Under a Gibbous Moon

I’ve written about this topic before and it just won’t go away. To a certain extent I can forgive random forum members and poorly trained sales associates but I cannot forgive a blogger for a major tech site. Jason Perlow from ZDNet  writes:

Why is it awful? Well, let’s start with the basics. In Android, as you start an application, its services will continue to run in the background when you start more apps.

Provided that an application is well-written, only a stub of that app continues to run, such as GMail’s message poller or perhaps a Twitter client’s notifier service.

But plenty of apps still commit a significant amount of resources to memory even when you stop using them or start a new process.

Which they really shouldn’t.

If these are left unchecked, your Android device’s performance and stability goes straight to hell.

Of course this is flat out ignorant, as Dianne Hackborn, a Google software engineer explains:

The fact that you can see an application’s process “running” does not mean the application is running or doing anything. It may simply be there because Android needed it at some point, and has decided that it would be best to keep it around in case it needs it again. Likewise, you may leave an application for a little bit and return to it from where you left off, and during that time Android may have needed to get rid of the process for other things.

…

Of course, there is a limited amount of memory, and to accommodate this Android must decide when to get rid of processes that are not needed. This leads to Android’s process lifecycle, the rules it uses to decide how important each process is and thus the next one that should be dropped. These rules are based on both how important a process is for the user’s current experience, as well as how long it has been since the process was last needed by the user.

The only evidence Mr. Perlow presents is that the existence of this myth is proof of its truth.

What’s the common fix to this issue? Well, an entire cottage industry of developers have written various task killer/task managment and memory optimization utilities for Android, which can be used with a single click of a button to wipe apps and services out of memory.

Of course there are a lot of popular apps written to kill task on Android but that is because people are constantly (and erroneously) being told that they need them. I remember that when my parents bought their phones that the store rep installed task managers on both phones. When I saw them later I explained to them why it was not necessary and it was just eating up resources for nothing. I uninstalled both apps but later, when they had gone back to the store for something, a rep again installed the app on their phone insisting that it was necessary.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to fix stupid but such ignorance is unacceptable in people who get paid to write about technology. Readers who are looking to ZDNet looking for information are going to be sorely misled by this article and this myth will be continued by people armed by the authority that the ZDNet logo imparts.

The summary for the article states that, “When it comes to task managment, the developers at Google think they know better than the end-users that are actually using their products.” In actuality, Google designed an OS that does not require end users to have to worry about task management and yet you bitch about it. Try educating yourself about your topic before trying to actually write about it.

It is said the he who shouts the loudest has the most to hide. Since his disastrous anti-gay advertisement, it seems that Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Perry has succeeded in getting people to wonder what, or rather who, may be hiding in his closet.

Rick Perry is far the people’s choice when searching Google for information that he might be gay. Interestingly enough, the focus of this attention is coming from the place where the people should know him the best, his home state of Texas.

So Rick, take this piece of advice. Tone it down and if you’re hiding in the closet, come out, God still loves you (it’s just Christians that don’t).

Every year, around Thanksgiving time, we are asked what it is that we are thankful for. I personally, am thankful that I am not a moron. Intelligence seems to a rarer and rarer commodity these days as the following will show.

Pat Robertson has said many crazy things in his life but this is just bizarre, he is apparently unaware of Mac & Cheese.

I guess he’s one of those rich guys who pays people to go to the grocery store for him.

Are you worried that your turkeys are not Christian?

Well, Pamela Geller sure is.

And since turkeys are apparently Muslim here’s more fire for the conspiracy.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and remember, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

In this country, sports in general and football in particular have become their very own religion. People so strongly identify with their teams that they get into fights over whose team is the best. Players are granted special privileges and get away with types of behavior that would land the rest of us in jail.

Of course, as has been recently shown, the Religion of Football is not above sacrificing children in the name of victory. To so many people, it seems, sports trumps all other concerns. The current case in point is this piece of news.

He’s been raped and abused and now he’s bullied out of school because, of all things, he being blamed for getting Joe Paterno fired. It seems that they believe that just because the man covered for a child molester as far back as 1998 that he doesn’t deserve to lose his job.

For years I’ve watched as people obsess endlessly over sports. While many people say they were shocked at the events of Penn State I can honestly say that I am not. Sports have become a god and this type of behavior is the end result.

This photo was taken at the aquarium in Camden, NJ. I don’t remember what kind of fish this was but it lives somewhere in the Amazon. It was just floating there staring and staring at me when I took this picture. No flash and a black and white filter give it the look of a monster peeking out of its lair.

I took this photo while sitting on the back porch of a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. Like most of my really good pictures, I wasn’t trying very hard when I took it but the composition turned out perfectly. I gave it a kind of dark sepia filter with center weighted highlights.

I took this a a rather dreary day at a “pumpkin patch” a ways up north. The place was rather deserted and, despite being in current operation, looked as though it had been abandoned for the last couple of years. I was standing by one of their “attractions”, a gutted school bus that had been turned into a sort of playground, when I noticed a really nice looking cloud formation coming in that lined up well with the old fence and the abandoned looking carnival rides in the background. I washed out some colors while sharpening others to give it a nice retro aged look.

The most interesting thing about all three of these pictures is that they were all taken with a cellphone. No fancy cameras here. While they are certainly limited in the types of pictures that can be taken, a carefully framed photograph can still come out looking great.