The Project
Typically, even my pet projects have a specific goal in mind. I don't write a spec for my personal projects, there's just a, maybe slightly fuzzy, goal. Generally I want something that will be useful. I'll work on a project until:
- The project does everything I hoped for. Maybe even more!
- I run out of spare time to work on it. This doesn't happen as often as you may imagine. I really enjoy coding. So, after a tiring day of coding at the office, I come home to relax and work on one of my pet projects. If it was any different, then I have no right to call my blog My Geekdom.
- I decide that I did a poor job picking a pet project as they're supposed to be fun and this projects isn't. So long!
- I get stuck such that proceeding will require more effort than I feel it's worth. That said, hopefully I learned something working on the project.
But, unlike my typical pet projects, my goal with my new project is rather amorphous. I want to analyze some data. At time of writing this, I have just shy of 5K records totally 181MB of data.
Leaving the details for a later posting, each record is a snapshot of the state of my Mac OS X computer. I've been collecting, and am continuing to collect, samples every five minutes since the beginning of March. At least every five minutes that my computer isn't sleeping or hanging.
I decided to collect the samples because I was getting downright frustrated with the performance of Mozilla's Firefox browser. For reasons that are off-topic for this posting, I feel a strong interest in making sure that Firefox continues to be successful.
For years I thought Firefox was the bomb. Starting about 9-12 months ago I started to notice that Firefox was routinely using all the resources on my computer. This concerned me because Google's Chrome browser was starting to have enough functionality to be a primary browser.
Being that I wanted Firefox to stay competitive, I decided to try to stay with it. As Mozilla changed their release model, I started to use Aurora and Firefox Beta and provide lots of feedback. The newer versions also seemed to consume a more reasonable amount of my computer's resources. Being that the Firefox team was working hard at fixing performance problems, especially memory leaks, I stayed with Firefox. (See Reference: Articles About Firefox's Memory Leaks And Repair Efforts for information about FF's memory leaks.)
