Jim Moy

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or read that while developing software, memory footprint considerations are no longer important. RAM is cheap, default configurations have plenty, software development resources are expensive in comparison, so go ahead, throw that library in the link, instantiate those STL templates!

And here I am on a 2.4GHz P4 with a half-Gig of RAM, wondering why the heck I’m swapping so much, and feeling like my system is weighted down, groaning under the pressure. Sure, blame it on WinXP’s swapping tendencies, but at least some of the blame is on these huge footprint programs, my Blackberry IDE wants 110MB, iTunes wants 25. Gallery Remote wants 20, as does any Swing-based Java app, Acrobat Reader needs 32. Even my AOL/IM client wants to open an Ad now and then that launches a JVM.

So, like a breath of fresh air, I fire up Miranda, and note that it sits in the background very nicely waiting for IM’s, occupying only a couple Meg of VM space. Gripe, gripe… I suppose I betray my age and duration in this industry.

You know, young whippersnapper, when I was your age I only had 16KB of RAM to work with, and that was a luxury!

I’ve been learning Ruby and wanted to use SQLite for an application, but there didn’t seem to be a pre-built package for Windows that would drop in and work with the quick-install distribution of Ruby for Windows. Read on for steps I took to get it to work, or just unpack this archive into your ruby 1.8 install directory and skip to the examples/reference section of the README file in the sqlite-ruby package.
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I’ve been fiddling with Bering on and off for months before I finally got a configuration to the point where it could substitute for my Dachstein firewall. The two primary advantages for me are its stock 2.4 kernel configuration, and Shorewall.

Since I don’t “do” router configuration every day, every time I got back in to open up a port for ssh or a service running on my web server or whatever, I felt like I had to re-learn ipchains before I was comfortable tweaking settings. Iptables plus shorewall puts a model on it that makes it easy to use.

With the 2.4 kernel the LRP modules for supporting my PCMCIA wireless cards as well as volume support becomes easier too, everything is just download and run and there’s not much re-configuring from the stock version that comes on the floppy. Satisfied user.