Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 22 February 2002

# 5:45 PM

Upon further experimentation, Mozilla not only crashed, but took the X server with it, leaving me with a fried display; no choice but to reboot the machine blind. And then when it came back up it decided it was time to run filesystem consistency checks, which are sloooow.

I think it's time for me to go to bed.

# 5:30 PM

not entirely unexpected, but frustrating

I attempted to feed a 27MB (generated) HTML file to Mozilla, and it spun for ages chewing up 100% CPU and wanting more and more RAM. Finally shot it when it got to 300MB of allocated memory. And, keep in mind, that 27MB was without any of the actual content; it was purely the table structure I'm going to need. (The content, as ASCII, is another 32MB.) Same thing happens if I cut out the heavier bits of the table, getting it down to 8MB.

The notion of doing this project entirely as a web-application suddenly became a lot less plausible. Feh.

# 2:45 PM

By dint of removing most of the structure, I managed to get my 27MB generated HTML file down to 651K, which was small enough to load it into Mozilla and verify that the concept I'm working with is sound. However, it was still painfully slow, and it'll only get slower if I try to load more data into it (like, any actual text). Time to read up on GTK and friends, sigh.

Drivin N Cryin's version of Leaving on a Jet Plane is profoundly surreal. Just what I need right now, sleep-deprived and hopped up on caffeine and low blood sugar.

The sun comes up at 6 AM these days and wakes me up whether I want to or not. I've already got blackout curtains on the window but that's not good enough. I may have to tape black construction paper to the glass.