TURBU Tech

As you may know, those of you out there who are active on StackOverflow and other StackExchange sites, they’ve got a site called Area51 that lets people propose new sites for the StackExchange network.  Proposals that get enough support get launched as beta sites, and successful betas “graduate” to full-fledged SE sites.

Since the purpose of StackExchange has been explicitly stated as not being about discussions, debates, or other “forum chat” stuff but about establishing definitive, authoritative answers to questions that can be answered definitively, I came up with a proposal yesterday that fits that mission perfectly, and would provide a sorely-needed resource in today’s world.  The basic focus of the site would be “How do I cut through useless automated support and reach an actual human being at company X?”  Anyone who’s ever grappled with this problem will know exactly what I’m talking about and why a site like this would be a useful resource. Continue reading ‘Reaching A Human Being’ »

I got assigned an interesting bug to fix today at work:  Performing a certain operation in our program caused an enormous memory leak, producing a FastMM report file that weighed in at over 150 MB, representing a serious amount of RAM in our program.  A bit of debugging made it obvious that a certain interfaced object was at the root of the problem, and it had a refcount of 1 when the program ended.  I found the object that was holding a reference to it and went looking for what was holding it up… and it turned out to have a refcount of over 4700 when the program ended! Continue reading ‘Memory management: still a non-issue’ »