The Null Device

Posts matching tags 'bugs'

2008/7/12

Recently I was going through some photos I took, on my Mac, and found that they all looked a bit blurry; none of them, I thought disappointedly, had turned out well enough to post to Flickr, and my photographic expedition had been for naught. A while later, I looked through them on my Linux box, using eog, and was surprised to find that they looked much crisper, and some of them had come out quite well. Which suggests to me that OSX 10.5's Preview has a bug in it, which causes images to be blurred.

Some evidence: here is a photograph, as shown in OSX using Preview:

And here is the same image, as viewed using eog on Linux:
Notice the difference? Here are details of the displayed images, blown up 4x:
It appears that the blur issue is well known, though not something Apple seem interested in addressing. Presumably in Apple's official worldview, those working with photos who wish to see them without blur should be importing them into iPhoto or Aperture, and managing them with that.

The only workaround given is to copy the version of Preview from an OSX 10.4 machine, modify its version information to run on OSX, and use that. Which, quite frankly, is not good enough.

apple bugs osx photography 1

2007/9/24

Why is it, you may have asked yourself, that a technological civilisation that can put men on the moon, map the human genome and create the Nintendo Wii and the iPod can't make a standards-compliant web browser that doesn't leak memory like a sieve. Well, there's some good news on the horizon: the developers of Firefox have embarked on a memory leak eradication drive:

Aaron suggested having an "about:memory" page showing a breakdown of Firefox's memory use (bug 392351). When I pointed out the bug to Brendan Eich, he excitedly assigned the bug to himself.
Robert Sayre created a script to load random pages and see whether they cause leaks. The random URLs come from the Yahoo directory (biased toward older, top-level pages), del.icio.us (biased toward newer, geeky pages), and AltaVista (biased toward pornography).
I see they have their use cases covered.
Steve England tested the top 500 web sites, finding two leaks. Later, he tested the top 20 Firefox extensions and found leaks in several of them.
And there are some interesting user comments on the page.
Could I suggest a test of a 10 minute session of scrolling and zooming around in google maps hybrid mode as something guaranteed to to eat over 1GB of memory?
I'd venture to say, from personal experience, that Yahoo! Maps (which appears to be a clone of Google Maps, and and is, to the best of my knowledge, only used for geotagging photos in Flickr) appears to chew up more memory than Google Maps. Which is rather funny, what with Yahoo! employing some of the brightest minds in AJAX development today (Douglas Crockford, for one).

Anyway, good luck to the Mozilla developers. Speaking as one in the habit of leaving lots of windows open in a session, I hope that this will lead to a browser that doesn't chew up all of the computer's resources if used for more than a few hours.

(via /.) ajax bugs firefox open-source tech web 1

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