Memory leak in Windows Live Messenger?

I downloaded the final RTW version of Windows Live Messenger a few days ago and it had been working well for the most part. Rose had mentioned that Messenger seemed to be crashing her computer, taking up almost 100% CPU and over 150MB of RAM. I thought that sounded a bit high, but her computer (my old IBM T30) is 4 years old, so I figured maybe it was just that it’s a bit outdated.

But lo and behold, a few hours later, my computer started getting really slow – quite a surprise since I wasn’t doing anything really and my computer is a totally decked out Pentium D 930 with 2GB of RAM and a 10k RPM SATA system drive. I looked in taskmgr and I see msnmsgr.exe going crazy at 48% CPU and using over 200MB of RAM (and the mem usage was growing while I was watching it). Looks like there might be a bug in there…

Note to Windows Live Messenger folks who might be reading this: it seems like a long haul bug. It only seems to happen after the client is running for a long time. Normally my messenger uses < 60MB of RAM and takes up < 10% CPU, even when I’m running a 2-way video chat session. Let me know if you need more repro details. Thanks!

Doodie Bot lives!

I saw a few weeks ago that MSN was running a bot contest, so I’ve been thinking of different bots to build. To get started, I figured I’d create something simple: a ToDo Bot (side note: it turns out, nothing is ever that simple).

If you’re on MSN Messenger, you can use it immediately – no setup required! Just send an IM to:

todobot@hotmail.com

Basically, you can chat with it and it’ll keep track of To Do items you tell it about. You can then access your list from wherever, whenever – especially if you use a web-based IM client like Meebo

I got the basics of the idea from Lifehacker, which had an article about making a ToDo.txt file and then someone wrote a Perl-based AIM bot for managing your ToDos. Well, the problem with that was that it’s hard to setup. Anyways, give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s pretty basic right now, but then again, I’ve only put maybe 1-2 days worth of work into it so far

If you like the bot and want to link to it on your site, just copy and paste this code!

Web Services Versioning – Google Style

Web Services Versioning – Google Style

Dare comments on Google’s policy of hard transitions to new versions of their API. Usually not a smart move for platform providers. I love this comment though:

“the old Web service end point stops being supported
2 months later. That’s gangsta.”

Nice!

Brings back college memories…

Ah, this strong bad e-mail reminds me of my college days… hehe.

I was prompted to head over after I saw that they were back and creating new content over at homestarrunner.com

My very own Dell Customer Advocate!

I got an e-mail today from John, a Dell Customer Advocate. He had read my blog entry about the flashing amber power button syndrome and wants to assist. Maybe Dell is taking cues from Lenovo and now has a group helping bloggers directly? If so that’s great news! Hopefully John can help me – maybe I’ll be back on the Dell bandwagon soon

Looking at their forums though, it looks like quite a few people would like some assistance. John, you’ve got your work cut out for you