fedward, tumbling

One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.

None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).

Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.

Tags: Google Chrome Google Chrome New York Times NYT nytimes.com
3 notes

Marco.org: News flash

A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.

I dislike the intrusive…

Well-reasoned post from Marco that says much of what I think about pagination of longer articles on the web. The one site that really got to me was Slate, since the second page of many articles was a single paragraph, but Slate at least offers a link for a single page view. That one annoyance, which I did complain about, has in fact caused me to read fewer articles on Slate, and it changed my reading habits there. Now when I open an article the first thing I do is scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out if the article has been broken up, and then I scroll back up and click the link for single page view. There’s a link at the bottom of the page too, but that link sends you to the anchor for the top of the second page, which I find just as annoying. The “single page” link at the top of the page, though, is also annoying because it’s always there, whether the article spans multiple pages or not. The NYT has a similar setup, but their UI only displays the “single page” link when the article spans multiple pages, and once you click on it to get the longer view, the link is absent from the resulting page.

I know they’ve probably got some numbers to back their annoyance, but my willingness to deal with it is pretty low in general and depends on how much I value the content and how intrusive the ads are. But I’m with Marco - nobody owes me anything, and I’m willing to vote with my page views.

Tags: reblog page views Slate NYT
158 notes

reblogged via

The difference is that instead of flooding the cone with water and letting the coffee seep and drip, you pour hot water in a thin, continuous stream for one to four minutes — coffee geeks are still sorting the ideal brew time — that maximizes extraction. (More on that later.) Pouring a steady stream of water for, say, three minutes isn’t easy. If coffee is dump-and-drip, then pour over is a tea ceremony.

(via Ristretto | Pour-Over Coffee Drips Into New York - T Magazine Blog - NYTimes.com)
Sometimes I think that the culture of X (for many values of X, from coffee to cocktails to baking to bicycling to whatever shows up in the style section on a slow news week) is more about proving how much better you are (because you do things a certain, extremely specific way) than about enjoying the result.
I’m curious about pour-over coffee in the abstract, but I’ll stick with my French press, thanks.

The difference is that instead of flooding the cone with water and letting the coffee seep and drip, you pour hot water in a thin, continuous stream for one to four minutes — coffee geeks are still sorting the ideal brew time — that maximizes extraction. (More on that later.) Pouring a steady stream of water for, say, three minutes isn’t easy. If coffee is dump-and-drip, then pour over is a tea ceremony.

(via Ristretto | Pour-Over Coffee Drips Into New York - T Magazine Blog - NYTimes.com)

Sometimes I think that the culture of X (for many values of X, from coffee to cocktails to baking to bicycling to whatever shows up in the style section on a slow news week) is more about proving how much better you are (because you do things a certain, extremely specific way) than about enjoying the result.

I’m curious about pour-over coffee in the abstract, but I’ll stick with my French press, thanks.

Tags: coffee NYT oh please

Looking (Or Not) At Art

I’ve been saying for years that if I ever go back to the Rodin Museum in Paris, I’m taking a sketchpad and sitting on the floor with the art students. I’ve also been known to stop and sit down just to soak up a particular work of art, but for the most part I don’t spend much more time stopping and looking in museums than the average person.

Tags: art NYT New York Times museums