After about a week of strange behavior, I’ve decided to essentially discontinue the use of my AOL Instant Messenger presence. For the last week or so, it seems that after my computer has been running for a few days (48+ hours, we’ll say)…the AOLIM program seems to do strange things and eat up all my CPU cycles. The behavior seems to be backgrounded, though…because it really doesn’t (initially…for the first several hours) make the machine react any slower. It does, however, eat up resources and eventually cause a memory leak (or overload) which makes all sorts of nasty things happen (e.g. not responding issues).

It seems to snowball like this: AOLIM -> (gets strange, eats CPU/memory) -> (causes Webshots to do strange things and not respond, eats up more CPU/memory) -> (causes system monitoring utilities to generate out of memory/other errata) -> (causes the entire machine to slowly respond or quit responding altogether).

As I leave most of our machines on (with the exception of the Mac) 24/7, therefore so is AOLIM loaded. As (for the past two years, essentially) I’ve not used it much (once a month, tops)…I’ve decided to phase it out. I will need to send email to my contacts to inform them of this change…but that’s in the future. For the time, I believe I’ll keep it running occasionally (when I’m actually at the computer)…but think it time to really just be done with it.

Same goes for ICQ, I think. I use that less often than AOLIM. Nice thing about ICQ, however, is that it sits nicely all by itself and is happy not doing anything…and I’m happy with it not eating up idle CPU cycles.

Moving on, that’s about all that’s new for now. I’m hoping to perhaps begin testing the aforementioned changes to how the website looks (via the TWiki as mentioned in the last post) in the news system here hopefully by the week’s end. In addition to that, I’m making plans to also completely migrate the old /zaskem website into TWiki land. With some creativity with Apache…it should be straightforward.

I’m also drawing up plans for my next building project (to not begin until this summer): to build a new entertainment center for the living room. More on that later, though.

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07