Leopard memory woes...

I am in a state today. Out of necessity, I added a third GB of memory to my MacBook Pro last week because (IMHO) there is a memory issue in Leopard. This screenshot shows what has become the normal state of affairs memory-wise since I upgraded to Leopard.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I may find myself working away with the usual cadre of programs running on my desktop (Mail, Twhirl, iChat, Adium, Preview, Eclipse, iTerm, TextMate) and expect that a fair amount of system resources are being taken up. Fine. However, after shutting everything down I would expect that most of the memory occupied by the running programs is reclaimed by the OS and is available for reuse. That's definitely not the case. WTF is kernel_task doing with a quarter of a GB of memory? Why is Finder holding on to 80 MB?

I have been generally very happy with the Leopard upgrade. Feature-wise, it is an improvement on what was already a fantastically strong platform. However, efficient resource utilization is not an unreasonable expectation for a modern operating system and Leopard totally fails in this area.

Apps Daddy Likes...

I have been asked more than once by friends and associates about what applications I use or recommend for OSX. I am sure this is not an uncommon occurrence for folks who enjoy sharing the positive experiences they have had on the Apple platform. This morning I remembered a site I came across many months ago that allows people to track the applications they use (and I believe it also notifies you when updated versions of applications you use are available). For anyone interested in the applications I use, here is my profile. The site has a utility that rifles through your Applications folder and uploads everything it finds there. I then went through the list it uploaded to the site and selected the applications that I use daily (or at least frequently). The site has an RSS feed for my profile if you are interested.

JDK 6 Source/Documentation install on Leopard

Sadly, Alex Miller's instructions for getting Java source files for Java 5 didn't work for Java 6.  Apple has cleverly hidden the Java 6 source/docs on the ADC.

Many thanks to Eric Burke for knowing which nook this resource was hidden in.