I doubt anyone in the software industry has avoided the Mythical Man Month problem, even if they don’t know it’s called that. This story, via Daring Fireball, has a great punchline/solution:

After failing to win several arguments on this point, the engineers became exasperated and decided to hold an intervention with the CEO. They each bought a copy of Brooks’ book, brought the CEO into a conference room, and stacked up the copies of the book, telling him, It is extremely urgent that you read this book. We’ve bought you many copies so that you might read it faster.

…or, in this case, a free collaborative writing tool. MacZOT are running “BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com“, the second give-away they’ve run in recent weeks. Basically as blogs link to their promotion MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software, in the form of a small price reduction for every link (possibly even down to free) to the highly rated SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys.

In their first promotion I scored a free copy of AppZapper, no apparent strings attached, so it all seems to be legit. As I write the price is already down to $7.60 (normally $35), so it’s quite the bargain. And the price has come down by a couple of dollars just while I’ve been typing. Definitely worth a go.

One of the flaws of Firefox is the amount of memory it can consume. In fairness to the developers this is often the result of extensions rather than the app itself, though there’s plenty of blame to go round (though not enough memory, apparently).

For those of you suffering from this issue temporary relief is available via a custom user setting. The tweak causes the app to save itself to disk when minimized, reducing memory usage to single digit megabytes. I’m guessing that this is the amount needed to keep the app itself in memory, as it comes up quickly enough from minimized that there can’t be much swapping from disk required until you scroll, switch tabs, etc.

The downside is that it’s a temporary fix; once you do anything in the app, even just scrolling , the memory usage goes back up. And it doesn’t change the overall amount of memory used, it just flushes most of the memory footprint to disk. But it does seem to tidy things up a little, and it saves the working memory for as long as it’s minimized at no apparent cost, so why not.

Oh, and it doesn’t seem to work on OS X. But then you’re using Camino, right?