Various Thingies

First of all, I should mention that my house is fine; the fire didn't get near it. The probability of it getting here was fairly low, but we did a bit of better-safe-than-sorry packing. Though last night while driving home from school I did drive past a (unrelated) fire that filled the entire intersection with smoke in about a 50 feet radius; I still don't know what was on fire (I couldn't see it), but the smoke was very obvious, and I heard fire trucks going by.

In other news, it's been relatively difficult to collect data on Firefox after reenabling the Feed Sidebar addon. Firefox crashed after three days of logging memory usage, and then a couple days later I needed to restart it because I needed the memory for WoW (Firefox was using about a gig). But the addon defintiely seems like the cause of the memory leak. From the days I gathered data, it looks like it leaks about 40 megs/hour (although that's only over a couple days; it might decrease over time).

Finally, I just noticed something that happened last year: the Starcraft soundtrack, not previously available (the compressed audio shipped with the games is 22 khz ADPCM, which is pretty poor quality), is on iTunes for $10; the other Blizzard OSTs that were included in the collectors' editions of Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and World of Warcraft are also available there (though unfortunately all of them are single CDs, which means they are incomplete). The music is DRM-free (although I hear they encode personally identifying information in the audio files), 256 kbps AAC (good quality), though you will have to install the Apple iTunes crapware to buy it. I'm told the M4A files should play on all PC audio players that support AAC (I know they work on WinAmp), though they are not MP3s, and will not work on MP3 audio players. That's your public service announcement for today.