I have just realised that I have been writing computer software for the past 16 years. Feels like an eternity. I am officially old...

A new installation of Microsoft Server 2003 SP1. I try to install a Microsoft component - .NET 2.0. I am greeted with this:

So if you are like me and eager to get the latest and greatest from Cupertino on your Mac Pro, you will be severely disappointed if you do any Java development that requires an older JVM than 1.6.

See, Apple symlinked all older folders to 1.6:

drwxr-xr-x 11 root wheel 374 28 Aug 21:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 408 28 Aug 21:36 ..
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 28 Aug 21:09 1.3 -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 20 Jul 16:35 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 28 Aug 21:09 1.5 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 28 Aug 21:09 1.5.0 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 28 Aug 21:09 1.6 -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel 272 28 Aug 21:36 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 28 Aug 21:36 A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 28 Aug 21:09 Current -> A
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 28 Aug 21:09 CurrentJDK -> 1.6

This must be one of the slickest web sites ever: http://www.taptaptap.com/#convert

And this app - Convert - has the best UI I have ever witnessed on an iPhone.

Bill Gates is famous for having said we will never need more than 640KB RAM on a personal computer. However if you ask someone today whether say 18GB of RAM is enough for a development workstation, what do you think the answer would be?

I am sure most people would argue even if you run 3 VM's each using 2GB RAM, and an IDE and mail and browsers and Word and whatever, you will not easily exceed 10GB of RAM. So it should be more than enough.

Well - here is the problem. I have 18GB RAM. I regularly exceed that limit and start swapping like mad even if I only have 2 VM's open - each using 2GB of RAM, IntelliJ, several small apps. The reason? Nobody can write leak free code. Not Microsoft, not Apple, not the people behind OSS software. Applications, kernels, drivers - they all leak eventually. So the question becomes not whether x GB of RAM is enough, but rather how long uptime can I achieve with a given amount of RAM. I found that I cannot exceed 27 days of uptime before I have to reboot to reset all the leaks. This is on my Mac Pro 8 core.