“Bus error” - Should I send my MBP to Apple?

I have some worrying errors in OS X. Some applications crash and refuse to be restarted. Firefox and Eclipse is the most common ones, but it has also happend to Aquamacs and NeoOffice.

Firefox reports a “bus error” and Eclipse shows the “Java has crashed” error screen.

Right now I can’t even run Java on the command line:


sparv:~/Documents/workspace/sf marvi$ ant refresh
Buildfile: build.xml
Invalid memory access of location 00000008 eip=9b9f22b6
Bus error


Sometimes I just have to wait a few minutes and everything will be OK. But sometimes I have to reboot.

Anyone else seen this? Any ideas what can cause it? Time to use Applecare?

New books - good price

Some publishers allow reprints to be sold for a lower price in poorer countries. Since I live in one I can take advantage of that. Today I bought:

• Code Complete, second edition
• JavaServer Faces in Action
• Head First Design Patterns
• Pro Java Swing, third edition
• Java Development with Spring Framework

I paid around $65 in total.

In some book the print and paper is not as good as it would be in Sweden, but it’s totally readable. Some books are almost the same.

Profiling article wanted

We are in the process of releasing a new application. During the development we have not spent a lot of time trying to optimize performance (I am not gonna quote you-know-who here…) and focused on clear and maintainable code, knowing that we will do a disciplined performance test in one of the later iterations.

So, now we are here. I haven’t used profilers that much, and when I have, the memory leak was spotted in the first snapshot. No need to dig deeper. This time there are no obvious suspects and the data doesn’t really speak to me.

Ok, so the recursive method in the Foo class is pretty expensive. Not a big surprise. So will I gain anything on the bottom line if I spend an hour making it faster? Or is the bottleneck really somewhere else? How can I tell?

So I thought I’d hit the Internet for help. I found loads of articles telling me how to profile with JProfiler, Netbeans, Eclipse, YourKit etc. But I can figure out that myself - it’s not hard to configure Tomcat and a profiler. The hard part is the methodology. How to go about finding the bottlenecks. Performance testing is hard.

So if you know a good online article that isn’t pushing a certain product but tells what questions I should ask the big amount of profiling data I have available in front of my eyes - please post a comment.

SWT chaos in Mac OS X?

This is what my Eclipse 3.2 looked like today. SWT painted strange things all over Eclipse. The toolbars had three layers of text on them and I couldn’t click on any buttons.

First time it happened. Is this a known issue?