Charles on… anything that comes along

Here’s the hardware: 1.67GHz Powerbook, with 1GB of RAM. (That’s the model with the fast, 5400rpm drives.) A fair number of apps running - um, 31 at latest count, though quite a few of those aren’t doing anything (eg PHP Function Index, which I just refer to from time to time. It’s terrific.)

I also have Keyboard Maestro (the old, 1.2 version) running in the background, because I have various Applescripts linked to keyboard shortcuts. It gets my email signed with different signatures according to what I’m doing, things like that.

But when I hit the keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, or for Dashboard (the latter of which I’ve changed to alt-space), there’s a delay of seconds before either Spotlight will start finding stuff, or the Dashboard will appear.

Look, I’ll show you. See? Dashboard took about three seconds to do anything there. I get the impression that it’s swapping memory in and out.

Is anyone else seeing this, or got any ideas? Could it be Keyboard Maestro, which traps passing keyboard input to see whether it matches any of the keystrokes in its records?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 132.13%)
• How not to write an operating system review: Paul Thurrott shows you (16 April 2005; score: 74.82%)
• Tiger: a rush to market means that it's full of interface errors (27 May 2005; score: 71.65%)

Following on from an earlier post, I’m trying out various browsers (to try to escape Safari’s memory-eating tendencies).

Camino is slightly ahead at the moment, because it can import bookmarks etc from Safari; Firefox doesn’t have anything in the “Import…” dialog box when I open it.

However, both Firefox and Safari are defaulting to opening google.co.uk even though I type google.com into the URL field. As is iCab. As is Omniweb.

I would suspect it was to do with my ISP, except that it doesn’t happen with Safari.

That’s weird. I mean, weird. Principally because the .co.uk site doesn’t have access to the Google History feature, which I think is cool (and cooler than things like localised maps, which I can go to the .co.uk site if I want them, thank you).

Anyone else in the UK finding this?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• On the Guardian site today: breakout, the real web game (14 December 2007; score: 46.56%)
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 41.56%)
• Why not explain the $700B bailout with a comic - you know, like Google? (25 September 2008; score: 40.16%)