Weeknotes 2020 WK 51
Year in review
Looks like we made it. Breathe.
Covid-19 obviously dominated here. Like for the rest of you, my year changed radically at the end of February, and I’m still reeling from it.
Looking through the diary, I was able to keep the core bits — fellowing, the podcast, tai chi, family life, … — on an even keel, but I had very little time (read that as none, for months) to take on open source, or other side projects.
By the end of the Summer I’d found a bit of space. So, successes, all from the Autumn:
- Gave my talk, Choose and Choose Quickly on optimising ModelChoiceField for DjangoCon Europe.
- Updated Channels &co to ASGI v3.
- Began posting Weeknotes here.
Of these, the first two are part of the core Djangoing category. That it’s a measure of success that they got done at all is some kind of guide (at least for me, and I ask you to imagine) as to how restricted this year has been.
I had three explicit goals:
- Get posting content
- Write up the various Contributing to Django content from the last few years
- Launch Button, my deployment tool.
I got one done.
That’s OK. Other priorities this year. I'm just carrying Button and the Contributing Guide over to next year instead. (I normally go for threes, so normally I’d add a third thing there; I’ll not bother this year.)
Uninstalling Chrome
I have an old MacBook Pro, from late-2013. Clearly now I’m drooling over these new M1 machines but, it’s plenty fast enough, lots of RAM and so on. Nonetheless, I’m conscious to keep an eye on what’s running to make sure it doesn’t slow down on me.
For quite some time, probably a couple of years, I’ve been looking at the WindowServer process, and thinking What on earth are you doing?, as it’s busy using 30% of CPU (say) for absolutely nothing.
So, when this week I saw a piece entitled Chrome is Bad, purporting to explain this high CPU usage, I stopped to have a look.
Tl;dr is that there’s a Keystone updater app that’s part of Chrome that causes the high CPU, and that for some unknown reason this hides itself from Activity Monitor, which is why it shows up under WindowServer. (The latter bit is somewhat strange but, it’s from Loren Brichter, who’s safely filed under Not a crackpot, so I thought it worth a look.)
Anyhow, I followed the instructions to uninstall Chrome, and all the dirty little bits, and couldn’t happier. WindowServer is hovering around 7% CPU, down from around 30%, and everything is running much quieter.
No idea what Chrome is up to but 👋
Year end
Keep safe. Have fun. Relax.
I’m going to take a break for a couple of weeks.
See you in January. All the best for 2021.