I've been having trouble with a Tinderbox file: not this blog, but the other important file in my life, a task-tracking thing that I've been putting all my work life into for the last 6 months or so. Suddenly it was perpetually consuming free memory (at a rate of 50KB/sec—I found it one morning hogging 400MB of RAM!). So I posted something on the Tinderbox Wiki in the hope that someone else had run into this and knew what was going on. No luck except for a note to contact Eastgate tech support with this.

But before I could get around to doing that, I got email from Mark Bernstein asking me to send him a copy of the offending file. Before the day was out, he had hunted down the problem (an obscure issue with invoking a macro from within a rule was causing a slow memory leak), and I had enough info to at least stabilize the file and get back to work. I have every reason to believe that the problem will be removed entirely in the next upgrade.

Can you imagine getting an email from Bill Gates saying he'll look into that Word document that won't paginate correctly, or from Steve Jobs explaining how to get rid of that file that won't leave the Trash even when you sudo? Personal attention (real attention that shows a concern for what you need, not pro forma monthly "how's it going" calls from a sales rep) makes a difference.