Vista, SSD, and Sound

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So I managed to snag a 32gb flash solid state drive. (Here’s a picture.) I personally think SSDs are the future and a computer sold with a regular hard disk in five years will seem as quaint as selling one with a tape drive is today. However the technology is still really early, as evidenced by the difficulty I had obtaining one, the cost, and the relatively small storage size (larger sizes are promised or announced, but only 32GB is commercially available). 32gb is more than enough for my primary HD, as anything heavy I can store on a cheap and slow SATA drive or on the network.
I spend a lot of time on my desktop, so I’m fairly sensitive to the speed of things there. I year or so ago I upgraded to a Western Digital 10k Raptor SATA drive and I was pleasantly surprised by the speed boost, more than I normally get from upgrading the CPU. So I thought the SSD would be a nice chance to refresh my desktop and also do a clean install of Windows Vista, which I’ve had laying around. I decided not to touch the CPU, memory, or graphics card, which are a FX-55, 4gb, and Radeon X800 respectively. Installing the SSD was easy, I just needed an IDE converter because it is laptop size.

First off, I like Vista better than Windows XP. There are just a lot of little things, like when you press Windows + M it minimizes windows on both monitors, that are a lot more polished. Also, thanks to the SSD, install and boot times are incredibly fast. Launching programs also feels snappier. The visual effects seem fine on my slightly-old video card, and in general everything feels great. There is also a benefit to wiping the OS and starting with a fresh, I probably had some cruft accumulated before which may have contributed to a slowdown. I don’t know if Vista is worth an upgrade, but if you’re going to start fresh I would go for it.

I have run into two problem, one large and one small. First, about 24 hours after I had set things up,  I came back to the computer and it said it had rebooted to recover from a “blue screen” error. I have no idea what caused this, but it hasn’t happened since.

More importantly though, something is seriously wrong with the sound. System sounds, and playing music through iTunes or Windows Media sounds great… for about 5 minutes. At some seemingly random point all the sound switches to this really awful distortion which is painful to the ear. When this happens I have to close the application that was playing sound, be it a Youtube video in Firefox or an MP3 in Windows Media, and restart the application for any sound on the computer to return to normal. This sucks. I’m just using the standard nForce sound card built into my motherboard, nothing fancy, and according to Vista it can’t find a better driver for it. I’ve googled around a lot but can’t find anyone with a similar problem, but if I figure out a fix I’ll update this entry to help future net searchers.

Plugin Authors Get No Love

WordPress

One interesting thing in the whole adware themes discussion is the people claiming if we require GPL it’ll kill the number and quality of themes out there, that the best themes have ads in them, that they couldn’t make themes if they weren’t getting the SEO gaming money, et cetera and so on.

There are two types of WordPress add-ons, themes and plugins. Are there any similarities?

  1. Plugins are just as hard or harder to write and design as themes.
  2. All plugins in our directory are required to be GPL or compatible.
  3. Plugin authors almost never get links on the front-end of a blog.
  4. I’m not aware of any plugins that bundle advertising with the intention of gaming search engines, like themes are.

Despite all of this, the plugin ecosystem around WordPress is flourishing, especially since we made the plugin directory, and hundreds have been added. It seems any of the doomsday scenarios people are expecting to happen to themes would have happened to plugins years ago. If ad-bundled themes really are better, a suggestion I find insulting to all those who volunteer their time for WordPress, then maybe they should start their own theme directory with only adware themes and they should get a ton of traffic.

(And just to respond to the title, I think plugin authors get tons of love, and hopefully we can help them get more with upcoming revisions to the plugin directory.)

Showing Arrogance

Asides

Matthew Mullenweg Continues to show his arrogance — “WordPress isn’t even true XHTML or XML script or code, It’s PHP Script. and this is why it is so easy to hack. From what I’ve gathered, Blogger is a True blue XML Blog. For those that don’t know this, PHP script, is the same script that is used by your PhpBB message boards. and anyone with any kind of good computer knowledge, knows that PhpBB is *very* easy to be hacked. VBulletin is a classic example, as is InvisionFree.” Work has already begun to ensure version WordPress 3.0 will be in True Blue XML.

NYC Meetup Update

Asides, WordPress

Based on the comments on the last entry I think we’re going to kick off the April 11 meetup at Bryant Park at 6:30, and if needed migrate for drinks at 8 PM when the park closes to someplace like Heartland Brewery on West 43rd. How’s that sound to the New Yorkers in the audience? Update: Scott says “The northwest corner of the park is the most accessible (south of the Starbucks, east of the Verizon shop). Plus that’s where the coffee is.” That’s where we’ll meet. I’ll be in a beige overcoat and green shirt.

Dave Chappelle

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Glenda and I just ran into Dave Chapelle in the new mall on Market Street in San Francisco. That’s pretty neat in and of itself, as he’s a funny dude, but what struck me more was how darn polite he was.

We got to the escalator at the same time and we stopped to let him on but he insisted we go first even though his friend was already ahead of us. Once we were on the escalator we realized who he was, confirmed by someone on the opposite escalator saying his name in surprise. I dorked out and snapped a quick photo with my Blackberry. As we started to walk away he called out and I turned around and tried to figure out why in the world Chappelle would be calling us, it turns out Glenda had dropped her parking ticket and he picked it up and gave it to her.

So not only was he polite and unassumming, he saved us $30. Someone’s mother raised him right. I don’t know what he was doing hanging out in a mall in San Francisco with a skateboard, but I sure hope he had a nice night too.