Hello from the Plan8. This week I bring you a little different format than my typical interview podcast. Today I have split the episode up into two parts. First I am sitting down with a good friend of mine, Lokesh Dhakar. A mild manner Baltimore based web designer and developer, you might not know he changed how webpages are designed. He created the JavaScript web app called Lightbox, a new take on how to overlay information on webpages without use of popups. You use it’s derivatives in such things as Facebook connect, blog image galleries, and a host of other types of information.
In the interview we chat about:
- The inception of Lightbox
- The growth and expansive use of Lightbox
- What Lokesh thought realizing he changed the path of web design
- Lokesh’s choice to put Lightbox out under the Creative Common’s License
- What are Lokesh’s views on the future of web design
- Lokesh’s views on the new web technologies of HTML5, CSS3, & Canvas
In the second half of the podcast Lokesh, past co-host Paul Capestany, and I talk about South-by-SouthWest (SXSW). An Interactive, Film, and Music Festival in its twenty-third year in Austin, Texas. Paul and I are both going for the first time so we talk with Lokesh about what are we to expect when we go. We also talk about what we are looking forward to in regards to the events, parties, panels, and other craziness that will happen at this popular social event of the internet connected dot.com, film, and art industries.
Today’s music is:
“A Tribute to Nothing (Atari ST)” by Ultrasyd of the 8bit Collective
“The Ballad of the Three Amigos” by Randy Newman from the film “Three Amigos!”
This podcast is released by its owner, Patrick Roanhouse (twitter), under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License.
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Just to let everyone know, I love technology. I love the fact that it gets smaller, faster, cheaper, and better. But what I love is that as it gets better it takes less power as well. So I must let everyone know that till this product review I was a solid state drive virgin. Crucial; a Micron Technology, Inc company provided me for free to keep for review their new model M225 128GB and M225 256GB SSD drives. My first solid state drives that i used for daily operating usage with OS, media, and applications usage.
I had experimented in the past, putting Linux on Compact flash drives. But that was when I was younger, it was just experimentation I said; thinking nothing of innocent techno lust experiments of 256mb and 1gb compact flash (CF) to IDE and SATA adapters. I knew when I got older I would settle down with a nice big platter drive that would store plenty of little files for us to be happy making. But then these SSD drives came to me. It was new, but it felt so right. I now come out, open, with the fact I love me some solid state drives.
For the longest time SSD had been only relegated to the most abuse heavy platforms. Military computers that would need to take a beating and keep on ticking. Super fast data centers that trying to be super green. The data processing focused dot com rich geek who had the money to burn for a personal server. In that last sentence is where the key word of why the majority of people haven’t moved to SSD yet though, it’s money. SSD’s until recently have been so expensive for a cost-per-gigabyte basis that is was impossible to suggest a normal person use it.
When modern age large capacity SSD 2.5 inch drives first came to the market in 2002 the typical 64 GB SSD 2.5 inch drive could run upwards of $5000, and only could be purchased direct from the manufacturer. Even today some 128GB enterprise class 2.5 inch drive still cost upwards of $2000 dollars coming out of Intel, a major manufacture of most of the highest end Flash based SSD drives. But that changed with upstart controller chip producer Indilinx, Inc.
In 2006 Indilinx, Inc.; a South-Korean based company, started to produce extremely cheap but high quality ARM Chip based SSD controllers called the Indilinx Barefoot. Which they then licensed out to a multitude of well known RAM and FlashRAM manufacturers. Micro the parent company of Cruical was just such a company.
But knowing now a little of the history of where we go today you can now know just what rights the struggle to cheap SSD gave us. For example when booting up on the Crucial drives MacOSX Snow Leopard 10.6.2 can take as little as 6 seconds to reach the Mac OS X login screen. Full boot takes under 10 second with the plethora of login items I have … which is sadly, for me, a lot. Under the typical 500 GB Western Digital Platter drive i used it could take upwards of about a minute from a cold boot. Booting from a platter drive is like asking me, the fat kid, to run a mile. You know its gonna be slow compared to the Olympic track star that is SSD.
Some of the other magics of SSD is the seek time it has, it’s instant. What does that mean you might ask? Well say you want to edit a video, well there is an app for that. It’s called Final Cut Pro. It can take up to a 5 minutes to load all the plug-ins and get it to pull from the drive to store its application in the ram like all applications do to run on computers. With an SSD drive that time is just shy of 6 seconds.
Crucial’s M225 was the first sub thousand dollar 256 GB SSD on the market. Selling now at an MSRP $769 but more commonly $600 on many online sales sites. From other reviews and my own the M225 is one of the best for price and performance on the market. Just be sure to read up about their latest firmware updates on Xlr8yourmac.com. They keep up to date on all hoopla of how to keep your mac fast with new hardware. They also provide great information on user reports on how drive firmwares act and effect system and battery performance. Currently as of this article’s publication they suggest sticking with M225 firmware version 1571 if your on a mac. If your on Windows 7 go right ahead and install the latest firmware, version 1916. But to ride on the side of caution read this Crucial.com forum post about it to make sure your machine will work with it.
