Sure, we can get a MacBook Air with 64GB solid state disk (SSD), but what about upgrading a MacBook Pro? Ryan Block put one in his MBP and got a 20 second startup. Ridata released a 128GB 2.5“ SATA SSD in January that looks compatible with my MacBook Pro. Newegg has it for under $500. For comparison, however, a 250GB 2.5” spinning platter SATA drive can be had for under $100.

Corrected: I had originally written “128MB” above. Jon Link pointed out my error.

WordPress 2.5 is out (and the WordPress site got a facelift), and I’ve already upgraded MaisonBisson using SVN. The changes are exciting, and seem to reflect a tradition that’s developing in WordPress of delivering some really revolutionary features in the x.5 release.

The loss of file-based object caching was a bit of a problem, as my VPS’s load average jumped to over 30 pretty quickly after the upgrade. I tried Mark Jaquith’s apc-object-cache enabler and saw load average drop back to 2 or so, but I also saw tag and category names disappear and discovered other weirdness. Why it happened I don’t know, but I’m looking into it. Fortunately, NeoSmart’s file-based object cache replacement works perfectly and efficiently. (Mind you, Ryan Boren thinks WordPress caches should require more adventure.)

bSuite seems to work perfectly in 2.5, though the new shortcode API obviates one of bSuite’s coolest features: tokens. Still, it’s better to run with the herd, so I’ll be transitioning bSuite’s built in tokens to take advantage of the shortcode API soon.

One of the features that’s not received much attention yet, but is hugely valuable to those (like me) who are using and advocating for WordPress as a general purpose CMS, is the concurrent editing protection. That is, if another WordPress author is editing a story, you can’t save changes to it until that editor is done. The next step for this is to allow concurrent team editing in the way Google Docs does as well as versioning (versioning has been discussed as a feature for 2.6).

ZDnet’s David Berlind complains that upgrades are painful:

Upgrading to new systems is one of the most painful things you can possibly do. If you’re a vendor of desktop/notebook systems, it also represents that point where you can keep or lose a customer. Today, most system vendors have pretty much nothing from a technology point of view that “encourages” loyalty. Upgrading from an old Dell to a new Dell is no easier than upgrading to a system from a competing vendor. The system vendor that figures out how to make it less painful to upgrade to their own systems than to their competitors’ is the one that will get more loyalty out of their customers.

Of course Apple’s been doing this for a while with their Migration Assistant tool.

Apple Migration Assistant, David Berlind, competitive advantage, system upgrades, upgrade, upgrades

I picked Plesk over CPanel as my server control panel because it was cheaper, looked better, and seemed to have all the features I wanted. What I didn’t know was that it came with PHP4 and MySQL3 at times when each was a major version ahead of that. When the good folks at my hosting provider tried to upgrade this, it conflicted with Plesk and they have to back off.

The answer, it seemed, was that I’d have to migrate from Plesk to CPanel to get those features. And now I’ve got a big database project, that’s looking more necessary than ever.

Why? Because MySQL 3.x doesn’t support query caching, boolean full-text searching, or complex subqueries.

In a simpler world, everything would be up to date and working, but in this world I’m trying to find a convenient time to migrate my stuff to CPanel.

mysql, plesk, cpanel, hosting provider, hosted server, upgrade

Theme change not yet complete, but looking good. It’s a widened version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation_3column, itself a derivitive of John Wrana’s two columned Relaxation theme. I found it on the WordPress Codex, and though it was among the first group I looked at, I dutifully clicked through to every other three-columned theme listed there.

Anyway, expect the banner to change, and I’m working on how I want to handle the width on smaller monitors (where “smaller” actually equals anything narrower than 1280px). Eh, life goes on.

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