Drafts Dropdown is a plugin for WordPress that adds a dropdown menu to every page in the admin section which when clicked lists links to all draft posts and pages. A much better way to manage draft posts than having to constantly go to Posts/Pages and clicking on Edit or going back to the Dashboard.
Month: July 2009
Clothes That Could Take Photos – I So Need That
The BBC reports on a new fiber created at MIT that can “detect the wavelength and direction of light falling on it.” The real point of the research was to coordinate the activities of different nano-scale devices. In this case, they were able to reconstruct a crude image sent by a small patch of these photosensitive fibers.
Clothes that could automatically photograph and store the surrounding area. That would be like the pimped out version of the little camera Gordon Bell wears around his neck. I need that like three years ago.
Live Blogging Plugin for WordPress
Live Blogging is a plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to live blog from within WordPress. Out of the box it will let you create a live blog within the admin interface and as you add new entries on the fly, those get pushed out to the post you have indicated the live blog entries should appear.
But that still requires users to refresh the page, etc. The plugin really takes off when you combine it with the open source Meteor server, however, because the live blog updates are streamed to the post and updated in real time, so the visitor doesn’t have to reload anything.
Check out the screencast video of how this works in action.
Amusing “First Person Shooter Disease” YouTube Video
Rob Lang’s 24Hour RPG – Cloudship Atlantis
Rob Lang, the person behind the excellent FreeRPG blog, did an excellent job on his 24 hour RPG challenge. Within the space of just 24 hours, Lang put together a complete RPG, Cloudship Atlantis.
SSDs – Write Endurance Myths
I happened to be reading a comment on another website the other day where the commenter claimed SSDs would never be viable alternatives to traditional magnetic hard drives until manufacturers solved the “100,000 rewrite cycle issue.” StorageSearch.com’s SSD Myths and Legends – “write endurance” attempts to put this claim to bed once and for all.
The main point is that most of the SSD drives being sold today have write endurances ratings in the 1 to 5 million rewrite cycle range. The 100,000 limit was the maximum available in the late 1990s, but has long since been superseded.
The upshot of this is that even using extremely data intensive applications that write and rewrite large amounts of data over and over again to and SSD, the user is looking at decades of such intensive use of an SSD before it fails.
This is why typically, SSDs released today have MTBF ratings equivalent to those of magnetic hard drives (not that there aren’t issue with MTBF as a guide to hard drive reliability, but rather that there is nothing about recent SSDs that will make them fail more frequently than their magnetic bretheren).