SSDs are replacements for common (aka old fashioned) hard drives. They’re better in every way except their cost. Even the lowest performing SSDs are twice as fast as hard drives and they have no moving parts so are more resilient in a mobile computer.

For most users, an SSD is an extravagance. Until now. A typical consumer will be just fine with 30 – 60 GB of hard drive space. I base this on annecdotal evidence from those I know. A modern fresh computer installation takes about 5GB. A large photo collection adds 5 – 15 GB and a large music collection 10 – 20GB more. Documents, email and work often take under 1 GB but on a very busy person’s system make take as much as 5GB.

I’m excited to share that I’m changing jobs at Canonical. I’ve been working as the Ubuntu.com webmaster for four years. I’ll be changing to a web developer on a different team. More specifically, I’ll be kind of a front-end web developer working on theming and the likes.

When I started at Canonical there was under 50 employees and the webmaster job description was quite broad. Over time as the company has grown and more people came on to help in various aspects my role became more of a marketing job, making content changes and running web reports. I was spending less of my time doing tasks where I excelled.

It’s kind of a lateral move. I’ll be switching to the team of developers responsible for managing our internal apps. I’ll continue to work on the Ubuntu.com infrastructure including Drupal, WordPress and Moin Moin as before. However this job is explicitly about developing custom application solutions. Someone else will be hired to take on the roles of managing the content and reporting for the website.

For those of you who are my colleagues in the Ubuntu community (i.e. not Canonical staff) our relationship will not change – I’m still the contact. As a matter of fact, there is a lot about my job that isn’t changing. I mostly get to focus on the parts I love.

This suits my tastes perfectly. I’m much more comfortable thinking about HTTP headers, reducing code duplication, CSS and the likes than I am hunting for typos, ensuring headlines are sentence case and keeping on top of web reports.

There will be a job post to fill the role of webmaster. If you’re interested in it, let me know and I’ll send you the details when they’re finalized by management. If you know me you know how to contact me privately and I think that would be the best method to express interest in the job.

Today I saw two items come across my radar that were unrelated but connected when it comes to the concept of mobile device fragmentation as it relates to software developers’ API stability.

Every release day is exciting in one way or another. Lucid’s was no disappointment. April 29th, 2010 was my 8th Ubuntu release as the ubuntu.com webmaster. Counting testing releases, betas and RCs I’ve participated in about 50 releases.

There are many aspects related to a release. I can only talk about my own perspective, as it pertains to managing the website. Usually, a week or so before release we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the website will look like and people are viewing it on a testing server. Invariably there are last minute changes, and I do mean up to the last minute.

Just to be clear, Adobe and John Gruber disagree on most of the issues around this “section 3.3.1″ incident, but they do heartily agree on the most important point.

First, to summarize what I’m referring to, Apple recently changed the wording in the contract developers have to agree to in order to develop apps for the iPhone. The wording prohibits developers from using tools other than Apple’s own sanctioned set which strongly steer developers towards creating apps that will only run on Apple’s products. This was done just a couple days before Adobe was scheduled to announce a product that allowed developers to create apps that run on a variety of devices, not just Apple’s. Developers, especially those at Adobe, got very upset and alarmed.

In short, you’re paying for the trust, not the actual encryption. Anyone with the appropriate software, which is widely available for free, can create their own certificate that provides encryption. However, using such a certificate will generate a browser warning when a user tries to create a secure connection. The warning will say something to the effect that “the connection is not trusted.” If you want to avoid the warning it costs something between $50 and $500. But there’s a justification.

I often keep tabs open for items on my todo list. So I get very upset if I lose my tabs. Sometimes I have two computers running or I dual-boot between operating systems and the tabs open on one are different than the tabs open on another. Xmarks now supports keeping these synchronized! I’ve just enabled this feature so haven’t played with it extensively yet but I’m excited about its potential.

In case you haven’t used XMarks before, it also supports synchronizing book marks between browsers. It works for IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. On some of these browsers you can also synchronize your passwords. Give it a shot at http://www.xmarks.com/

You think I’m crazy, but yes, you can do it. The below instructions have been tested by me and worked flawlessly. I started out by doing a migration locally using a virtual environment and you should too.

In case you’re wondering why, basically, I have a server that does not have hardware virtualization support and I wanted to use Xen’s paravirtualization capabilities to manage virtual machines. Ubuntu server makes a great guest but it really prefers KVM over Xen and KVM, as far as I know, does not support machines like mine without the proper cpu instructions. Debian does have good support for Xen so I’m switching to it as my host (Dom0).

Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?

(as a follow-up to “How data affects wifi range“)

It’s also important to realize that if a country consumes more media on the Internet than it produces, the electrons will get shifted from the creating country to the consuming country.

Because electrons have a negative charge this will leave the creating country with a positive charge and the consuming country with a negative charge. In effect, “polarizing the nations.” This was actually discussed in ancient biblical prophecy and is a sign that the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world is near.