YouTube - Thirsty Merc - 20 good reasons

YouTube - Thirsty Merc - 20 good reasons

YouTube - Light Surrounding You

YouTube - Light Surrounding You

YouTube - Colbie Caillat - Bubbly

YouTube - Colbie Caillat - Bubbly

Post to Google Reader

Post to Google Reader: "You can now add your messages to Google Reader to be seen by your Google friends. To post a note, log-in to Reader and click Your stuff -> Notes to the left. This will open a box where you can type in a note with any thought, Friendfeed/ Twitter-style. To find out who exactly your friends are, check the Friends tab at the Settings page for an overview (or click the Manage Friends links).

Next to the notes box, there’s also a new bookmarklet to share items you find on the web. Just drag and drop the link to your bookmarks and you can activate it when you stumble upon something; you can also add a custom note to items, Google explains in a blog post.

Another new feature is that the layout of your Shared Items page can now be customized to *drumroll* display one of three graphics on top (titled ice cream, ninjas and sea)."

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM

Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM: "During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at some big news involving Amazon and its web services. Today, the company officially announced:

* Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now.
* Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

These developments are meant to address the needs and complaints of the developer community. OpenSolaris, which comes with tools such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (D-Trace), will be offered for free, in contrast to some Linux offerings that cost money. For instance, if you sign up for EC2 and pick RedHat, it costs $19. ZFS allows instant rollback and continual check-summing capabilities, something developers have found lacking in the EC2 platform. This OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only."

Running Django on Google App Engine - Google App Engine - Google Code

Running Django on Google App Engine - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Google App Engine and Django both have the ability to use the WSGI standard to run applications. As a result, it is possible to use nearly the entire Django stack on Google App Engine, including middleware. As a developer, the only necessary adjustment is modifying your Django data models to make use of the Google App Engine Datastore API to interface with the fast, scalable Google App Engine datastore. Since both Django and Google App Engine have a similar concept of models, as a Django developer, you can quickly adjust your application to use our datastore."

Applications Gallery - Google App Engine - Google Code

Applications Gallery - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Featured Applications Gallery"

Google and Dojo, sitting in a tree

Google and Dojo, sitting in a tree: "A bunch of new tools have been added to the Dojo Ajax Toolkit that make it amazingly simple to search all of Googles services from your own site, and display the results however you want. Examples show how to integrate Google with the Dojo Grid, and with the Django templating language. And all with zero server side dependancies!"

Iron Man: Steve Jobs is even tougher than you think.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Iron Man | PBS: "Iron Man: Steve Jobs is even tougher than you think."

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal and plenty of incentive, too. Apple's goal in acquiring Adobe would be to control first Flash and second Adobe's emerging Air application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn't a participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash outright?

BREAKING: Microsoft Walking Away From Yahoo Deal, No Hostile - Silicon Alley Insider

BREAKING: Microsoft Walking Away From Yahoo Deal, No Hostile - Silicon Alley Insider: "Microsoft (MSFT) is withdrawing its bid for Yahoo (YHOO), people familiar with the matter say. Microsoft will not pursue a hostile proxy battle.

Microsoft raised its bid to $33. Yahoo's board wanted $37 (Jerry Yang and David Filo reportedly wanted $38.)

A letter from Steve Ballmer should be released momentarily."

IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

IBM cooks up internal virtual world for confidentiality, security | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com: "IBM has created its own internal virtual world called Metaverse for corporate meetings and collaboration. Why not use Second Life? “If you really want to make most of these (virtual world) meetings it has to be confidential,” said IBM CIO Mark Hennessey.

Those comments could indicate the beginning of a trend: Corporate specific virtual worlds designed to bridge geographies. The message: Confidentiality is everything whether your world is virtual or not."

Michael Ackerbacker, innovation manager of IQ collaboration development at IBM, said Metaverse has been in development for about a year. For 2007, IBM’s big goal was to prove the concept. Ackerbacker’s comments came in a series of presentations in New York.

“We did learn a lot in Second Life, but wanted to do a world here internally where we could talk about IBM types of things securely,” said Ackerbacker.

So what did Ackerbacker and IBM learn about corporate virtual worlds? Here are a few key takeaways:

Remember the users when building a virtual world. The goal is to enable collaboration not make things complicated. Ackerbacker said IBM is still noodling over how to bring the emotional connection into virtual space and get employees there easily. “Can we create a learning environment that doesn’t get in the way?” asked Ackerbacker.

Cater to your culture. The avatar options in Metaverse–built on the Torque gaming engine–were distinctly IBM. For instance, ties are an option. So is gray hair is an option. And no one is some hybrid animal thingy.

Don’t be exclusive. If you want collaboration you have to make virtual worlds simple. Ackerbacker said IBM stripped down its user interface “quite a bit.” “We only have a dozen controls,” said Ackerbacker. “Click on an icon and it’ll do something–fly, teleport and dress. We’re having an ongoing discussion on how to make it easier.”

Don’t be surprised if IBM takes these learnings an turns them into a service for verticals like retailing and hospitality.

Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline

Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline: "Project Caroline is a research program developing a horizontally scalable platform for the development and deployment of Internet services. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. Project Caroline helps software providers develop services rapidly, update in-production services frequently, and automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands."

An advanced R&D project at Sun Microsystems, Project Caroline is a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services. It is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java(tm) programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl, to update in-production services frequently, and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Key features of Project Caroline include:

• Project Caroline enables services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. By providing programmatic interfaces for managing platform resources, Project Caroline enables developers to create services that can themselves update and flex platform resource usage, dynamically and without human intervention.

• Project Caroline resources are exposed through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible filesystems and databases. These abstractions can improve developer productivity by providing simplified interfaces to infrastructure resources. They also enable developers to create more robust, long-living services by insulating service code from changes to the underlying infrastructure.

• Project Caroline presents a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources. In addition to simplifying developers' use of distributed resources, this unified system model also allows the platform to draw on a horizontally scaled resource pool to meet the allocation requests of multiple applications, running on behalf of multiple users.

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog: "As I write this post, many are predicting that the big announcement from Google tonight will be that it’s opening up BigTable for the world to use. At least Kevin Burton and Mike Arrington think so. I hope so, because the world needs a lot more cloud computing choices. I wonder how many have figured out just how little time remains to introduce new cloud computing platforms?

Ray Ozzie has said, “[the cloud market] really isn’t being taken seriously right now by anybody except Amazon.” He’s right on the mark: it isn’t being taken seriously by anyone except Amazon. The distant runner up is Benioff’s Force.com. I say distant because there are a lot of problems with it, not the least of which is an economic model that makes it completely untenable for anyone but big corporate IT to use. Technically, it is a completely closed and proprietary environment that offers only minimal leverage. It’s true, they’re very seirous about it, so in that sense we should add them to the list, but the way they’re going about it makes it seem less than serious.

Here’s an important tip for various big industry players who’ve made noise about Cloud Computing at various points: it’s a perishable opportunity! You don’t have forever to contemplate how to get in and start winning.

"

Can Apple Break Into The Enterprise Market? It's Trying (AAPL) - Silicon Alley Insider

Can Apple Break Into The Enterprise Market? It's Trying (AAPL) - Silicon Alley Insider: "Earlier this week we wondered why Apple was looking to rent a big block of Manhattan office space. Now we have an educated guess: Apple (AAPL) may be trying to increase its very small foothold in corporate America, by establishing a support team dedicated to business clients.

Apple already provides, grudgingly, a very limited amount of assistance to businesess that buy Macs. But we hear it is taking members from a team that provides similar services for the education market and converting them to a business-focused team. Apple officials have already begun acknowledging their interest in 'industry-vertical wins, like oil, gas, and government,' we noted in March.

Why would Apple, which has always been the choice of consumers and college kids, target the business market? Because business users want to use Macs -- and are already doing so.

Yankee Group surveyed 250 companies and found that 87% now have at least some Macs in their offices, up from 48% two years ago, reports BusinessWeek, in a new cover story. It's a comprehensive look at how Apple is making headway, almost unintentionally, in the coporate market -- and why it will still has a long way to go."

Yahoo and Google May Announce Search Deal Within a Week - Silicon Alley Insider

Yahoo and Google May Announce Search Deal Within a Week - Silicon Alley Insider: "As Microsoft announces (through the WSJ) an imminent decision on Yahoo, Yahoo announces (through the WSJ) that it may sign a Google search partnership within the week. (If these two companies finally do get together, the WSJ deserves a cut of those $300 million in M&A fees.)

The search deal has also been carefully designed to reduce anti-trust concerns."

Great Presentation on REST

Overview: Check out this slide presentation to learn how REST (Representational State Transfer) compares to SOAP and the WSF (Web services framework). This presentation by Peter Lacey, Senior Analyst for Burton Group, explores these key topics and more:

http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=320716

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/html/itp/burton_RESTEasy.ppt

CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On-Demand - Easy Server Provisioning

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/elasticserver

Complexity really is a growing problem for people. Every day we are hit with “more of everything” - more software choice, more versions, more systems and more business change. And soon - with more virtualization - more VMs. How many VMs will there be in your organization in 2010? How will they be manufactured and provisioned and will this be done in the same way as it is today? InfoQ spoke with Alexis Richardson, a founder of startup CohesiveFT, about their "Elastic Server On-Demand" product, which aims to simplify working with virtualized application stacks.

InfoQ: Please provide an overview of Elastic Server On-Demand for InfoQ readers.

CohesiveFT: Elastic Server addresses the problem of virtual machine management using self-service and automation. The Elastic Server On-Demand service delivers ready-to-run application stacks to order, for virtual server and cloud formats. It takes the complexity and uncertainty out of assembly and deployment lifecycles by replacing multiple manual steps and scripts, with a single automated process that is both quick and easy to use. We give you a place to create and share servers, or reproduce them from recommended patterns, with speed and quality.

InfoQ. How do I use Elastic Server?

CohesiveFT: Say you have an application, written for Ruby on Rails, and you want to run test builds on your laptop but move to a data centre in production - for instance on Amazon EC2. No problem. On the Elastic Server site you’ll see a collection of portals each catering to a different technology community or product pattern. Choose the Ruby on Rails portal and customize the components you want in your base stack - e.g. Rails 2.0.2, Mongrel 1.1.4, PostgreSQL libraries, and some RubyGems. Now press ‘build’. That’s it - in a few minutes you can be running your Rails server on EC2.

Choices can be saved as a template, so you can reuse the same configuration and run it on your own hardware in other formats, currently VMware, Parallels, or Xen. This is why we call servers “Elastic” - you have one server recipe, but keep the flexibility to reuse it across multiple business cases and technology platforms. Every aspect of this is managed in a consistent way in one place. Additionally, every server has a web console and API for organizing maintenance functions such as network settings, security, audit, and lifecycle.

twittervision

twittervision
its been around for a while but still pretty compelling. Twitters tweets mashed with Google Maps.

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut) � Online Journalism Blog

How journalists can master Twitter (blogger’s cut) � Online Journalism Blog
It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together - for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice."