This JRuby deployment stuff I am reading about in “Deploying with JRuby: Deliver Scalable Web Apps using the JVM” is so rad, much more mature than previously hacked together solutions.  Rails deployments in the past were so hard to manage, wish I had this stuff when I was working on Cheddr / Gethundos.  Among all the goodies I just found out they have tooling now that lets your automatically provision VirtualBox machines to configure and host your JVM builds all from the command line:

J:\Projects\JRuby\code\twitalytics>vagrant up

Vagrant initialize: 4ccd04dc-1b99-41ad-bb1b-3ff9be279512

[default] VM already created. Booting if it's not already running...
[default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports...
[default] Forwarding ports...
[default] -- 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)
[default] Creating shared folders metadata...
[default] Clearing any previously set network interfaces...
[default] Booting VM...
[default] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes.
[default] VM booted and ready for use!
[default] Mounting shared folders...
[default] -- v-root: /vagrant
[default] -- manifests: /tmp/vagrant-puppet/manifests
[default] Running provisioner: Vagrant::Provisioners::Puppet...
[default] Running Puppet with /tmp/vagrant-puppet/manifests/site.pp...
notice: /Group[puppet]/ensure: created
notice: Finished catalog run in 0.13 seconds

J:\Projects\JRuby\code\twitalytics>

Erlang R14 running on TMobile G1 (rooted)

http://www.erlang-embedded.com/?page_id=24#comment-379

Arg… so sick of this crap!  Can’t anyone do security correctly anymore?

A whopping 99.7% of Android smartphones are leaking login data for Google services, and could allow other access to information stored in the cloud, so claim German security researchers Bastian Könings, Jens Nickels, and Florian Schaub from the University of Ulm

*facepalm*

Having a good time the last week playing around with secure auth solutions focusing around this little guy

April 11, 2011 | Devindra Hardawar 

If you want to see what real multitasking is like on a tablet, take a gander at HP’s new TouchPad demo video below, which shows off the WebOS-powered slate’s ability to juggle multiple apps with ease.

The video also gives us our first glimpse at the TouchPad’s enterprise appeal by showing off Citrix Receiver, an application that works inside the TouchPad’s browser and provides access to Citrix-powered applications and virtual desktops via enterprise networks.

As I’ve written previously, the TouchPad’s multitasking capabilities put the iPad 2 to shame (although the same has been true of WebOS versus the iPhone OS for some time). This demo drives home the massive gap in multitasking capabilities between HP and Apple’s platforms — moving between the TouchPad’s applications is far more fluid and reminiscent of a desktop computing platform. Using iOS, on the hand, still feels like a dumbed-down computing experience.

The TouchPad’s Citrix capabilities are also worth highlighting for HP, as it definitely wants a slice of the enterprise tablet market. The video shows off AutoCAD being run in the cloud — and while it’s nowhere near as smooth as a powerful laptop or desktop computer, the functionality may be good enough to show off 3D models, or make some quick edits, while on the go.

View the HP WebOS in Action Video

By James Gleick

Average customer review: 

Amazon.com Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that’s just the “History.” The “Theory” focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the “Flood,” Gleick explains genetics as biology’s mechanism for informational exchange—Is a chicken just an egg’s way of making another egg?—and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information’s own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an “interesting number,” and why “[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle.” What results is a visceral sense of information’s contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borges’s “Library of Babel” is literature’s iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which “creatures of the information” may just recognize themselves. —Jason Kirk

The ultimate in “sympathetic” needles - circumventing the barriers of time and space:

April 4, 2011 by Editor

Controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits using calcium atoms in an ion trap

(credit: University of Innsbruck)

Physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria have achieved controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits (qubits), realizing the largest quantum register ever produced.

The scientists have almost doubled the record for the number of entangled quantum bits realized experimentally. They confined 14 calcium atoms in an ion trap (similar to a quantum computer), and then manipulated them with laser light. The internal states of each atom formed single qubits and a quantum register of 14 qubits.

They discovered that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly in a process known as superdecoherence, which has rarely been observed in quantum processing.

Ref.: Rainer Blatt et al., 14-Qubit Entanglement: Creation and Coherence, Physical Review Letters, March 31, 2011

more…

March 26, 2011 by Editor

An international production team has created a teaser for a feature-length drama documentary on Alan Turing, says biographer Dr. Andrew Hodges.

Turing was the British WW II code breaker and early pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence who proposed an operational test of intelligence as a replacement for the philosophical question, “Can machines think?”

Historians believe that his WW2 code breaking work helped save millions of lives and shortened the war by two years. He founded three new scientific fields: computer science, artificial intelligence, and morphogenesis.

Funding is currently being raised for the film, with a goal  for completion in mid-2012, to coincide with the centennial of Turing’s birth.

Alan Turing Documentary Teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BEAxoknHgo&feature=player_embedded

April 3, 2011 by tomaswell

BATON ROUGE (CNS)—This post is about justice. More accurately, it is about the betrayal of justice—absolutely and without doubt, the most tragic, most egregious, most heartbreaking betrayal of justice one could possibly imagine.

And just who is responsible for this horrific miscarriage of justice? None other than the one institution that is supposed to be the very embodiment of justice, that bulwark of equality and fairness, the highest authority on the law of the land, the United States Supreme Court.

In a mind-numbing 5-4 decision, the court overturned a $14 million judgment against the late Harry Connick, Sr., and the New Orleans district attorney’s office for the wrongful conviction of John Thompson in the 1984 murder of a New Orleans hotel executive.

more…

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/chrome-10-vs-internet-explorer-9-reconsidered/792?tag=nl.e589

> But, then I ran 32-bit IE 9 on my 64-bit Windows 7. Wow. Now, IE 9 came in at 245.4ms. This was actually faster than Chrome 10, which came in at 266.7ms. So, for the moment at least IE9 is actually the fastest browser I’ve tested to date.

That seems to be what I am getting as well, at least with the latest build…

64bit IE is slow as hell.. looks like they really sped up the latest build… the beta was slower than chrome, here is what I am getting:

Sunspider 0.9.1 (Used in the article)

win 7 64 Box (2.66GHz cores):
IE9RC 9.0.8080.16413 ( 32bit )
  246.4ms +/- 0.5%
  http://bit.ly/h5yDqp
IE9RC 9.0.8080.16413 ( 64bit )
  1130.4ms +/- 0.4%
  http://bit.ly/eC803Z
Chrome 10.0.648.133
  343.2ms +/- 3.1%
  http://bit.ly/fasTq6
IE9 Beta 9.0.7930.16406 ( 32bit )
  380.2ms +/- 0.3%
  http://bit.ly/eVIPOU  
IE9 Beta 9.0.7930.16406 ( 64bit )
  1288.1ms +/- 0.5%
  http://bit.ly/hwx64p
Sunspider on Linux Box: Linux 2.6.35-25-generic kernel (2.67GHz cores):
Chrome 9.0.597.67 beta
  301.0ms +/- 4.2%
  http://bit.ly/gHykp7
Chromium 10.0.648.127
  277.0ms +/- 2.0%  
  http://bit.ly/eWm7KP


The damn download link for Chrome 10 for Linux failed so I can’t test that.  These are my v8 results, which is a test probably slighted towards chrome since Google built it and tunes chrome with it.  I run these three times as it doesn’t seem to be super consistent between runs (but the other benchmark does seem to stay consistent as it runs 5 times):

http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v6/run.html
(bigger is better on this one)

win 7 64 Box (2.66GHz cores):
  Chrome 10.0.648.133                         7597 / 7702 / 7688
  IE9 9.0.8080.16413 ( 32bit )                2186 / 2225 / 2207
  IE9 9.0.8080.16413 ( 64bit )                479  /  475 /  479
  IE9 9.0.7930.16406 ( 32bit )                1248 / 1258 / 1241
  IE9 9.0.7930.16406 ( 64bit )                350  /  348 /  345
Linux Box: Linux 2.6.35-25-generic kernel (2.67GHz cores)
 - Chrome 9.0.597.67 beta                     5268 / 5152 / 5325
 - Chromium 10.0.648.127 (76697) Ubuntu 10.10 5369 / 5319 / 5323

So chrome wins this one hands down… loses the other one.

Some have accused IE9 of cheating this test so I would take all this with a grain of salt… http://digitizor.com/2010/11/17/internet-explorer-9-caught-cheating-in-sunspider-benchmark/