Rocky-inspired Philadelphian hey_suburbia decided to put Wii Sports to the diet test back in early December. The idea was to see if the game could help him shed unwanted pounds when played with full, exaggerated movements. He continued his normal activity and eating habits only adding 30 minutes of Wii Sports to his daily routine. The results after six weeks? He lost 9 pounds.

I am moving back to Atlanta, and am concerned about gaining weight now that I won't be surfing often. Wii Boxing could be part of the solution.

Lose weight by playing Wii Sports - Joystiq

$100,000 is the New $10 Million
Venture capitalists are racing to miniaturize themselves toward the vanishing point. One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, recently asked why not “back 10 teams at $25,000 each instead of one team at $250,000”? Just last week a Seattle venture capitalist boasted that “we are seeing impressive companies being built for under $100,000.”

To which one can only say: Really? Which companies?

Just do the math. Two engineers can last 12 months on $100,000, which is great for building a prototype, but often nowhere near enough to build an ambitious product, much less a business. Yes, hardware and software have become nearly free, but people have always been a startup’s main cost.

Spending Less, Doing Less
What’s usually happening is we’re spending less by doing less. Behind the steady drumbeat of startups, any TechCrunch reader can’t help but notice how whimsical many have become.

Trading college-girl gossip or graphing rock-band popularity is cool but we also need entrepreneurs willing to spend the time and money to f*** with the order of things. Rather than building game-changing technologies that can make an entire segment of the economy better, most startups are using what’s already out there to create a new media site. Silicon Valley, meet Hollywood.

Honey, I Shrunk the Startups! (Guide for Scoring TechCrunch 50 at Home) | Redfin Corporate Blog

Registration is required so we can know how many people to expect and plan for. We are also limiting the number of people to 50 at the max. We are wanting to see an equal number of entrepreneurs and investors so we can have a meaningful conversation with out it being one sided. We also want everyone to try to make it to Fridays launch event for START Atlanta because that is when we will have the break out sessions for product development. The break out sessions are where we will spilt the group into investors and entrepreneurs and have each side describe what products they will need, and want for START Atlanta to be functional for them. This will ensure we are building something for the community which will help to foster a better community. So if you are thinking you can’t make it to the whole weekend that is fine, just be sure to make it to Friday night’s event.

START Atlanta | Fostering the Atlanta Early-Stage Technology Community

Objectica adds full-scale, perfectly integrated object orientation to Mathematica. You can rapidly build your mathematical models using classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation. With Objectica, the capabilities of Mathematica are combined with the power of object orientation.

In addition to its simple and easy-to-learn syntax, Objectica has many consistency checks and automatisms that support your development, especially in a commercial environment. Objectica enables more productive development and leaves more room for thorough model creation by allowing you to:

Objectica: Your Simulation with Mathematica's Object Orientation

Gov. Sarah Palin’s church is promoting a conference that promises to convert gays into heterosexuals through the power of prayer.

“You’ll be encouraged by the power of God’s love and His desire to transform the lives of those impacted by homosexuality,” according to the insert in the bulletin of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Palin has worshipped for about six years.

Palin's church: You can pray away the gay

In SQS, a queue is a list of entries. An entry is a blob of data. When you create a queue, it's empty until you put entries on it. You can then read the entries you put on the queue. Entries remain on the queue until you explicitly delete them. The ordering of the queue is FIFO (First In, First Out). However, because access to the queues is heavily cached for performance reasons, Amazon does not guarantee FIFO access--occasionally, SQS requests may return results in a slightly different order than FIFO.

XML.com: Fun with Amazon's Simple Queue Service

Overview
At my job, we've just about finished work on the next segment of our Catalyst-based application. It required the implementation of a JobQueue system, and after careful consideration we narrowed down our choices.

Why TheSchwartz?
Aside from the fun statements that are made while working it into every day business conversation, it had a few things that really stood out over the competition. What competition, you say? Well, we really didn't have many options. Our choices for a reliable jobqueue (reliable meaning it handles failure conditions internally, and can guarantee success or failure) were really TheSchwartz, Catalyst::Engine::JobQueue or a home grown solution. TheSchwartz was really the only choice.

Getting it running
Setup was actually very simple. Aside from the hidden doc directory containing the schema, it was all laid out in a sane fashion. We configured one of our higher powered slaves to be the jobqueue database, and created the InnoDB tables. After that, configuring the test cases to use our DB and we were in business. Things couldn't have gone easier, really. Well, maybe if there was more Pod available but I'm not complaining one bit, considering how well it works.nullnullnull

Catalyst and TheSchwartz: Reliable JobQueue in a great framework - Vox

Star Caller makes use of the Amazon Cloud, so I wanted to know just how FIFO the Amazon Simple Queue Service is. Amazon says that the SQS is not FIFO. So I (with hobbs from #catalyst) wrote a script to test the SQS's Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between set order and get order.

The results for 1000 gets/sets to the queue usually look something like this:

SAD: 42.04
Spearman: 0.9835

The data is plotted for 1000 inserts/gets, with a 0 second delay between the finish of get/set here:

So far, a delay between the sets and gets seems to have no effect on FIFO-ness, but the rate of sets may.

The results? Its pretty FIFO. Not completely ordered, but its in a distributed cloud so that would be quite hard.

How much did the tests cost me?

29,021 Requests: $0.03
0.000035 GB In: $0.01
0.000023 GB Out: $0.01
----------------------
Total Cost: $0.05

How FIFO is Amazon's SQS? - Pretty FIFO

The plan, which would place the companies into a conservatorship, was outlined in separate meetings with the chief executives at the office of the companies’ new regulator. The executives were told that, under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced and shareholders would be virtually wiped out, but that the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.

It is not possible to calculate the cost of any government bailout, but the huge potential liabilities of the companies could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and make any rescue among the largest in the nation’s history.

Let rich ceo's gamble the money of the wealthy, and then use tax money to bail them out when their big bets go bad. Sounds like corporate welfare to me. Is this really necessary to stop a chain reaction of bad shenanigans in the economy?

U.S. Rescue Seen at Hand for 2 Mortgage Giants - NYTimes.com

The 2008 GTISC Security Summit on Emerging Cyber Security Threats is the sixth security summit hosted at Georgia Tech since 2004. The summits began as an effort to engage the broader community in the Atlanta area and at the national level to better understand the threats to digital information and to develop strategies for securing it. The summits bring together thought leaders in the information technology and security fields to explore key cyber security threats and ways for countering them. The GTISC annual security summit has evolved into one of the most forward looking cyber security events with a focus on emerging threats that you and your company should be prepared to recognize and respond. This is not a product focused meeting. Instead, more than 250 attendees from academia, government and industry gather to discuss emerging cyber threats and explore potential solutions.

Past GTISC Security Summits have addressed issues in VoIP security, identity management, wireless security and role of regulation in addressing threats like email spam. This year, our keynote speaker and panelists will look ahead to discuss and debate threats and vulnerabilities that will emerge or become serious problems over the next few years. The 2008 GTISC Security Summit on Emerging Cyber Security Threats will also mark the second issuance of the annual GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report for the year ahead – read last year’s report.

2008 GTISC Security Summit: Emerging Cyber Security Threats