China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources.
It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful.

This is really, really cool.

China Attempted To Blind U.S. Satellites With Laser - DefenseNews.com

Optimus Mini Three - RSS FeedsIt is clear that the Art Lebedev gem has a big x-factor. There are, at the time of writing, not that much applications that would justify spending 160 dollars for three buttons, but fans, especially tweakers, have been known spending more money on crazier things. The projected images are, mostly because of the usage of OLED technology, clear and bright. With a few finishing touches, like getting rid of the high-pitched sound, it looks like this device might have some pretty good prospects once the technology used gets cheaper.

Still not perfect, but even better than the hardware, is the software. On this matter, the Russian developers certainly deserve some credit because of the frequent updates and the quick response to reported problems. If, by the time the 'big' keyboard is launched, the company corrects a few mistakes and gives some more attention to details, the Optimus keyboard might end up in quite a few offices. Whether the Mini Three is worth the money is something everyone has to consider for himself, but Floris hasn't had any regrets about his purchase yet.

The many little dissapointments and disadvantages will give a lot of potential customers good reason to reconsider spending their money on this gem, but there will be quite a few that will ignore these problems because of the most important positive thing: the gadget factor. Gadget quality seems to be the most important, if not the only, trump of the Optimus Mini Three.

Tweakers.net - Optimus Mini Three: OLED keyboard reviewed (5/5)

JavaScript is a general purpose programming language that was introduced as the page scripting language for Netscape Navigator. It is widely believed to be a subset of Java, but it is not. It is a Scheme-like language with C-like syntax and soft objects. JavaScript was standardized in the ECMAScript Language Specification, Third Edition.

JSON is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript. Since JSON is a subset of JavaScript, it can be used in the language with no muss or fuss.

JSON in JavaScript

Graph Visualization
Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. Automatic graph drawing has many important applications in software engineering, database and web design, networking, and in visual interfaces for many other domains.

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. It has several main graph layout programs. See the gallery for some sample layouts. It also has web and interactive graphical interfaces, and auxiliary tools, libraries, and language bindings.

The Mac OS X edition of Graphviz, by Glen Low, won two 2004 Apple Design Awards.

The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in several useful formats such as images and SVG for web pages, Postscript for inclusion in PDF or other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.)

Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, and custom shapes.

In practice, graphs are usually generated from an external data sources, but they can also be created and edited manually, either as raw text files or within a graphical editor. (Graphviz was not intended to be a Visio replacement, so it is probably frustrating to try to use it that way.)

Graphviz

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

Visit the FireBug website for documentation, screen shots, and discussion forums:

http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

A quick overview of FireBug's features:

* JavaScript debugger for stepping through code one line at a time
* Status bar icon shows you when there is an error in a web page
* A console that shows errors from JavaScript and CSS
* Log messages from JavaScript in your web page to the console (bye bye "alert debugging")
* An JavaScript command line (no more "javascript:" in the URL bar)
* Spy on XMLHttpRequest traffic
* Inspect HTML source, computed style, events, layout and the DOM

Works with:
Firefox 1.5 - 3.0 ALL

I was very frustrated doing AJAX/AHAH development until I found this tool. Firebug lets me inspect any part of the DOM I want, and it lets me look at the XMLHttpRequest and its response. This, along with Catalyst's DBIx::Class debug information from the console allows me to monitor my web application from the client presentation to network communications to server side processing to database queries and back. Pretty damned cool.

FireBug :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

Welcome to the Spread Toolkit!

Spread is an open source toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point to point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees.

Spread can be used in many distributed applications that require high reliability, high performance, and robust communication among various subsets of members. The toolkit is designed to encapsulate the challenging aspects of asynchronous networks and enable the construction of reliable and scalable distributed applications.

Spread consists of a library that user applications are linked with, a binary daemon which runs on each computer that is part of the processor group, and various utility and demonstration programs.

Some of the services and benefits provided by Spread:

* Reliable and scalable messaging and group communication.
* A very powerful but simple API simplifies the construction of distributed architectures.
* Easy to use, deploy and maintain.
* Highly scalable from one local area network to complex wide area networks.
* Supports thousands of groups with different sets of members.
* Enables message reliability in the presence of machine failures, process crashes and recoveries, and network partitions and merges.
* Provides a range of reliability, ordering and stability guarantees for messages.
* Emphasis on robustness and high performance.
* Completely distributed algorithms with no central point of failure.

TCP for the application layer?

The Spread Toolkit

RSF-1 Features

RSF-1, the Resilient Server Facility, makes applications and services highly available by automatically switching between servers should a server or service fail. It provides a multi-directional redundant facility allowing servers to constantly monitor and "shadow" each other.

No Redundant Investment

Rather than keeping a standby option idle as your failover server, RSF-1 allows operational systems to act as standby servers for others and vice-versa, ensuring that your hardware investment is not wasted. In the event of a server failing, its shadow will initialise the failed service(s), thus ensuring continued availability.

Highly Available Services

RSF-1 not only provides a highly available platform but also highly available services, allowing individual applications to be stopped, started and migrated between nodes, without affecting other application execution environments or requiring shadow systems to be rebooted.

Automatic or Manual Switch-Overs

When a server or service fails, RSF-1 detects the breakdown and can either restart all associated services on an available cluster node or signal an operator. RSF-1 also monitors the health of individual services on a node via service agents. Should a failure be detected, it can either restart the service or fail it over to another node in the cluster.

Monitoring and Control

RSF-1 includes both a Java and Windows based system administration modules that allow RSF-1 cluster to be monitored and adminstered in real time. They also show the status of any RSF-1 instances available on the network and provide manual switch-overs functions.

Multi-Protocol Heartbeat

RSF-1 uses disk, TCP/IP and RS232 connections to establish heartbeat mechanisms providing independent monitors; all of which must fail before a machine is deemed to be unavailable. The RS232 component uses a custom protocol and is completely independent from network service daemons.

Secondary IP Addressing

Floating host names and IP addresses are used to alleviate the need for any changes to client configurations after failovers. The node in the cluster that is restarting the services simply assumes the identity of the failed machine.

Load Sharing

RSF-1 treats applications as individual process units and executes them on one of a number of servers, as defined by the RSF-1 configuration.

Typically, each server will be a primary node for a group of services, which will all be initiated on one server at system start-up. Once running, the RSF-1 administrator can switch individual services to other nodes in the cluster. This can be used for server optimisation, load balancing, or to grant more resources to certain applications. For example, a Payroll application may require more system resources on certain days. Using this feature of RSF-1, the administrator could move all or some process units to a shadow server to achieve this effect.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Shadowed systems can be geographically disparate, providing high availability across multiple sites and a framework for disaster recovery.

High Availability : RSF-1 Features & Benefits

Introduction

IPMItool is a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) version 1.5 and version 2.0 specifications. IPMI is an open standard for monitoring, logging, recovery, inventory, and control of hardware that is implemented independent of the main CPU, BIOS, and OS. The service processor (or Baseboard Management Controller, BMC) is the brain behind platform management and its primary purpose is to handle the autonomous sensor monitoring and event logging features.

The ipmitool program provides a simple command-line interface to this BMC. It features the ability to read the sensor data repository (SDR) and print sensor values, display the contents of the System Event Log (SEL), print Field Replaceable Unit (FRU) inventory information, read and set LAN configuration parameters, and perform remote chassis power control.

It was originally written to take advantage of IPMI-over-LAN interfaces but is also capable of using a system interface as provided by a kernel device driver such as OpenIPMI on Linux and BMC on Solaris 10 or the new OpenIPMI-compatible driver in FreeBSD.

IPMItool

Sun’s vision is to make Solaris on Opteron an industry leader. Unlike IBM and HP, which treat Opteron like a second-source Xeon, Sun invested in unique engineering that leverages Opteron’s superior performance and power utilization characteristics while meeting enterprise expectations. Sun’s Opteron systems are not the vendor’s cheap seats reserved for those who can’t afford RISC. Sun is as serious about AMD64 as it is about Sparc.

Sun also stretched its neck out -- way out -- by daring to differ with the seemingly universal consensus that Linux is the path paved with gold. Is there a compelling reason to abandon Unix? Maybe the qualities that made Unix an enterprise mainstay still exist. Linux faithful mock Solaris with the adolescent nickname “Slowaris,” but I challenge critics to find one instance among the innumerable huge-scale Solaris deployments where decision makers are considering a switch to Linux for speed’s sake. The only intelligent argument in favor of taking Unix down was that it was closed source. So Sun took the bold step of open sourcing its crown jewel, Solaris, to take the “proprietary” millstone from around its neck. Now Solaris is the only one of the Big Three Unixes that is open source.

Sun kicks ass.

Sun is winning in the server market | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-09-13 | By Tom Yager

Flashing a RAZR to enable OBEX.

HowardForums: Your Mobile Phone Community & Resource - V3M Seem Edits (Questions)