vmbuilder is a python tool that allows to create virtual machine images on the fly, without the need to start an installer in an hypervisor. vmbuilder can create images for KVM, Xen, VMWare and for Amazon EC2.

I was browsing Ubuntu 8.10 and I bumped into vmbuilder which claims to be a solution for deploying virtual machines on Ubuntu quickly. The currently supported hypervisors are KVM, Xen, Virtual Box (not working yet), and VMware so naturally I decided to play with it a little bit to see how well it stacks up.

Läs mer: Virtualize -IT- » Blog Archive » Deploy VM’s Quickly with Ubuntu’s vmbuilder

We recognise love as our companion and protector and we now think that it may even shield us from death itself, at least while we're alive. 'Terror management theory' sounds oddly militaristic to the modern ear, but it was never intended to makes us think of politics. It was developed by psychologist Sheldon Solomon and his colleagues to help explain how we live with existential angst.

Läs mer: Mind Hacks: Love and immortality

Anonymous (2001) is a TrueType version of Anonymous 9, a freeware Macintosh bitmap font developed in the mid-90s by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins. It was designed as a more legible alternative to Monaco, the mono-spaced Macintosh system font.

Läs mer: Anonymous(tm)

Just as Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we hope to do the same with Bespin by developing an extensible framework for Open Web development. We’re particularly excited by the prospect of empowering Web developers to hack on the editor itself and make it their own.

Läs mer: Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Bespin

The material can be molded like plastics to create features at the nano-scale and yet is more durable and stronger than silicon or steel.

Läs mer: Engineers Revolutionize Nano-device Fabrication Using Amorphous Metals

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Hardcover)

Läs mer: Amazon.com: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution: Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending: Books

Monkeypatch for Zope to make ZPublisher not do header field continuation. Why? Because current versions of Chrome break on this. Symptom: your Plone site, when viewed in Chrome, says::

Läs mer: NoHeaderFieldContinuation — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management

Mostly lnked from here so that I know where to find them. CacheFu in Plone:

• Initial setup and background
• Cachefu strategy
• Debugging cache settings

De fyra originalmedlemmarna i Ultravox (den uppsättning som började med Vienna, dvs Warren Cann, Chris Cross, Billy Currie och Midge Ure) återförenas och ger sjutton konserter i Storbritannien och på Irland under april-maj 2009. Tunén heter Return to Eden (Efter albumet Rage in Eden).

Läs mer och boka biljetter här

I finished doing the Plone training in London last week, and the participants have gone back home via train and flights. When you hold a course like this, there is very low tolerance for technical glitches, everything must work. You cannot tell people who have flown in that the network is down, please come again tomorrow.

Most of these things you mitigate by having redundancy, e.g. two laptops and WiFi and two 3G modems on different networks +  router with both its own WiFi and Ethernet cables for all participants. But what about the software? Participants are running different operating systems and have all kinds of different Plone installs on their laptops.

It used to be that you could teach Plone with a text editor and whatever install of Plone that the participants had. You could write some example products totally from scratch in about two hours.

But now with ZCML, and XML in profiles you need to start with boiler plate code, and it is not possible to ignore buildout. With buildout you can also demonstrate the ability to build a load balancer and cache, and you can have Plone 2.5 and 3 side by side. Buildout works on Linux, has some problems on Mac and is not something I'd even attempt to get to work in Windows on a participant's machine during a course.

So how do you see to that all participants have a good working environment? Well, I have come up with two solutions and I tried one this time. Please note that if the participant wants to run everything on their laptop as they do at work, this will of course be supported at the course. But for those who don't, and in those cases when new features need to be demoed and tried, something is needed.

Option 1: Portable VirtualBox on a memory stick

One solution is to give each participant a virtual server running VMWare, VirtualBox or any similar environment.  Ideally the software should be able to run completely from a USB memory stick, to avoid installation problems on the participant's computer. After some scouring of the Internet I managed to find a French project that bundled a slightly older version of VirtualBox made for USB memory stick use.  Applications that can run directly from e.g. a memory stick are called portable. These applications need not be installed on to the participant's computer.

Each participant was offered a 4GB memory stick with a self contained VirtualBox, running Ubuntu 8.10 preconfigured with:

• Python 2.4
• VirtualEnv
• Kate Text Editor
• svn
• Firefox
• A working buildout already built with virtualenv

Next time I'll add cached eggs and FireBug for Firefox.

On Windows, you just stick the USB stick into a port, double click the VirtualBox icon, select the virtual machine and start it. You could even pre-save the state of the machine in such a way that the participant is immediately presented with a shell in the right directory with the command ./bin/instance fg already typed in :-)  .

For those who use Macs, there is a free VirtualBox available. In this case you need to copy the contents of the memory stick to the hard drive and install the VirtualBox application to run it. I am not aware of a portable VirtualBox for Mac. The format of the VirtualBox xml has changed in the newer version, but here is a guide that shows how to get the old style image to work on a Mac.

So how did it go?

Some participants on Mac and Linux had flawless installations of buildout already when they came to the course, so they did not need it.

On Windows the USB stick worked like a charm, but with one unforeseen glitch: It turned out that by using a ready made VirtualBox image of Ubuntu and then decking it out with KDE (for Kate), we hit the 4GB limit of the memory stick during a new buildout! This will easily be rectified by e.g. using Kubuntu the next time or just remove unnecessary packages like OpenOffice.

On Mac, it took a while to edit the xml files to work with the newer VirtualBox (and you must keep glitches to a minimum when training). Next time I will just supply an alternative xml virtual machine specification for the newer Mac VirtualBox already on the memory stick.

Another unforeseen problem was that one of the Windows machines lacked a bit in memory and CPU power.

Option 2: VNC

Next time I am pondering to try to host a number of VNC sessions on one of my laptops. In this way all that needs to be run on the participants' machines are VNC clients. They will get different ports on the server and get their own Linux environments and I can even make live changes to it. Memory and CPU specs of the participants' computers become irrelevant.

For this to work a number of demands need to be met

• The VNC clients must be compatible with the server
• The clients should ideally be run from a USB stick
• The server must have enough power to run all the sessions with GUI environments

I'd probably go for CentOS since I know how to add VNC sessions easily on that distribution, and I would need to do some load testing to see what server performance is needed. It might be  good idea to use a more resource friendly desktop environment than KDE Or Gnome. However, everybody likes KDE:s Kate, so I would prefer to use it.

I have been looking for a good laptop and found HP 2230s. It has a core 2 duo processor, weighs in at 1.7 kilos and can take 8GB of RAM. However, reviews of it say that it is flimsily built, so maybe it is better to get something else.

Option 3: Why not use both?

If I do go with CentOS 5.2 on a laptop I may get problems with  sleep and hibernation, since CentOS is not made primarily with laptops in mind. So why not virtualise it? And if I do that, I could also put it on the participants' memory sticks. So I could use the exact same image for options 1 and 2 above

MRSA appears to be claiming more lives in the United States than HIV/AIDS. According to an October 2007 report in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," 94,360 U.S. patients developed an invasive infection from MRSA in 2005 and nearly one of every five, or 18,650 of them, died. In the same year, 17,011 people died from HIV/AIDS.

Läs mer: World Running Out of Weapons to Fight Superbugs

Det har i alla fall den pakistanska kärnvapenteknikens fader, Abdul Qadeer Khan, sagt förra året. Khan är nu fri från husarrest.

If Dr. Khan is allowed to speak of all he knows, or chooses to do so, he could cause considerable embarrassment to Pakistan. In July 2008, he told Pakistani reporters that Pakistan had transported uranium enrichment equipment to North Korea in 2000 with the full knowledge of the country’s army, then headed by Mr. Musharraf.

Läs mer: Pakistan Lifts Restrictions on Nuclear Scientist - NYTimes.com

“A lot of inflammatory diseases — multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and asthma — are due to the activity of Th 17,” he explained. “If you infect mice with worms, Th 17 drops dramatically, and the activity of regulatory T cells is augmented.”

Läs mer: Babies know: A little dirt is good for you | ajc.com

Testing these nanoparticles in the internal fluid of brain-cancer cells, Kopelman found electric fields as strong as 15 million volts per meter, up to five times stronger than the field found in a lightning bolt. However, this discovery goes beyond being incredibly interesting; the finding will likely change the way researchers look at disease.

Läs mer: Human Cells have Electric Fields as Powerful as Lighting Bolts -A Galaxy Classic

Preliminära data, fungerar bara i tidigt skede. Men stamceller verkar ju vara the shit, alltså.

Researchers from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine said they transplanted early-stage multiple sclerosis patients' own immune stem cells into the patients' bodies, thereby "resetting" their immune systems.

Läs mer: Stem cell transplant reverses early MS - UPI.com

While poverty has rarely been a driving force for revolutionary movements and wars, rising expectations often have.

från denna rapport (pdf)

To meet even the conservative growth rates
posited above, global energy production would need
to rise by 1.3% per year. By the 2030s, demand
would be nearly 50% greater than today. To meet that
demand, even assuming more effective conservation
measures, the world would need to add roughly the
equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s current energy production
every seven years.

...

With the cost of precision weapons
expected to decrease and their availability increasing, joint force commanders could find themselves operating
in environments where even small, energy-rich opponents have military forces with advanced technological
capabilities. These could include advanced cyber, robotic, and even anti-space based systems.

...

Even though
populations today are much larger and more concentrated,
increasing the opportunities for a new pathogen to spread,
the fact that mankind lives in a richer world with greater
knowledge of the world of microbes, the ability to enact
quarantines, a rapid response capability, and medical
treatment, suggests that authorities could control even the
most dangerous of pathogens.

..

Above all, the Chinese are interested in the
strategic and military thinking of the United States. In
the year 2000, the PLA [People's Liberation Army of Chine, blogger's note] had more students in America’s
graduate schools than the U.S. military,

Ur denna rapport (pdf)  från United States Joint Forces Command

A report (pdf)  from United States Joint Forces Command shows just what a dynamic, to not say chaotic world we have been and will be living in with regards to security and international politics.

Take a look at this list from the report, just how the balance of power has changed during the 1900s per decade:

• 1900 If you had been a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you would have
  been British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy: France.
• 1910 You would now be allied with France, and the enemy would now be Germany
• 1920 Britain and its allies had won World War I, but now the British found themselves
  engaged in a naval race with its former allies the United States and Japan.
• 1930 For the British, naval limitation treaties were in place, the Great Depression had
  started and defense planning for the next five years assumed a “ten year” rule -- no
  war in ten years. British planners posited the main threats to the Empire as the
  Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy were either friendly or no threat.
• 1936 A British planner would now posit three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a
  resurgent Germany, while little help could be expected from the United States.
• 1940 The collapse of France in June left Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with
  Germany and Italy with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. America had
  only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.
• 1950 The United States was now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age had
  dawned, and a “police action” began in June in Korea that was to kill over 36,500
  Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North
  Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire
  brought an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict would be
  China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.
• 1960 Politicians in the United States were focusing on a missile gap that did not exist;
  massive retaliation would soon give way to flexible response, while a small
  insurgency in South Vietnam hardly drew American attention.
• 1970 The United States was beginning to withdraw from Vietnam, its military forces in
  shambles. The Soviet Union had just crushed incipient rebellion in the Warsaw
  Pact. Détente between the Soviets and Americans had begun, while the Chinese
  were waiting in the wing to create an informal alliance with the United States.
• 1980 The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, while a theocratic revolution in Iran
  had overthrown the Shah’s regime. “Desert One” -- an attempt to free American
  hostages in Iran -- ended in a humiliating failure, another indication of what
  pundits were calling “the hollow force.” America was the greatest creditor nation
  the world had ever seen.
• 1990 The Soviet Union collapses. The supposedly hollow force shreds the vaunted Iraqi
  Army in less than 100 hours. The United States had become the world’s greatest
  debtor nation. No one outside of the Department of Defense has heard of the
  internet.
• 2000 Warsaw is the capital of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nation.
  Terrorism is emerging as America’s greatest threat. Biotechnology, robotics,
  nanotechnology, HD energy, etc. are advancing so fast they are beyond forecasting
• 2010 Take the above and plan accordingly! What will be the disruptions of the next 25
  years?

Denna rapport (pdf)  från United States Joint Forces Command visar hur svårt det är att planera framtiden vad gäller militär och politik. Här har man som exempel bara visat på hur allianser och stormakter skiftat per decennium under nittonhundratalet:

• 1900 If you had been a strategic analyst for the world’s leading power, you would have
  been British, looking warily at Britain’s age old enemy: France.
• 1910 You would now be allied with France, and the enemy would now be Germany
• 1920 Britain and its allies had won World War I, but now the British found themselves
  engaged in a naval race with its former allies the United States and Japan.
• 1930 For the British, naval limitation treaties were in place, the Great Depression had
  started and defense planning for the next five years assumed a “ten year” rule -- no
  war in ten years. British planners posited the main threats to the Empire as the
  Soviet Union and Japan, while Germany and Italy were either friendly or no threat.
• 1936 A British planner would now posit three great threats: Italy, Japan, and the worst, a
  resurgent Germany, while little help could be expected from the United States.
• 1940 The collapse of France in June left Britain alone in a seemingly hopeless war with
  Germany and Italy with a Japanese threat looming in the Pacific. America had
  only recently begun to scramble to rearm its military forces.
• 1950 The United States was now the world’s greatest power, the atomic age had
  dawned, and a “police action” began in June in Korea that was to kill over 36,500
  Americans, 58,000 South Koreans, nearly 3,000 Allied soldiers, 215,000 North
  Koreans, 400,000 Chinese, and 2,000,000 Korean civilians before a cease-fire
  brought an end to the fighting in 1953. The main opponent in the conflict would be
  China, America’s ally in the war against Japan.
• 1960 Politicians in the United States were focusing on a missile gap that did not exist;
  massive retaliation would soon give way to flexible response, while a small
  insurgency in South Vietnam hardly drew American attention.
• 1970 The United States was beginning to withdraw from Vietnam, its military forces in
  shambles. The Soviet Union had just crushed incipient rebellion in the Warsaw
  Pact. Détente between the Soviets and Americans had begun, while the Chinese
  were waiting in the wing to create an informal alliance with the United States.
• 1980 The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, while a theocratic revolution in Iran
  had overthrown the Shah’s regime. “Desert One” -- an attempt to free American
  hostages in Iran -- ended in a humiliating failure, another indication of what
  pundits were calling “the hollow force.” America was the greatest creditor nation
  the world had ever seen.
• 1990 The Soviet Union collapses. The supposedly hollow force shreds the vaunted Iraqi
  Army in less than 100 hours. The United States had become the world’s greatest
  debtor nation. No one outside of the Department of Defense has heard of the
  internet.
• 2000 Warsaw is the capital of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nation.
  Terrorism is emerging as America’s greatest threat. Biotechnology, robotics,
  nanotechnology, HD energy, etc. are advancing so fast they are beyond forecasting
• 2010 Take the above and plan accordingly! What will be the disruptions of the next 25
  years?

Hittat via Foreign Policy.

Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow.

Läs mer: How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic - ReadWriteWeb