September is turning into a meetup month for the Hudson community. In parallel to the meetup in Oslo and the meetup in JavaOne, Nokia and InfraDNA are hosting a meetup in Copenhagen on September 6th, Monday. Read on for the details.
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The current tentative plan is to do a short "state of the union / what's new" kind of presentation, then use the rest of the time for open mic Q&A, but if you have other ideas, or better yet if you want to do some talks, please let me know. I think the event will be fun.

If you plan on coming, please drop me a note, so that we can get some sense of the attendance.

• When: September 6th, 18:30
• Where: Auditorium 1, Nokia Denmark A/S, København (map)
• Food will be provided.

(author unknown)

by Chris Bodenner

From the horse's mouth:

Meanwhile, Beck and his followers go to war over crowd estimates, claiming the number was six times the independent figure of 87,000.

Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Sports Related - Business

I'll be in Copenhagen from 9/5-9/7 and in Oslo 9/8-9/9 to present in JavaZone. I'd like to take advantage of the opportunities and have user meet-up events in those cities. Depending on the number of participants, it could be just a drink in a bar, or a talk in a meeting room.

So if you are:

1. in those cities,
2. available in the evening of 9/6, 9/8, or 9/9, and
3. willing to attend such an event,

... then please let me know.

Also, if you have an office in those cities and willing to provide a space for an event, that would be extra appreciated!

(author unknown)

by Patrick Appel

Philip H. Howard provides a visual:

Three firms control 89% of US soft drink sales. This dominance is obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves. Steve Hannaford refers to this as "pseudovariety," or the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice. To visualize the extent of pseudovariety in this industry we developed a cluster diagram to represent the number of soft drink brands and varieties found in the refrigerator cases of 94 Michigan retailers, along with their ownership connections.

A much larger version of the graphic is here.

(Hat tip: Flowing Data)

Soft drink - Business - Beverages - Food and Related Products - Steve Hannaford

"A stunning visual poem from Radiolab and NPR". Just marvelous:

Radiolab - Health - National Public Radio - Directories - Podcast

"A stunning visual poem from Radiolab and NPR". Just marvelous:

Radiolab - Health - National Public Radio - Directories - Podcast

From local news (worth watching first) to autotune in a matter of hours:

Now, he's doing media interviews.

Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Sports Related - Business

From TNR's symposium on Afghanistan.

Asia - Business and Economy - Government - United States - Bank of England

Dezeen Magazine has the drop on this superb clock that shows the time in every time zone, using just one hand.

The clock is called Bent Hands and is designed by Giha Woo and Shingoeun.

Via Neatorama

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)

This is generously borrowed from the PostgreSQL Docs, and updated to something that represents a modern approach to PostgreSQL backups. This documentation has always bothered me because it should have been re-written years ago. Yes I plan on submitting a more comprehensive version as a patch but I don't have time to push it into DocBook right now. If someone else wants to grab it, please do. Yes, I really do believe the use of plain text backups is a mistake. Yes I realize PostgreSQL has the limitation of not being able to backup the cluster in anyway but plain text. The standard for portable backups with PostgreSQL is pg_dump and pg_dumpall. When used properly pg_dump will create a portable and highly customizable backup file that can be used to restore all or part of a single database. The pg_dump application acts as a standard PostgreSQL client. This means that you can perform this backup procedure from any remote host that has access to the database. You do not need to be a super user to use pg_dump but you must have read (and EXECUTE for functions) access to every object within the database. Backups created by pg_dump are internally consistent, meaning, the dump represents a snapshot of the database at the time pg_dump began running. The backup will not block other operations on the database while it is working. (Exceptions are those operations that need to operate with an exclusive lock, such as most forms of ALTER TABLE.) The minimum useful syntax for pg_dump is: pg_dump dbname > outfile However, the backup created from this method has limited usefulness. It can be used to restore a single database in full. A more useful and proper form of PostgreSQL backup syntax looks like this: pg_dump -U $username --format=c --file=$mydatabase.sqlc $dbname The options in detail are: -U, --username=NAME connect as specified database user -F, --format=c|t|p output file format (custom, tar, plain text) -f, --file=FILENAME output file name The most important of which is --format. By default pg_dump uses the plain text format. The plain text format is useful for very small databases with a minimal number of objects but other than that, it should be avoided. The custom format allows for a wealth of customizability. Using the custom format you are able to restore single objects from a backup. For example to restore only a specified index from a backup file: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --index=$indexname If you wanted to restore only a single function: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --function=$functionname(args) If you wanted to restore only a single table: pg_restore -U $username --dbname=$dbname --table=$tablename For more information on all the pg_dump options, please see the reference page. Restoring the dump The command used to restore a backup file is pg_restore. It has similar options to pg_dump. A simple restore: pg_restore -U$username --dbname=$databasename $filename Where filename is the name of the backup file. Do not confuse --file with $filename. The --file option is used to turn a custom format backup into a plain text backup. The value of --file will be used as the output file for that transformation. If you make the mistake of creating a plain text backup, pg_restore can not be used as a restoration mechanism. You can use psql to restore it: psql $dbname $backupfile Backing up every database The "postgresql" way of backing up every database is to use the command pg_dumpall. Unfortunately pg_dumpall can only create plain text backups and should be considered deprecated. However it is the only way to backup the globals in your cluster. A reasonable backup strategy to backup your globals and produce a flexible backup of every database in the cluster would look like this: pg_dumpall -g -U$username --file=$globals.sql; psql -AtU postgres -c "SELECT datname FROM pg_database \ WHERE NOT datistemplate"| \ while read f; do pg_dump -Upostgres --format=c --file=$f.sqlc $f; done; If someone knows of some Windows code that produces a similar result, it would be great if you would share. Remember, pg_dumpall creates a plain text backup. This means you will need to use psql to restore the globals backup file. After restoring a backup, make sure you run ANALYZE to update the statistics. I know this isn't as comprehensive as it could be, but hey, its just a blog.(author unknown)1015390613620224411608725652041167378087

Well this is one lucky Tiffany here, but she's not alone. Wired UK was first to report that Samsung's been quietly dishing out free Galaxy S handsets (the European flavor) to a few lucky British Twitter users. How so? Oh, four of them just made a fuss about their iPhone 4s, and the fifth guy needed help to choose between the Desire, iPhone 4 and Galaxy S. Before you all start tweeting your way to a free Android phone, though, it looks like the Korean giant's only picking certain influencers for some cheap publicity -- turns out our Tiffany here works in Digital Marketing for Condé Nast, which is coincidentally Wired's parent company. Tut tut tut. The other tweeples all appear to be similarly involved in marketing or publishing, with the exception of one student.

As if it hasn't already rubbed enough salt into Apple's wound, Samsung UK's also running new Galaxy S ads that take an indirect shot at the iPhone 4's antenna controversy with a clever bit of typography -- you can see the dirty work after the break. Very nice, Sammy, but you better be careful playing with fire here, as we've found it pretty easy to death grip Galaxy S phones like the Captivate into losing a fair bit of signal.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Samsung dispatching free Galaxy S handsets to iPhone 4 whiners on Twitter?

Samsung dispatching free Galaxy S handsets to iPhone 4 whiners on Twitter? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Wired UK  |  @samsungukmobile (Twitter) (1), (2), (3), (4)  | Email this | CommentsRichard Lai105249404977945091000834820375990833294414885494554096291064125759210128781128591514345738170101710909803098588727110477091416638452893456500680706942770405127809312033871958233249030352238674914053210692535118535090527109080749622352591393160395279761280336861152687987233131415312457052903369128949150901215496224586170637353778363242415412905267204033508094143093407804536755361228353566785639992612524858514798717745165235267989028318841754329185896039650804841335476326133857155328836710004336810707169646564865902013515673954418267922024821632045067751990192486820538880012017765290363804142997042269942845517213560253718595159757683106008721996002204660099738409123284311000230882796045969471703698914982117173299182370004986127879651766203978691574786817715806621902786721143166847321054337920673108403382844539102510298501820695431119439337271437837290207846034727679878400762398053736439035012033827848677250990980975256470805690314754904777283236952021587469067920763130523254169471655877410714456525799019741145758269454051671820923802563002446111101283567726076153494056184554188932777931021945666561711659614177662329411081428116327512184004634681524262457460530409314219907492392040299017958723817456958451675350010897507634708067905058702299807015133574468215776820604437123649582887313994099104502943631131654451358841423930353325837909739022403111779159494569156019089351791616656391211557267604774878606322551553253102976180951777516477520071199393446011828279201286600368596648475102898968201516854780350574145462047176207068743179246131876085833847176751322110074530071208333337818120468709065437730001124223986634897730756782868284503979903453924166205374639126438028013698052181001049816558467867609582910181759246482

"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. Look at you: you're the Prodigal Son; you're quite a prize!" -Tyrell, from Blade Runner Look up at the night sky. On a clear, dark night with normal vision, you can literally see thousands of stars.

Some of them are barely visible, others shine so brightly that they come out when the sky's still blue! Why do some appear brighter than others? Two reasons. Some stars are simply closer to us, but others, intrinsically, shine spectacularly bright. Let's take a look at a small section of the Southern sky.

Alpha Centauri (in yellow, above) is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, coming in at #4 on the list. It's similar to our Sun, only a little bit bigger and brighter, and has roughly the same color. The reason it's so bright, though, is that it's so incredibly close to us: only 4.4 light years distant.

But take a look at the second brightest star above (the blue one). Known as Beta Centauri, it's the 10th brightest star in the night sky, appearing about 70% as bright as its yellow neighbor. Except Beta Centauri isn't really Alpha Centauri's neighbor. While that yellow star is 4.4 light years away, Beta Centauri, the blue one, is 530 light years away, or over 100 times as far away!

Why then, does Beta Centauri appear almost as bright as Alpha Centauri?

Well, because it's a different type of star! If we go by color, yellow Alpha Centauri is a "G-type" star, much like our Sun. But Beta Centauri is one of the bluest stars out there, making it a "B-type" star. In fact, if it were just a little bluer, it'd be an "O-type" star, the bluest of them all.

Surprisingly, we can learn a lot from a star's color. For the whole time a star burns Hydrogen into Helium -- just like our Sun has been doing since its birth billions of years ago -- its color is indicative of another property. Take a look at the picture below.

The bluer ones are bigger, too. In fact, the bluer a star is, the larger, brighter, and hotter it is as well! And Tyrell from Blade Runner got it right: the brighter, hotter, bluer stars burn through their fuel faster!

A "G-star" like our Sun will live about 10 billion years. A star only 10% as massive, an "M-star", will live many trillions of years! But what if you start looking at stars more massive than our Sun? Well, you need to know where to look, because the very massive ones are rare. We find most of them inside star clusters, like 30 Doradus, below.

A "B-type" star, like Beta Centauri, can be up to about 12 times as massive as our Sun, and instead of 10 billion years, only lasts about 10-20 million years before it burns out all of its fuel. Despite being over 100 times farther away and having much more fuel to burn, a B-type star can appear incredibly bright and short-lived, because it burns its fuel over 10,000 times faster than the Sun does!

But they're not even the most extreme stars in the Universe. If you can get more than around 12-15 times the mass of the Sun together in one star, you're going to get the brightest, hottest star type in the whole Universe, an "O-type" star, like Alnitak (below).

But why muck around with a star only 28 times as massive as our Sun? Even though Alnitak has a total lifetime of just one or two million years or so, we can find even brighter, heavier, shorter-lived ones. If we look near the center of the galaxy, we can find star WR 102ka, located in the Peony Nebula below.

WR 102ka is located where the bright white spot near the center of the image is, and it weighs in at a whopping 175 times the mass of the Sun! At around 25,000 light years away, WR 102ka has an incredibly interesting property: it's already dead! A star that massive will live less than 25,000 years, and since the light we're seeing now left that star 25,000 years ago, it's already burned up all of its fuel, and has likely died in a tremendous supernova explosion!

But WR 102ka, you need to move your skinny butt over. There's a new star in town that's got you beat.

(And click to enlarge this image above.)

Deep inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away, the star R136a1 has just shattered all of the records.

It weighs in at 265 times the mass of the Sun. It's so massive that it's probably already blown off something like 60 times the mass of the Sun, meaning it was over 300 times as massive as the Sun when it was born. A star like this is unheard of, and many were dubious that a star like this could have even existed! With a lifetime under 10,000 years, we're lucky to have caught a glimpse of it at all!

And since it is the biggest star we've ever found, would you like to see an illustration of just how big it is?

In terms of size, this star is to the Sun like Jupiter is to the Earth: huge!

In terms of energy output, this one star, R136a1, radiates more than 10 million times faster than our Sun. Imagine that, for a minute. If you replaced the Sun with this star, you'd be able to place Earth nearly an entire light-year away from the Sun, and life would still survive. For comparison, in our solar system, it takes sunlight less than nine minutes to reach us.

So be aware that behemoths like this are out there, burning through Hydrogen with the fury of millions of Suns, and be very, very happy about the fact that they're as far away from us as they are!

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)05848138683244235982034563661326153522240899042345064573963909262217421594242994119999569197718450770158441601926017544212244210876396734600080468508548942683941556806699070243280312066706595542903934058909597649850224471577646548724547354008171045344855446125057512498974388844980758192949914186679605650439971478030852

Hat tip: Buzzfeed.

BuzzFeed - Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Children

This is excellent.

And it's been cracked already.

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"If you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face." -Kevin Spacey One of the most powerful ideas from Einstein's theory of Gravity -- General Relativity -- is that any massive object in the Universe not only causes a gravitational force on other masses, but also bends light!

This was confirmed in 1919 by observing the positions of stars during a total solar eclipse; the stars closest to the Sun had their apparent position shift due to the gravitational bending of the light rays!

How does this happen? The mass acts just like a lens does, bending the light rays! Only, instead of being a glass, plastic or acrylic lens, it's a gravitational lens.

In 1936, Fritz Zwicky, the same guy who theorized the existence of dark matter, realized that distant galaxies could act as gravitational lenses also! After all, they have mass, and if there are other objects emitting light behind them, that light could get bent towards us!

Although it wasn't discovered observationally until 1979, this phenomenon, known as strong gravitational lensing, has given us some of the most remarkable images in the Universe.

Those weird arcs in the above image -- of cluster Abell 370 -- are due to gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing is great for distorting the light from background objects, and therefore for distorting the shapes of lensed galaxies.

Any other neat effects of gravitational lenses?

Multiple images! Do you see what looks like five bright blue stars (with crosshair-style rays) in the image above? Those are actually five multiple images of the same quasar! In many of the images, you can actually see the host galaxy that the quasar resides in!

In fact, just two years ago, we discovered an incredible alignment of three objects nearly all in a perfect row from our vantage point. What does that give us?

Two almost perfect, concentric rings!

It turns out that there's only one thing that determines how much (and what type of) bending we get, given your galaxies in a certain place. All that matters is the mass of the thing acting as a gravitational lens! So if I put down a distant galaxy in the background and then a lens in the foreground, by observing what the background light does, I can easily figure out how much mass is in the lens. In fact, there are software packages out there that will even do it for you.

This is true whether it's a galaxy, a cluster of galaxies, or an individual star doing the lensing. But that's usually not such a big deal. After all, by observing a galaxy, a cluster of galaxies, or an individual star, we can usually learn a lot about its mass from other means.

But you know what would be a huge advance?

If we could find something of unknown mass acting as a gravitational lens!

Well, there's a new paper out (with some great new images) by two joint teams from Caltech and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, respectively, led by George Djorgovski and Georges Meylan. And they found exactly that, for the first time.

Instead of a star, galaxy, or cluster of galaxies, the object acting as a lens is a quasar (shown below), where the galaxy its found in is completely obscured by the blazing core!

Under normal circumstances, we'd never be able to know the mass of the galaxy housing this quasar. But because of the gravitational lens, we can figure it out!

Want to know something that makes this even more amazing? This image was taken from the ground, with all of the Earth's atmosphere to contend with! It is amazing how good adaptive optics have gotten!

And thanks to these observations, this is the first time we've ever seen a quasar act as a strong gravitational lens!

And what they found is that there's a mass of 22 billion Suns within the innermost kiloparsec (about 3,000 light years) of this quasar and its host galaxy!

This is the very first time this technique has been used to measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, and the very first time we've seen a quasar act as a gravitational lens! You can bet it won't be the last. So, welcome to the birth of a new way to do astronomy, and enjoy the images and analysis from this first discovery!

Read the comments on this post...(author unknown)0618607929272186267801584416019260175442122442108763967346000446825613442215716705650439971478030852

Image purportedly shows a Humble Oil "melting glacier" advertisement from 1962.snopes@snopes.com14959784015366716567

How Britain has changed since 1997.

(Hat tip: Yau)

Hosting - Web Design and Development - Free - United States - Espionage

Mercifully, they do seem as if they are finally taking sexual abuse as seriously as they should. But in the same document, according to insiders, they also elevate another act to that of  "most grave crimes." The act in question? Attempting to ordain a woman as a priest.

Abusing children and ordaining women? The same level of obloquy from Benedict. That tells you a lot, I think.

Sexual abuse - Child abuse - Priest - Support Groups - Vatican

The sheepdog block driver for qemu has been merged into mainline qemu providing access to sheepdog’s distributed storage system. Sheepdog is the first driver for a distributed file system to be included into upstream qemu ( I don’t consider nbd to be a distributed file system ). The sheepdog team has been been submitting patches since last year for inclusion into qemu.

Since then, there have been a few revisions and just a few days ago it was merged into upstream qemu. You now have native access to the client block drivers in qemu. What is also noteworthy is that qemu is currently the only client for the sheepdog distributed file system. With the inclusion into upstream qemu, you can expect to see these drivers merged into qemu-kvm very soon.

Using the sheepdog distributed file system requires the following:

• Three or more x86-64 machines
• Corosync cluster engine

A typical session using qemu with sheepdog will look like the following example taken from the sheepdog website. On the cluster nodes:

Install corosync on the nodes

yum install corosync <--------- install corosync service corosync start <--------- start the daemon

Once qemu with sheepdog drivers are released in future you simply need to install qemu or qemu-kvm.

yum install qemu-kvm <-------- install qemu/kvm

Until the sheepdog drivers have been merged into qemu-kvm, you’ll have to use the instructions at the following page.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html

Run the following commands to start your qemu session using the sheepdog distributed filesystem.

sheep /store <---- launch on each cluster node collie cluster format --copies=3 <----- specify data redundancy qemu-img create sheepdog:Alice 256G <----- create the disk image on sheepdog qemu-system-x86_64 sheepdog:Alice <----- start qemu/kvm

The sheepdog website has been updated and provides some good documentation on getting started with sheepdog including how to convert images to sheepdog format and using snapshots with sheepdog. See the following page on getting started with sheepdog with the qemu client.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html
 

Haydn Solomon1217184184994959208510314834615052755310064194081303234746731223099976807336284106947507505228527571065997379075172303300485507684618532686501993857499677576189167780801250458570870636307925967771028212993981182342687684062094459950777765291746805956552427076612077786968492113672050550963270710909210952570714720263677113253302024960493265021936646494402955021715752003466750156317235334906474059075138686548020273977901075235485146515299306043141133165588466042959276877734527751756065049488269808302072535751339202631090721697540990300290517490738260174185013813399869481268455092888820650117833910634533956943045044204744476210212481943

The sheepdog block driver for qemu has been merged into mainline qemu providing access to sheepdog’s distributed storage system. Sheepdog is the first driver for a distributed file system to be included into upstream qemu ( I don’t consider nbd to be a distributed file system ). The sheepdog team has been been submitting patches since last year for inclusion into qemu.

Since then, there have been a few revisions and just a few days ago it was merged into upstream qemu. You now have native access to the client block drivers in qemu. What is also noteworthy is that qemu is currently the only client for the sheepdog distributed file system. With the inclusion into upstream qemu, you can expect to see these drivers merged into qemu-kvm very soon.

Using the sheepdog distributed file system requires the following:

• Three or more x86-64 machines
• Corosync cluster engine

A typical session using qemu with sheepdog will look like the following example taken from the sheepdog website. On the cluster nodes:

Install corosync on the nodes

yum install corosync <--------- install corosync service corosync start <--------- start the daemon

Once qemu with sheepdog drivers are released in future you simply need to install qemu or qemu-kvm.

yum install qemu-kvm <-------- install qemu/kvm

Until the sheepdog drivers have been merged into qemu-kvm, you’ll have to use the instructions at the following page.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html

Run the following commands to start your qemu session using the sheepdog distributed filesystem.

sheep /store <---- launch on each cluster node collie cluster format --copies=3 <----- specify data redundancy qemu-img create sheepdog:Alice 256G <----- create the disk image on sheepdog qemu-system-x86_64 sheepdog:Alice <----- start qemu/kvm

The sheepdog website has been updated and provides some good documentation on getting started with sheepdog including how to convert images to sheepdog format and using snapshots with sheepdog. See the following page on getting started with sheepdog with the qemu client.

http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog/usage.html
 

Haydn Solomon1217184184994959208510314834615052755310064194081303234746731223099976807336284106947507505228527571065997379075172303300485507684618532686501993857499677576189167780801250458570870636307925967771028212993981182342687684062094459950777765291746805956552427076612077786968492113672050550963270710909210952570714720263677113253302024960493265021936646494402955021715752003466750156317235334906474059075138686548020273977901075235485146515299306043141133165588466042959276877734527751756065049488269808302072535751339202631090721697540990300290517490738260174185013813399869481268455092888820650117833910634533956943045044204744476210212481943