Highly recommended, for humor, posterity and just plain entertainment.

Here’s an example:

She might be completely motherf-ing crazy, but Braun’s new haircut is fierce.

With the elections a few days away, the drama is quite epic, throw in the Daley Dictatorship coming to an end, Chicago watch out, we’ve got some history making, tweet filled polls coming up.

Update!: The author of the tweets has been discovered. Article here

You can now add my calendar with all those listings and UK TV channels as well (Courtesy of Nottingham Graphics).

Google Calendar link – 36t64htd9divc0p001djj52hd4@group.calendar.google.com
iCal/ics
HTML
XML

Xenocode apparently decided to pull the standalone .exe downloadable files from their website, and instead would like you to install a plugin called Spoon. Spoon enables you to run the virtualized application through your web browser by visiting Xenocode’s site. Not something I want to do, especially since my main use of this technology is to do browser testing in one VM.

I run a Windows XP VM and would like to have IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari and Chrome all running on the same VM. I also wanted standalone applications I could click on and use even when I was offline. Those .exe downloads had proven to be that solution. Also, I wanted to carry these .exe files around in a USB drive, so that I could pull up a browser version I wanted on another machine. So I dug a little further into it.

After installing the spoon plugin, I went to the Xenocode browser site and launched a browser. It took forever to get going and launch the application. A few days later I launched the same application again and found that this time, it launched almost instantaneously. That got me thinking, so I tried a few other applications and found that ALL the .exe files are actually cached on your system the first time you launch an application. Which explains why it takes forever to launch the first time, but the subsequent launches are quick.

You can copy them from the Spoon plugin cache on your hard drive, it’s located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\< Your Username >\Local Settings\Application Data\Spoon\Cache\

So they haven’t gone away, it’s just a little harder to get to.

I’ve always wanted to have standalone browsers I could use in Windows for browser testing and have them all co-exist side by side without ugly hacks or running a separate windows virtual machine instance for each of them. In my research I uncovered Xenocode. Prior to this I was using Multiple IE, a good solution, but it was a bit too hacky and had no solution for IE8.

Xenocode provides exactly what I was looking for, they package standalone versions of pretty much all the popular browsers out there and made them available to download. So, how do they do it? They make use of a concept called application virtualization, the applications are packaged using their own virtualization technology. You can read more about it here. Xenocode also has a product that lets you enable a citrix like web based access to the application. I haven’t really tried that out, accessing IE through a browser to browse the internet, doesn’t really appeal to me.

Application virtualization is a pretty broad term, but what it essentially does is encapsulate the application, enhancing it’s portability and compatibility while isolating it from the underlying operating system on which it is executed. It does this by fooling the application at run-time into believing that it is directly interfacing with the OS and it’s resources, when in actuality it’s not. This enables one to carry around a USB flash drive with such virtualized applications and use them on any computer that may or may not have those applications, including those that have strict security policies enforced. The other advantages include increased OS security since you are essentially sandbox-ing the application, easier license management, simplified OS migrations and uses fewer resources than a dedicated Virtual Machine with an OS installed. Amongst the downsides is the fact that not all applications can be virtualized. Apps that heavily integrate with the OS like anti-virus software are difficult to virtualize.

Apart from Xenocode, there are quite a few guys out there, Boxed App, VMWare Thinapp, Microsoft Application Virtualization and Citrix XenApp are some of the others who provide software to create virtualized applications. My experience so far has led me to believe that Xenocode is the best solution for my needs and since they have already packaged the applications I need, it’s free!

Hope this helps some of you guys out there.

All this came about because this sector made loans to consumers without really checking on their ability to pay it back. Using that they leveraged themselves to extremely nonsensical levels. Of course, while real estate prices were rising, no one really defaulted or went into foreclosure. Those who couldn’t afford the mortgages simply sold their houses, banked the profit on equity and moved on, others banking on the rise of property values, used their homes as leverage and pulled out what little equity they had left. With these rising consumer debt levels and the over extending of banks by banks, the sector started booking massive profits, mostly paper profits, and started paying themselves huge bonuses. Once housing prices started to fall, this cycle went bust and the reality of the situation hit both consumer and banks. The consumer started defaulting and foreclosing while the banks took extensive measures to keep the losses away from their balance sheets and therefore from the investing public. They did so primarily by reporting most of it as level-3 assets, where the valuation is estimated by formulas that these entities create, anyone else notice a possible conflict of interest here?

Then came the bailouts, the brokering of the Bear Stearns sale, nationalizing Freddie and Fannie, etc. There is a very real difference between the bailout now vs. the bailouts during the S&L crisis. Back then the assets the government received after paying off depositors and shutting down insolvent institutions were by and large real assets like land or buildings. The shareholders and unsecured creditors were the ones who bore the brunt of the losses. In the current rescue the government is buying a lot of this level-3 assets at a so called substantial discount. Why so called, well because the real value of the assets are almost impossible to ascertain, so if the government (aka taxpayers) buy these at the currently trading value they are simply forcing the price discovery of the assets and not achieving much. If they buy it at a discount to the “original” value, lets say 50¢ on the dollar, then this becomes nothing but a large scale bailout and transfer of wealth to Wall Street². Since these instruments are so hard to value, no one really knows the extent to which the taxpayers will suffer, but one thing is certain, the people who benefit and make billions out of this, are the very people who caused this. You tell me, where is the parity that the free markets create in all this?

More on the destruction of free markets now. So this week the government intervened and stopped all short selling on 799 stocks, great, this coming on the heels of two 350+ point drops in the DJ Index.

Question: Why do they want to protect just 799 companies? Why not just ban short selling for the entire market?
Answer: Cronyism.

It’s as though they are blaming short sellers for the destruction and bailout of the financial sectors. If you look closely and as evidenced above, the short sellers have been correct about the underlying fundamentals of the sector. Banning them is not the answer. They play an important role in price discovery and make the markets more efficient. More importantly they provide the markets with a lot of liquidity. I don’t mean to exonerate all the short sellers here, there are obvious abuses by some of them, but even the longs have their share of abusers. Naked shorts without any kind of enforcement are a dumb idea, you are just inviting trouble.

There is also some irony in all this that makes this such a farce. The large entities that I talked about earlier, have been short selling as a part of their trading strategies, which has made them billions of dollars. Earlier when companies complained that short selling was ruining them, these entities just chalked it up as free market principles in play. Their attitude changes dramatically when they find themselves faced with the same situation, they work the phones and have their buddies bail them out. The SEC is now doing exactly what it claims to be against, manipulating markets and propping up failing companies. Why, because, suddenly since the taxpayer is now the bearer of all this “dead money”, it’s now politically important³.

What’s next? Another round of stimulus checks⁴? Right, because the taxpayers are not in enough debt already.

I’ll leave you with a humorous take on all this.

1 – Source: 24/7 Wall Street
2 – Source: Zacks.com
3 – Source: CBS Marketwatch
4 – Source: Trader Mark

So what exactly does the LHC do? It’s designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles, protons specifically, to near light speeds. At those speeds, the energy that such particles possess is in the order of several trillion electron volts. According to CERN the LHC is capable of making the protons do 11,000 laps around the track every second. I did some math and that works out to about 297×10⁶m/s, the speed of light is 299.792458×10⁶m/s, pretty darn close. It does so using more than 1000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end around the tunnel. These magnets then steer the beam of protons around the circumference. The idea then is to have two beams of protons steered in opposite directions and have them collide in the vicinity of one of the six massive detectors placed around the track. These detectors are very different and each has it’s own specialty. The six are:

• ATLAS – The first of two general purpose detectors. It detects signs of new physics phenomena like origins of mass and extra dimensions.
• CMS – The second of two general purpose detectors, it hunts for the Higgs boson (more about this later) and for clues to the nature of dark matter.
• ALICE – It’s forte is a “liquid” form of matter called quark-gluon plasma. This type of matter existed shortly after the Big Bang.
• LHCb – It detects and tries to find out what happens to anti-matter during such high energy collisions.
• TOTEM – It measures total cross section, elastic scattering and diffractive processes.
• LHCf – It’s a special purpose detector for cosmic ray physics, to study particles generated in the forward regions of collisions.

All this acceleration and detection will, according to the scientists running the experiment, recreate within the LHC, the moments shortly following the Big Bang. This gives particle physicists a close look at certain particles and phenomena that existed only during that time frame. Some of them hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, the so called “God Particle”, which, according to theory, endows mass on all other particles. The other big discovery could be the meaningful interpretation of the nature of Dark Matter, stuff that makes up about 25 percent of the known universe. Yet another target for some physicists is the principle of Super-symmetry, which envisages new particle species that are left over from the Big Bang. All this promises to be a fantastic next few years for physicists but the obvious question that has to be asked is whether they will see anything at all. That would amount to a huge setback for particle physics research as well as the community in general.

Understandably, the buzz amongst physicists the world over is huge. A lot of them think that this experiment will bear the answer to how the universe came about and why it is, how it is today. Not all this is without it’s critics. There is a significant number of people who believe that the LHC, once fully operational, will destroy the Earth. It sound more like science fiction that actual science, but the theory is that when quarks and gluons, within the protons, collide at near light speeds they produce mini-blackholes, and that these blackholes could rapidly swell and eventually gobble up Earth itself. The other prevalent theory is that the collisions could produce hypothetical particles called strangelets within the LHC and that could trigger a mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter, eventually transforming the Earth into a hot dead lump. These doomsday predictions have been dismissed by CERN as not possible or as a highly improbable cataclysmic event. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that we are not going to find out anything significant without taking risks or putting everything on the line. Nature has a way of evening out the odds. On a lighter note, we at least have four good years left before Armageddon. (Thanks sogrady!)

Photo courtesy AFP/Getty Images

This victory by an American boat, prompted the British to pursue a series of challenges over the ensuing century, presumably upset that their image as nautical superpower was tarnished by the loss. They lost all their challenges to the holders from New York Yacht Club, which incidentally is the longest winning streak in any sport. It was only in 1983, when ‘Australia II’ won the Louis Vuitton Cup, which was established to determine the challenger for the America’s Cup, and went on to beat ‘Liberty’ to win the America’s Cup and end the 132 year old streak.

The last America’s Cup was held in Valencia, Spain in 2007, the first time since 1851 that it has been held in Europe. It was won by Alinghi, the Swiss boat, who were also defending champions. But controversy ensued, as Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC) on behalf of BMW Oracle Racing lodged a complaint against Alinghi and Société Nautique de Genève (SNG), contesting that Alinghi and SNG had violated the terms of the Deed of Gift and that the rules governing the next cup are unfair. The americans had a ruling in their favor reversed after an appeal by SNG who still plan to host the 33rd running of the America’s cup in Valencia. That after a lengthy and expensive battle in the courts. What started out to be a friendly competition between nations has now turned out to be a legal battle between the billionaire owners of the two teams concerned, Larry Ellison (BMW Oracle) & Ernesto Bertarelli (Alinghi). The case now rests with New York State’s highest court, and the date of the next cup hinges on it’s decision. A decision is expected in the Spring of 2009.

Ellison is hoping that his team wins the case, as then it would allow his newly launched 27m trimaran to compete. The new boat promises to be a beast on the water based on the initial specs and pictures. What’s unfortunate about all this though, is the fact that the sport itself has become obscured. The focus has moved away from competing and making the boats go fast on water, to nitpicking on the interpretations of century old rules. For anyone who has competed in a sail boat race, you know that the corinthian spirit is all about giving it your all during the race and having fun while doing so. Respecting your competition is a big part of that. In this day and age where there are Kiwis and Americans sailing on a Swiss vessel owned by an Italian billionaire, the competition between nations is in name only, it’s primarily a glorified race course for billionaires and their minions. The sanctity of the Cup has been violated in my opinion, and will continue to disappoint true fans of the sport.

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After a little research I found that this particular region is very bike friendly, over 140 miles of well maintained bike paths in this part of Wisconsin alone, with tons of biking amenities along the way, including roadside bike stewards, friendly locals and eateries. The terrain here is also quite unlike the flat Midwest, there are some nice elevation changes, good for the recreational biker, probably a little too easy for the Le Tour types. The other thing I found is that vehicular traffic is very low on these roads, most of which runs through farm country, which is nice, especially when you don’t have to constantly worry about being run off the road by rogue drivers. Apart from the loops outlined above, the county has about 380 miles of paved county back roads, suitable for biking. Trempealeau County is one of the non glaciated regions in the Midwest i.e. this region was not covered in ice during the Ice Age. This makes for bluffs, ravines, exposed rock and caves.

If biking isn’t your thing, there are also a couple of trails here which seem like good hikes. More info here. Getting there is pretty easy, it’s a nice 5 hour trip up I-90/94 from Chicago.

After looking at most of the applications in the gallery, the one thing that stood out to me was the lack of consistency in the User Interface of these apps. That was and is still to a certain extent one of the problems in the Linux Desktop. I’m not taking any sides here, but I can see why Apple didn’t release a SDK until the product was well into it’s first cycle. They set the UI standards and had plenty of time to refine those standards before letting 3rd party developers have at it. That brings me to the next issue, it’s all well and good that these developers wrote the code and have apps now, but where are the devices to test these code-bases on? Lack of actual hardware testing is potentially a huge problem. Reality bites, yes, software simulations are just that, simulations. No amount of emulation is going to be the substitute for the real thing.

It’s pretty cool of Google to dole out significant sums of money to developers to create apps. This has brought about a whole new dynamic to development. Suddenly now there’s two new cool platforms to develop on (no offense Symbian, but you know why you’re not one of the cool kids) and there’s quite a significant backing to that community if you also include all the Venture money that’s out there. I think one of the reasons this mobile platform thing is so hip nowadays is because it’s moved away from the stodgy “enterprise” mode into something you can use for SMS, pictures, video, social networking and all these other things that the younger generation are crazy about. The masses will move product, hence more money in it for everyone. Personally I’m pretty psyched about all the capabilities my handset has and will have. Moreover I now have the chance to create my own “thing” if I’m unhappy with any part of it, a far cry from my Startac days, oh not so long ago.