Fractal Domains 2.0.9

Fractal Domains is a program that generates color fractal images. With it, you can explore and create an unlimited variety of images.

Fractal Domains offers several options for producing striking variations, and it includes advanced features for producing high-quality images.

WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.0.9:

• Happy Pi Day! The following bugs have been fixed:
• 1) There are several bugs involving the rendering of large images.

  First of all, please note that images in Fractal Domains are limited to a maximum size of 32,767 x 32,767. This is pretty big; images larger that this are not supported directly in Fractal Domains 2.0, although larger images CAN be generated piecemeal using the TilingÂ… command.

  Given this restriction the followng bugs were fixed:

  • a) Spool files were not correctly generated when the size went over 2GB, even when the image size was within the correct bounds. The program would freeze when this limit was exceeded.
  • b) Similarly, image files in JPEG, PNG and TIFF format were not guaranteed to be generated correctly for large file sizes.
  • 2) There were several bugs related to the Color Map Editor which could cause visual anomalies and crashing, especially when editing certain color maps from the predefined menu selections.

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.4 or later.
PRICE$20.00
DEVELOPERDennis De Mars
DOWNLOADS8804
DOWNLOAD NOW (4.5 MB)
More information

Winners are all over the map at South by Southwest's 13th annual awards ceremony honoring the internet's best and brightest. Thank god for host Doug Benson's satirical jabs at the contenders.

Two Digg employees have built "Wheretheladies.at," a relatively simple map mashup that tries to figure out which South by Southwest venues are populated by the most females.

The final of the Fifth ESEA-Invite has concluded, with Evil Geniuses taking the crown without even losing a map.

Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information online and elsewhere.

Here’s the Twitter-esque soundbite version of the speech:

• “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.”

• “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” (Shirky’s fellow NYU professor Jay Rosen used this quote in what looked to be the most repeated tweet from the session, from what I could see, though I’m not sure it was the nugget of the talk.)

• “Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.”

• “ We have a word for not sharing if there’s no cost to you: that word is ’spiteful.’”

  More on SXSW
  • SXSW: Is Privacy on the Social Web a Technical Problem? Tech Insider
  • SXSW 2010: All You Need to Know, Courtesy of the GigaOM Network Tech Insider
  • SXSW: Boyd Calls Out Google and Facebook for Abusing Users’ Privacy Tech Insider
  • Foursquare Turns 1 With Half a Million Users Tech Insider

• “ How much value can we get out of civic sharing?”

That last point was Shirky’s main thrust — how can people use sharing information to effect change? Civic sharing, as Shirky described it, is “turning what the whole group knows tacitly and turning it into a public document.” By bringing that information to the fore, you can make governments and institutions pay attention to you. Shirky used the example of Ushahidi, which aggregates and maps text messages from crises to create a broader, crowd-sourced sense of what’s actually happening (and was profiled this weekend in the New York Times).

Shirky said that though people would like to think the government serves individuals, it really serves groups. He told the story of how a group of harassed Indian women were able to get the attention of the government to arrest members of the radical Sri Ram Sena group, which was beating them for going out in public to drink at bars. The women formed a Facebook group called the “Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women,” and mobilized people to mail pink panties to the leader of Sri Ram Sena. For the local Indian government, the Facebook group made the women a constituency, rather than individuals, so it merited a response.

So how do we create those groups and those collective bodies of information? By motivating people to share. Shirky referred to the new book Why We Cooperate that used research on monkeys to map out three types of sharing. Sharing goods means the giver no longer has them; sharing services takes some effort; sharing information is so easy that it makes us feel good when we do it, and if we don’t do it, we’re spiteful. Shirky asserted that this explains why users and the music industry are out of sync in situations like file-sharing on Napster and elsewhere — since sharing digital goods is just sharing information.

Wrapping it all together, Shirky contended that in the case of sharing information, “The link between intrinsic motivation and private action is just a coincidence.” The natural desire to share information isn’t just a matter of giving directions to an elderly lady because it’s the right small thing to do, it can be a broader movement to provoke change. People can be motivated — due to their feelings about sharing — to contribute to the public greater good.

EG.US are the ESEA s5 playoff champions and they did it in dominating fashion, charging to the title without a map loss.

Want to know where you can get a glimpse of the ultra-rare total solar eclipse? This map shows exactly when and where every eclipse in the next fifteen years will be visible—and why you should move to Memphis. More »

Want to know where you can get a glimpse of the ultra-rare total solar eclipse? This map shows exactly when and where every eclipse in the next fifteen years will be visible—and why you should move to Memphis. More »

This is a really interesting image map provided by the BBC, based on data from the Nielsen company and covers the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, US and Australia. The figures represent unique users for the month of January 2010.

Thanks to Richard for this.

Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. SOme of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware, which they sold to HP for $1.6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO. Perhaps the most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership. So what is leadership and how do we think about it in the context of the CEO job? Are great leaders born or made?

Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”

A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.” For our purposes, we can generalize this to be the measure of the quality of a leader: the quantity, quality and diversity of people who want to follow her.

So what makes people want to follow a leader? We look for 3 key traits:

• The ability to articulate the vision
• The right kind of ambition
• The ability to achieve the vision

Let’s take these in order.

The ability to articulate the vision—The Steve Jobs Attribute

Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More importantly, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make objective financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that’s compelling enough that the people stay out of curiosity?

I believe that Jobs’ greatest achievement as a visionary leader so far was a) getting so many super talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina; then b) getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. It’s difficult to imagine any other leader being so compelling that they could do these back-to-back and this is why we call this one the Steve Jobs attribute.

The right kind of ambition—The Bill Campbell Attribute

Andy Grove once remarked that a company needs highly ambitious executives in order to achieve its goals. However, it’s critical that those executives have “the right kind of ambition”: ambition for the success of the company rather than the “wrong kind of ambition”: ambition for the success of themselves.

One of the biggest misperceptions in our society is that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is being selfish, ruthless, and callous. In fact, the opposite is true and the reason is obvious. The first thing that any successful CEO must do is get really great people to work for her. Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart.

Most of us have experienced this in our careers: a bright, ambitious, hard working executive that nobody good wants to work for and who, as a result, delivers performance far worse than one might imagine.

Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: a huge number of the employees believe that it’s their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become the quality control for the entire organization. They set the standard of work that all future employees must live up to. As in, “Hey, you need to do a better job on that datasheet—you are screwing up my company.”

I call this characteristic the Bill Campbell Attribute after my friend Bill who is the best that I’ve ever seen at this. If you talk to people who worked in any of the many organizations that Bill has run, they refer to those organizations as “my organization” or “my company.” A huge part of why he has been so unbelievably strong on this dimension of leadership is that he’s totally authentic. He would happily sacrifice his own economics, fame, glory, and rewards for his employees. When you talk to Bill, you get the feeling that he cares deeply about you and what you have to say, because he does. And all of that shows up in his actions and follow through.

Ability to achieve the vision—The Andy Grove Attribute

The final leg of our leadership stool is competence, pure and simple. If I buy into the vision and believe that the leader cares about me, do I think she can actually achieve the vision? Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there?

I like to refer to this as the Andy Grove attribute. Andy Grove will always be my model of CEO competence. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, wrote the best management book that I’ve ever read (High Output Management), and tirelessly refined his craft. Not only did he write exceptional books on management, he taught management classes at Intel throughout his tenure.

In his classic book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove details the story of leading Intel through the dramatic transition from the memory business to the microprocessor business. In doing so, he walked away from nearly all of his revenue. He humbly credits others in the company with coming to the strategic conclusion before he did, but the credit for swiftly and successfully leading the company through the transition goes to Dr. Grove. Changing your primary business as a 16 year old, large, public company raises a lot of questions. As Andy describes in an incident with one of his employees:

One of them attacked me aggressively, asking, “Does it mean that you can conceive of Intel without being in the memory business?” I swallowed hard and said, ‘yes, I guess I can.’ All hell broke loose.

Despite shocking many of his best employees with this radical strategy, ultimately the company trusted Andy. They trusted him to rebuild their company around an entirely new business. And that trust turned out to be very well placed.

So, are great leaders born or made?

Let’s look at this one attribute at a time:

• Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
• Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the Bill Campbell Attribute is impossible to learn, but I am pretty sure that it is impossible to teach. Of the three, this one most fits the bill “born not made.”
• Ability to achieve the vision—This attribute can absolutely be made; perhaps this is why Andy Grove’s tolerance for incompetence was legendarily low. Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.

In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three.

CrunchBase InformationBen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzInformation provided by CrunchBase

In Data Mining Techniques for the Life Sciences , Vol. 609 (2010), pp. 17-44.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), as a primary public repository of genomic sequence data, collects and maintains enormous amounts of heterogeneous data. Data for genomes, genes, gene expressions, gene variation, gene families, proteins, and protein domains are integrated with the analytical, search, and retrieval resources through the NCBI Web site. Entrez, a text-based search and retrieval system, provides a fast and easy way to navigate across diverse biological databases. Customized genomic BLAST enables sequence similarity searches against a special collection of organism-specific sequence data and viewing the resulting alignments within a genomic context using NCBI’s genome browser, Map Viewer. Comparative genome analysis tools lead to further understanding of evolutionary processes, quickening the pace of discovery.
Tatiana Tatusova

Thruk est une réécriture des cgi Nagios mais en perl et s'appuyant sur livestatus (livestatus est un module de courtage d'évènements  pour Nagios qui permet de se passer des "middlewares" base de données type ndoutils/merlin pour accéder aux données). L'auteur ne s'est pas contenté de juste réécrire les cgi mais à rajouté pas mal de fonctionnalités qui faisaient défaut :

• Navigation par page
• Agrégation de plusieurs "collecteurs" nagios/icinga (pas vraiment du distribué mais de l'agrégation en console unique, ce qui a le mérite de ne pas introduire la complexité de configuration des environnements distribués nagios).
• Moteur de recherche multi critères
• Support des thèmes
• Repliement du tac pour gagner en visibilité sur les tableaux
• Filtrage des "collecteurs" (on peut directement sélectionner le ou les collecteurs dans l'interface)
• Possibilité d'ajuster la fréquence de rafraichissement de l'écran.
• Recherche dans les logs avec inclusion/exclusion de termes (par exemple inclure serveur et exclure serveur_windows).

On perd au passage la "map" mais est ce un mal quand on a nagvis à disposition (qui supporte également livestatus au passage)?. Le système de frames disparaît aussi (mais peut être réactivé pour conserver la compatibilité avec certains addons)
la démo est bluffante en terme de performances 20000 services et 1000 hôtes répartis sur 5 collecteurs.

On aime ou on aime pas "l'ergonomie" et le "design" des cgi nagios, mais pour un parc déjà installé cela peut se révéler une alternative tout a fais crédible. Et le fait de ne pas avoir a installer la console sur les "collecteurs" est également une bonne chose.

Site de thruk : http://www.thruk.org
Demo : http://www.thruk.org/demo.html
Github : http://github.com/sni/Thruk

Related posts:

• check_mk arrive en version 1.1.2 Mathias Kettner nous annonce sur la mailing list Betatesters que la version 1.1.2rc1 de check_mk va bientôt sortir. Pour rappel check_mk est constitué de deux principaux projets : check_mk est un plugin de check nagios (et un agent multiplateforme : windows, linux, aix, solaris ...) novateur...

Billet original de Monitoring-FR.Votez pour cet article sur le Planet Libre.

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

Publication Date: 2010 Mar PMID: 19864250Authors: Horner, D. S. - Pavesi, G. - Castrignano, T. - De Meo, P. D. - Liuni, S. - Sammeth, M. - Picardi, E. - Pesole, G.Journal: Brief BioinformTechnical advances such as the development of molecular cloning, Sanger sequencing, PCR and oligonucleotide microarrays are key to our current capacity to sequence, annotate and study complete organismal genomes. Recent years have seen the development of a variety of so-called 'next-generation' sequencing platforms, with several others anticipated to become available shortly. The previously unimaginable scale and economy of these methods, coupled with their enthusiastic uptake by the scientific community and the potential for further improvements in accuracy and read length, suggest that these technologies are destined to make a huge and ongoing impact upon genomic and post-genomic biology. However, like the analysis of microarray data and the assembly and annotation of complete genome sequences from conventional sequencing data, the management and analysis of next-generation sequencing data requires (and indeed has already driven) the development of informatics tools able to assemble, map, and interpret huge quantities of relatively or extremely short nucleotide sequence data. Here we provide a broad overview of bioinformatics approaches that have been introduced for several genomics and functional genomics applications of next-generation sequencing.post to: CiteULike

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The goodies in this edition include a turn-based aerial dogfight game, a puzzle platformer by Karoshi creator Jesse Venbrux, an interactive fiction game about the Russian Roulette, a visual novel, and a game about gardening that doesn't feature zombies in it.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Steambirds' (Andy Moore and Dan Cook, browser)
"Steambirds is a turn-based aerial dogfight game that is viewed from a top-down perspective, where players are given command of a squadron of planes with their own unique abilities to deploy. Fans of strategy games like the Advance Wars series would feel right at home here, with the only differences being that combat takes place in the skies and rigid tile-based movement has been done away with."

Game Pick: 'Redder' (dessgeega, browser)
"In Redder you play as an astronaut forced to make an emergency landing on an alien planet after finding out that she has run out of crystals to power her ship. This 2D platformer features a world map, regular checkpoint locations, and an unlimited number of retries to assist players who are unaccustomed to difficult challenges."

Game Pick: 'Maru' (Jesse Venbrux, freeware)
"Maru is a simple platformer that plays rather similarly to Jesse's other creation called Frozzd, although the tone in both games are practically on different ends of a spectrum. The adventure basically involves leaping from one planet to another to collect the spirits or souls of other creatures that look just like the protagonist, then figuring out how to get to the portal that will transport you to the next area and continue with your mission."

Game Pick: 'Six-Chamber Champion' (C.E.J. Pacian, freeware)
"Six-Chamber Champion is a single-room IF game created by C.E.J. Pacian in under two hours for a 371-in-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart event held last weekend. This particular adventure should be tried out without reading anything about it at all, since every screenshot and mention of it only serves to spoil the best bits. Suffice to say that the story involves a gun and trying to avoid killing yourself."

Game Pick: 'Air Pressure' (Bento Smile, freeware)
"Bento Smile's Air Pressure is a visual novel with original graphics and music, featuring quite a number of branching story paths but only three endings to discover. The entire adventure takes about ten minutes to play through, and Terry Cavanagh (developer of VVVVVV) even liked it enough to recommend the game to everyone."

Game Pick: 'Extreme Gardening' (Jan Willem Nijman, freeware)
"Extreme Gardening is a short puzzle game about trimming hedges. On each of the fifteen levels, players are shown how the hedge should look, then given 10 seconds to cut it into shape using the mouse to click and drag the hedge away."

We may still be waiting for a the "spring" release of Modern Warfare 2's first DLC ("Stimulus Package"), but thanks to an early Xbox Live Marketplace listing for the map pack, we aren't in the dark anymore as to its contents. The blurb reveals the pack will contain "5 additional action-packed maps," including three all new ones ("Bailout, Storm, and Salvage") as well as two remakes from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ("Crash" and "Overgrown").

"Bailout" is said to be "a multi-layered apartment complex," while "Storm" is described as "an open industrial park littered with heavy machinery," and "Salvage" is "a snowy junkyard fortified by stacked debris and crushed cars." Presumably, if you're reading about the details of unreleased a MW2 map pack, you already knew that "Crash" is a "war-torn urban environment" and "Overgrown" is set in a large dry creek. No pricing or date is set, unfortunately, though you can ogle the XBLM listing for now if it makes you feel any better (though we wouldn't suggest it).

[Thanks CL4P-TP!]

XBLM listing reveals 5 maps, 2 CoD4 remakes in MW2 'Stimulus Package' DLC originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We may still be waiting for a the "spring" release of Modern Warfare 2's first DLC ("Stimulus Package"), but thanks to an early Xbox Live Marketplace listing for the map pack, we aren't in the dark anymore as to its contents. The blurb reveals the pack will contain "5 additional action-packed maps," including three all new ones ("Bailout, Storm, and Salvage") as well as two remakes from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ("Crash" and "Overgrown").

"Bailout" is said to be "a multi-layered apartment complex," while "Storm" is described as "an open industrial park littered with heavy machinery," and "Salvage" is "a snowy junkyard fortified by stacked debris and crushed cars." Presumably, if you're reading about the details of unreleased a MW2 map pack, you already knew that "Crash" is a "war-torn urban environment" and "Overgrown" is set in a large dry creek. No pricing or date is set, unfortunately, though you can ogle the XBLM listing for now if it makes you feel any better (though we wouldn't suggest it).

[Thanks CL4P-TP!]

XBLM listing reveals 5 maps, 2 CoD4 remakes in MW2 'Stimulus Package' DLC originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The creator of Chatroulette has revealed that he is working on a way to preserve user’s privacy, following the launch of Chat Roulette Map, a Google Maps mashups that pinpoints the location of users of the service.

Andrey Ternovskiy, speaking in an interview with the New York Times Bits blog, stated, “There is a certain level of anonymity on the Chatroulette that Chatroulette Map takes away, but I plan to add something to my site to allow them to still hide their whereabouts.”

Chatroulette Map highlights a Chatroulette user’s location by looking at his or her IP addresses, which is revealed via the peer-to-peer nature of the webcam connection. As well as placing a marker on a map, users are screengrabbed, offering anyone in the world a brief sneak peak through a stranger’s webcam.

This has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, although those behind Chatroulette Map say they will remove an image and marker on request if emailed a matching photo to ensure the authenticity of the request.

17-year-old Ternovskiy, a Russian student currently visiting the U.S., says of ChatRoulette Map, “I enjoy it”, but obviously realizes his users — some of which appear to have a penchant for public nudity and masturbation — might be less likely to use the service without the anonymity it previously offered.

However, this does not mean Ternoviskiy is green-lighting the use of the service for such NSFW activities. He has introduced a “report” button, which will see someone “reported” three times banned from the service.

Other points of interest from the interview are the fact that Ternovskiy has yet to collect his Google AdWords earnings as he’s is still under 18, that he’s been offered a $1 million buy-out, and that last month 30 million unique visitors hit Chatroulette, which is averaging one million new users a each day.

Tags: chatroulette, chatroulette map