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Just what did Citrix buy when it bought XenSource? As Dana Blankenhorn analyzes, Citrix appears to be in a dead sprint to remove any and all value from open source, virtualization buzz, etc. that it may have acquired when it bought XenSource:

Citrix either got completely snowed in the acquisition or, much more likely, it’s getting pressure from its bosom-buddy, Microsoft. What it’s not getting is much value for its $500 million.

And now, a quarter after the deal was closed, Citrix officials have indicated that they will use the hot XenSource branding, but de-emphasize its identity as a virtualization company. Citrix’s flasgship Presentation Server has been renamed to XenApp Server, a fitting title considering its function as an application delivery platform. But it has no XenSource code.

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(Credit: Curbed)

Now that the scaffolding has been removed (Curbed has more pictures), the critics are starting to weigh in, though I haven’t heard anyone describe the new building as being inspired by the Bose Acoustic Wave Music System. Any New Yorkers (or amateur architecture critics) care to weigh in?

For those of who don’t follow New York real estate and architecture, the area around Columbus Circle is home to some of the most valuable real estate in the city, including the Time Warner Center (where, ironically, there is a Bose store, as well as the Samsung Experience). Before it got refurbished, 2 Columbus Circle was considered by many to be one seriously ugly building. But it had its supporters, including the author Tom Wolfe, who wanted it landmarked and left the way it was.

What’s this, the new Bose headquarters in New York? No, not at all–but that’s the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this picture of the wraps coming off the new Museum of Arts & Design, which is located at 2 Columbus Circle and scheduled to open in the next few months.

(Credit:
Bose)

The Acoustic Wave Music System II

To aid in that discovery process users can submit their creations to a central pool where others can jump in and play their creations, with some of the best items rising to the top. Also neat is the option to grab someone else’s level and pull it back in the editor to make tweaks.

Also worth noting is LittleBigPlanet, a
PlayStation 3 title that lets you build your own 2D platforming games and share them with others. It’s launching next month (thanks MoRic123)

The game builder is entirely in 3D. (Click to enlarge.)

Atmosphir is a software-based game building tool for PC and
Mac users that lets users put together their own gaming levels. Like many consumer-facing game creators you’re only limited by the tools that have been given to you. In this case the tools provided are split up into packages of “blocks” that are both interchangeable and feature simple gameplay devices like moving platforms, and various themed texture elements that let you build worlds with grass, dirt, and sand.

The service is a TechCrunch50 finalist, and is currently open for sign-ups, with plans to release a public client later this year. I’ve embedded a video of it in action below.

The only thing I’m concerned about with this product is that the demo did not make playing the game look like as much fun as building the levels. I’m willing to withhold judgment until I get my hands on it, but it seemed to be lacking a decent physics engine and the graphics looked akin to Super Mario 64–a console title that came out 12 years ago. That said, look at something like Line Rider; if you give people simple tools and a platform they’re going to go nuts.

The builder actually reminders me a lot of Cubescape, a product I looked at back in May. In Atmosphir’s case, it’s simply a matter of stacking pixels together on top of one another in a 3D grid. The big difference is that you can jump into your creation and play test it. Depending on what game play goals you set up, it changes what’s needed to successfully get through what you’ve created.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CBS Interactive)

What’s interesting here is that the creators, the guys from Minor Studios, could have launched this a few weeks ago at the gamer-centric Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) but chose to do it here. When I asked creative director Dave Werner why he’d pass up the chance to show this in front of more than 58,000 gamers and industry analysts, he told me he thought he’d get more leverage by launching it at this show.

Update: I got some hands-on time with this after the presentation. Judging from the time I played with it, it’s fun but frustrating. Like I said, if you’ve played Super Mario 64 before you’ll feel right at home. It borrows the same camera controls and kill screen, something you’ll probably see a lot if you’re playing a badly designed level.

See also: Mytopia: Yet another casual-gaming start-up goes live

But more to the point: a great corporate leader shoulders the responsibility for making tough decisions. But did Yang mention anything in his prepared comments about the 1,000 or so people Yahoo is planning to fire? Nope. Again, he left that one to his lieutenant–the news came 39 minutes into the conference call.

So, I’m sitting at my desk listening to the Yahoo conference call, and Jerry Yang is droning on about how the restructured deal with AT&T will work to the great benefit of both companies. Oh brother.

I know this is a niggling detail but why can’t Yang just come right out and acknowledge the truth? Everybody knows what happened here. AT&T has long wanted to rewrite the terms of an agreement that was heavily weighted in Yahoo’s favor. Yahoo wanted to continue the deal, but AT&T wanted a fairer deal–or else it would walk. No big deal. That’s the nature of business.

Here’s the problem with so many tech CEOs these days. They think and speak in PR-scripted monotones and sound like Stepford-like robot clones. Honestly, I’d prefer to rip out my brains with a plastic fork than suffer through most of these gasbag deliveries. But it’s earnings time, and if you want to learn what these clowns are thinking, it’s a cross we must bear.

Yahoo made the right decision but it’s going to cost more than a few shekels. But instead of honestly addressing the renegotiated contract, Yang ran a bunch of business-speak jive about how wonderful this all is. Yeah, sure, Jerry. (At least his CFO allowed that there would be a near-term hit.)

It will be a few years, but I can’t wait until Zimbra and MySQL have loosed their golden handcuffs so that they can start new companies, too. That’s how the open-source business market will be enriched and grow.

Here are a few to watch:

Acquia - Drupal-based social/web content management company
Ringside Networks - Social networking platform/application server
Loopfuse - Marketing automation (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Loopfuse)
Projity - Microsoft Project competitor

There were a slew of new open-source companies launched (or still getting first looks) at last week’s Open Source Business Conference. A few sites (Socialized Software and ZDNet, to name two of them)have been pointing to some of the more promising ones.

And more. Check out the sites above to see who else caught the eye. Interestingly, JBoss executives sit on the management teams of several of them. As the market grows, there will be more cross-breeding between commercial open-source projects. This is a Very Good Thing.

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SmugMug was one of the earliest S3 users. As Chris tells the story, SmugMug was buying a “mindblowing” number of Xserves from Apple. The Silicon Valley-based company was running out of power and space–the usual story.

However, Chris raised another point that bears mention. The company was having to buy all this gear up-front, in advance of the revenues (i.e. user subscriptions) that it would hopefully generate. This was difficult from a cash flow perspective–especially for a company that wasn’t venture capital-backed. But the reality is actually worse.

Like Amazon’s EC2 compute service, it falls roughly into the “Hardware-as-a-Service” concept.)

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These are important topics that I’ll be discussing further in due course, but today, I’m going to focus on SmugMug’s physical infrastructure.

In a nutshell, relative to Flickr, SmugMug has opted for less of a open-community orientation than for ways to store and display photos with a rather granular set of access controls. (See some discussion by CEO and “Chief Geek” Don MacAskill.)

All that said, the company does maintain some of its own servers. It does this, in part, to provide a sort of cache for “hot” photos. (Chris estimates that 10 percent of the photos on the site get 90 percent of the traffic.) Related is the fact that SmugMug runs its MySQL database servers in-house (so it’ll be physically close to the hot photos.)

However, over time, SmugMug started seeing better uptime from Amazon than it could deliver in-house. It now has more than 400 terabytes of photo and video storage on S3, and it can add as much as 1TB on busy days.

Now that the company has switched much of its primary storage to S3 as well, there’s another economic point worth making. Were SmugMug to host all this storage in-house, it’d actually have to buy more like 1.2 petabytes because it’d need enough to support any growth spurts and enough for backup, as well as primary storage.

Amazon’s recently announced SimpleDB could potentially offer an alternative, but it’s missing some features that SmugMug’s software, as currently written, requires. (See some technical discussion here.)

Initially, SmugMug used Amazon S3 for backup while keeping all of its primary storage in-house. At the beginning, it wasn’t thrilled with uptime, but it said that it wasn’t disappointed, either. More troubling was that Amazon wasn’t so transparent about the time and length of outages, which seems to remain a big issue.

When photo site SmugMug initially contacted me, it was in the context of some of the pieces that I had written about competitor Flickr and some of the issues associated with protecting photographers’ works online.

With Amazon S3, the company effectively gets backup for “free.” (Of course, that assumes that you trust Amazon not to lose data, but as far as I know, there has been no data loss associated with any Amazon outages.)

SmugMug is also a heavy user of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), even though the service is still in beta test mode. One of the most appealing features of EC2, according to Chris, is that it can handle load spikes without paying for the capacity all the time. For example, loads go way up after a three-day holiday weekend, when people upload all their pictures on Tuesday.

I suspect that we’ll see these hybrid architectures–even at aggressive Cloud Computing adopters–a lot. You sometimes need that little bit of customization or specialization that you can’t get from a service that has to be relatively standardized. That said, SmugMug is an aggressive adopter, and it gives us some good insights into what can be gained by making the infrastructure largely someone else’s problem.

During my conversation last week with President Chris MacAskill, he made some points about using Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) that may not be widely appreciated. (S3 is Amazon’s “storage as a service” offering that users pay for based on the amount of storage space used and data transferred.

Then Amazon called out of the blue, after a conference, and told the site about S3. At Amazon’s initial target of 50 cents per gigabyte, it was intriguing. When Amazon ended up pricing its offer at 15 cents, Chris says the company’s “jaws dropped.”

Not only were the expenses up-front, but they were capital expenses. From an accounting perspective, this means that the depreciation on the systems hit the P&L in a given year. The result? You may look profitable, but cash flow is tight and you could end end up effectively “prepaying” taxes.

Robochan consists of a 3GS wired to a Kondo Kagaku KHR-2 HV kit robot through its doc connector. The 3GS serves as the controller for the humanoid body, a popular kit which retails for about $900 with much assembly required.

Check out the video. Robochan is perhaps disturbing, but undeniably cute. The anime face and leek-waving are nods to Hatsune Miku, a character created for Yamaha’s Vocaloid singing synthesizer application. Hatsune is a virtual idol in Japan; one of her albums topped the Oricon music chart last month.

Robochan can speak, dance, wake you up at a preset time, learn motions taught by hand, and react when its screen is touched. Its creator has also wired the
iPod touch to a robot, as seen here.

Via Pink Tentacle

An enterprising tinkerer in Japan has turned an iPhone 3GS into a humanoid robot by wiring it to a mechanical body.

Meet “Robochan.”

When it’s not enough to let your
iPhone control your life, you can have it control a robot.

Related:
Shifd reimagines the desktop Post-It note

Earlier Monday one of my colleagues from Gamespot spent most of lunch gushing to me about his new favorite GTD tool. Called Toodledo, it’s diminutive name does not do its to-do list prowess justice–this is one of the most deep and full-featured offerings on the market. It’s also one of the easiest to get into, especially if you’re using other Web services like Google Calendar, Twitter, and Jott.

ToodleDo's iPhone Web app is pretty and lets you add items while offline. (click to enlarge)

Two of Toodledo’s most handy input methods are actually outside of its core Web service. Using speech-to-text service Jott you can simply call in and leave a to-do item. It will convert your call into one or more to-do items while managing to pull out any dates and times. Having used this with ReQall’s iPhone application (coverage) it’s just plain handy, albeit a minute killer if you’re on a tight cellular plan.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Toodledo has far more features than you’re bound to use. Those looking for more, including a file storage system for group to-do collaboration, as well as an analytics system that crunches through your task history to find trends, can be had with two premium plans that run $15 and $30 a year respectively. You can see a full breakdown of what’s included and what’s not, along with what the competitors have to offer on this page.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Also of note is the iPhone Web app, which made waves for being one of the first to-do lists to get optimization for
Safari mobile. What makes it cool is that you can enter items even while you’re away from a data connection, as long as you’ve got the entire page loaded. This isn’t as good of a solution as a native application–something that could give you reminders, notifications, and be accessible offline, but it’s still quite handy as its own management system.

Manage all your to-do list items in one place, or many with Toodledo, one of the most full featured to-do list tools we've run across. (click to enlarge)

At its heart Toodledo is a task organizer, so two of the most important aspects should be entering in the data as well as being able to access it from all over the place. Luckily it does a great job on both counts. You can plug into your task list from all sorts of places including mobile phones, start pages like Netvibes and MyYahoo, Twitter, and on various widget engines like OS X’s Dashboard and Vista’s Sidebar. In any case the interface is pretty familiar: just a simple rundown of what you have to do and some empty boxes to check off whatever you’ve dealt with.

The other method I like is the Firefox extension that lets you create and manage list items without having to use a separate application, or you keeping the site open in another tab. It also includes a contextual menu shortcut, so say you get an e-mail from a friend about their favorite wine, you can simply highlight the name, and right click to send it to your to-buy list. You can also do this with entire chunks of text and it will simply pull the dates and add the entire clipboard into the notes section of that item.

1. Under Edit, click Preferences.
2. Click the Security icon.
3. Uncheck Enable JavaScript.
4. Close and restart Safari.

There is no patch available from Apple. The recommended workaround is to disable Javascript within Safari. To do so:

So far, Apple has had no comment.

A new exploit will either lock up your
iPhone or
iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or
Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Unlike an earlier exploit that required users to click to become infected, the new code published by iPhoneWorld requires no user interaction.

The code was first reported in January and exhausts the memory in Safari, which in turn will cause your iPhone or iPod Touch to freeze, or your desktop Safari to crash. “Given the nature of this issue,” said the BugTraq newsgroup vulnerability report, “remote code execution may also be possible, but this has not been confirmed.”

Twitter, which is widely accepted as the drum major of the Web 2.0 failure parade, released an open source project called Starling in January of this year. Starling is the Ruby-based messaging system that runs Twitter’s backend. Yes, Twitter, the nonprofit web service known widely for its downtime, dropped its disaster-producing xxxxpile on the world. Why? Maybe they thought more competent developers would fix their problems. The more likely scenario is that they wanted to get a [a boost] from the fake tech media to make themselves look more important. I am guessing this is why no code has been released for Starling since it was open sourced. Oops.

Please head over to The Register and read the full article. One of the best I’ve read in a long while, the language notwithstanding. It’s a great reminder to those of us in the open-source world prone to hubris, and it didn’t even come from Savio.

Winner? Hadoop. Sometimes open source is cool because it’s cool. Other times it’s cool because it’s useful (but hard). I like the latter kind.

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Twitter decided they would be cute and trendy. They wrote their code in Ruby: the official state language of the hipster-developer nation. Doug Cutting, on the other hand, decided he would get xxxx done, and wrote Hadoop in Java. Starling was hidden away in some corner and forgotten (it’s hosted at RubyForge…). Hadoop lives prominently at the Apache Software Foundation. Starling is a re-hash of an existing Java Enterprise API called JMS that has several open source implementations. Hadoop is an implementation of Google’s MapReduce, a system that publicly only existed on paper. Hadoop has the added benefit of actually working.

I loved this post in The Register about Doug Cutting and his Hadoop open-source project. I’ve written about Hadoop before and the vision it shows on Yahoo!’s part, but El Reg is having none of that, castigating companies and projects like Twitter that release parts of their software as open source for media, not business, effect: