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Resig, a lead developer of JQuery, wrote:

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time…

Microsoft said Sunday that it plans to ship the JQuery JavaScript library with its Visual Studio developer tool suite.

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Microsoft)

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice “selector” API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply “commands” to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be “chained” together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Writing on the JQuery blog, John Resig said that mobile phone heavyweight Nokia also is adopting JQuery as part of its application development platform. As is the case with Microsoft, he said, Nokia isn’t looking to make any changes to the library, and its developers will contribute to the JQuery project.

Guthrie also pointed to a newly posted tutorial on Scott Hanselman’s Computerzen blog about integrating JQuery with ASP.net Ajax.

…The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit - above-and-beyond what is already done by the jQuery team.

In addition, Microsoft said that it would contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches to the JQuery open-source project and that later this year it would extend product support to JQuery.

The announcement came in a blog post by Scott Guthrie, a vice president in Microsoft’s developer division, who described the library’s attraction:

Sample JavaScript using JQuery.

The software powerhouse said that jQuery would be one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit, and would also have a role in new Ajax server-side helper methods. The 15KB JQuery JavaScript library will be distributed as is, with no forking, and files will continue to adhere to the JQuery MIT license.

“The target would never know what hit them,” John Pike, an analyst with defense think-tank Global Security told New Scientist. “Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike.”

The U.S. Navy is seeking its own version to take out “small boat threats”.

“This is a major step toward providing the ultra-precision engagement capability that the warfighter needs to dramatically reduce collateral damage,” said Scott Fancher, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. A larger version that can pick an incoming ICBM out of the sky will be mounted on a Boeing 747, according to the Chicago, Illinois based company. (Video)

New Scientist reports that both Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate and John Corley, director of USAF’s Capabilities Integration Directorate, used the phrase “plausible deniability” at industry briefings to describe one of the weapon’s advantages, namely “that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes”.(PDF)

Enemy combatants are close to feeling the heat from an airborne laser weapon called the “long-range blowtorch” and, if officials at US Air Force are right, nobody will know what hit them.

Boeing recently tested the ATL at Kirtland Air Force Base Base N.M., firing the high-energy chemical laser through a rotating turret mounted on the belly of a Hercules C-130H. The company claims the weapons is accurate enough to pick off a vehicle’s tires.

(Credit:
USAF)

The 5.5-ton Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) combines chlorine and hydrogen peroxide molecules to release energy that stimulates iodine into an intense infra-red, silent and invisible laser with a 20 kilometres striking range.

Besides the covert - plausible deniability angle, other pros to this 100KW-class high energy laser include “ultra speed of light engagement” and pinpoint accuracy, according to Boeing.(PDF)

(Credit:
L-3 Communications/Brashear)

(Credit:
Hitachi)

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B spreads 1TB of capacity over only three platters.

Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks–down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi’s 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.

While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn’t deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it’s retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24×7 applications.

Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year’s model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung’s Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.

You can find plenty of advice from ergonomic experts on proper posture when working on a PC, and there’s no end of special keyboards, mice, and other input devices designed to avoid repetitive stress injuries. But the fact is, what works to keep one computer user healthy will make another want to put their chiropractor’s phone number on speed dial.

Get advice on avoiding PC-related aches at Lenovo's Healthy Computing site.

An even-more comprehensive resource for help with PC pains is Safe Computing Tips, which has sections for various body parts, as well as reviews of ergonomic software and training materials.

You guessed it. I went the stand-up route and noticed an improvement in my back health after only a few days. That was five years ago, and I’ve been standing in front of my PC ever since. (Two bits of advice if you do likewise: get a footstool and well-soled shoes.)

Case in point: about 20 years ago, I developed a bad case of tendinitis in my right wrist, caused by over-mousing. Someone suggested that I use a digital tablet in place of a mouse. After a few months of twice-a-week physical therapy and the switch to a tablet, my wrist was back to normal. I’ve been using a tablet ever since, and my wrist has been fine ever since.

(Credit:
Lenovo)

Finally, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration provides information on proper workstation setup, including an evaluation checklist and a purchasing guide.

After years of writing about PCs, I’ve concluded that computer users care about only three things (in no particular order): speed, security, and reliability. But the fastest, safest, sturdiest PC in the world won’t do you any good, if overuse has made you too sore to turn the darn thing on.

OK, that’s the end of the public-service announcement. Next week, we’re back to the performance, security, and reliability tips.

Of course, somebody else may have no problem using a mouse but finds his fingers cramping after a day of twirling a stylus around a tablet. The key is to try various alternatives to find the PC setup that makes the difference for you.

The best sources for PC health advice
You might think that the only time hardware vendors mention ergonomics is when they’re trying to sell you some wavy keyboard or contoured mouse. Usually, you’d be right, but there is some solid health advice offered at such sites as Lenovo’s Healthy Computing.

I’ll give you one more example: I was forever trying to find the office chair that wouldn’t send my back into spasm at the end of every workday. Then I noticed that a co-worker with similar back problems had traded in her chair for a standing workstation.

Organizations of all types and sizes are cutting workers, which usually leaves even more work for the people whom they retain. Computers have been a primary reason for the increase in worker productivity in the last few decades, but sooner or later, all those hours in front of a PC take their toll.

Companies at this event that we’ve already covered include: Capzles, Triggit, and Zuora.

Dial2Do is a text-to-speech service that front-ends your e-mail app, Twitter, a dialer (like JahJah). Will have to try this one. See also: Jott.

I’m heading to the Launch Silicon Valley 2008 conference later this morning, where 30 new (or newish) companies will be doing the usual pitch to investors, analysts, and jaded journalists like me. But I did pick out seven new-to-Webware companies from the lineup that I want to learn more about. These are the most interesting ideas from my Web 2.0 perspective.

Previmed is being built to coordinate information about overseas medical care for people considering “medical tourism” to address their needs. Booming business. Very smart. However, barriers to entry for Previmed are not very high.

uTest collects the crashes of the crowds. It’s a service that software developers can use to get just the beta testers they need to pound on their products. uTest coordinates all the bug reports and helps developers track them.

Dayak is a service that helps employers find not people to employ, but rather recruiters to work with, who then find people to employ. In other words, it’s a middleman site for middlemen. Wins my Chutzpah 2.0 award for the month. And it’s probably a great business.

Vault Street helps users store their financial documents. You contract with it and then it acts as your proxy to collect bank and other financial statements for you. Better than having all those statements go to your e-mail, and much better than trying to keep them all in boxes in your basement. I don’t know what it can do about the documents you already have, though.

Modiface "after."

Modiface will make you look better. It’s a tool that takes your pictures, and then smooths your wrinkles, slims you down, adds body to your hair, etc. It is being marketed as a tool for medical professionals and stylists, and will likely also be used successfully by all manner of snake oil salesmen. Somewhat related: Big Stage.

Emphasis Search helps medical professionals generate appropriate referrals for their patients. Need a good podiatrist? Instead of relying on internist to hook you up with his squash buddy, this system will match your medical needs with a provider’s expertise, location, availability, and so on. Smart.

Cognisign does image matching. It can tell if two images are related by content, or pick out from a pool of images one that matches an input picture. Could be useful for organizing photos or enforcing copyrights.

Rockefeller expressed disbelief that more students were not interested in pursuing careers in cybersecurity.

He insisted he will aggressively press the subject with more hearings, as well as a bill he will introduce with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) that will, among other things, provide funding for scholarships to get more people into the field of cybersecurity.

While Congress has dedicated a number of hearings over the past year to cybersecurity, Thursday’s meeting focused specifically on the damage the private sector incurs from cyberattacks.

“I’m mortified by the lack of attendance,” said Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) “I regard this as a profoundly and deeply troubling problem to which we are not paying much attention.”

“It is pretty disgusting we’ve had more people cooking up toxic assets than killing bugs” on networks, she said.

The federal government, Spafford said, should invest more in basic research to fundamentally redesign security systems, both for the purpose of creating better systems but also to strengthen the country’s level of cybersecurity expertise.

“This ought to be the most fascinating, cerebral problem that exists,” he said. “It just cries out for the smartest, most creative people.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), one of the few other senators in attendance, said some of the people who have built careers in finance would have done more good in cybersecurity.

“We’ve had our electronic Pearl Harbor,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re trying to figure out how many people have figured out this is a major national security problem, and I don’t think enough have.”

WASHINGTON–The U.S. economy is suffering massive losses every year due to cyberattacks, yet most Americans are not aware of the gravity of the problem, cyber experts told Congress Thursday. Without more federal funding for educational reforms and basic research to promote cybersecurity, the nation will regularly suffer from attacks of serious consequence, they said.

“I believe less than 100 people worldwide truly know and understand control system cybersecurity,” he said.

“The commercial losses are in the tens of billions of dollars a year,” said Eugene Spafford, a professor and the executive director of Purdue University’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). “Imagine a Hurricane Katrina-style event occurring every year and being ignored.”

“Our investments in research, even if they don’t always produce something we can use, do have a benefit in the country’s knowledge base,” he said.

Expertise is especially lacking in the area of industrial control systems, said Joseph Weiss, managing partner for the consulting firm Applied Control Solutions. A control system, he said, is a “system of systems” typically designed by an engineer rather than a computer scientist.

The witnesses at the hearing said the economic downturn driven by those toxic assets has only increased the risk of cyberattacks. They cited the case of a disgruntled information technology worker indicted Tuesday for allegedly sabotaging a computer system he helped set up for a California oil and gas company, after he was not offered a permanent job.

Control systems, he said, are designed as simply as possible so they perform more reliably, but are consequently more vulnerable to cyberattacks. An attack on such a system would take the country “months–not days”–to recover from, he said.

Furthermore, he said, the criminals who profit from cyberattacks are reinvesting their money in new tools to conduct more attacks–far more than the United States invests in defensive tools.

Seemingly in demonstration of Lewis’ point, he and the three other cybersecurity experts testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Thursday had a small audience–no more than three of the committee’s 25 senators were in attendance at a time.

In July, Grisoft modified its free AVG 8 due to complaints about a proactive scanning of a Web site feature. The feature that had been enabled in the paid version of the product did not scale with the free release causing spikes in Web traffic.

Grisoft did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Yecies, vice president and general manager of Check Point’s ZoneAlarm consumer division said, “as soon as Check Point learned that AVG’s recent antivirus update was mistakenly flagging a ZoneAlarm file as a virus, we contacted AVG and they issued an update within hours that corrected the problem. AVG users will automatically get the update that corrects the issue.”

On Tuesday, AVG users reported desktops warnings that their desktop was infected with something called Trojan Agent r.CX. Some files within zlsSetup_70_483_000_en[1].exe, a compressed file containing dormant set-up files for Check Point’s ZoneAlarm, apparently set off the alarm. The ZoneAlarm user forum soon filled with concerned users.

Grisoft, makers of AVG antivirus, on Wednesday released a new update addressing a false positive in another security product.

This post was updated at 3:30 p.m. PDT with comment Check Point.