Find a Cure for AIDS With Your Android Smart Phone

Ever wish you could do more for humanity? Think AIDS sucks? Ever feel like you’re not getting everything out of your smart phone that you could? Thanks to World Community Grid, now your Android smart phone can join in the fight against AIDS by helping to actively search for a cure to AIDS using grid computing technology.

Grid computing (a.k.a. distributed computing) is the concept of taking a bunch of computers or devices and teaming them up to figure out huge problems, which would normally take a single computer a really long time to figure out. Each device checks out a small work packet, does it’s computations on it, then checks in the results and asks for another work packet. These grid computer systems can far out-power the world's most fasted super computers.

Does the thought of running something like this on your Android smart phone scare you? Think it will kill your phone’s battery or jack up your data usage? According to the good folks at World Community Grid -

The FightAIDS@Home project is the first to be made available on our new Android app, with more projects to follow suit in the future. And don't worry, it won't kill your battery or use up your data quota: by default, the Android app will run only when your device is plugged in, and will only transmit data when your device is connected to a WiFi network.

Want to help find a cure for AIDS? You need to do two things:

1. Register with World Community Grid (if you haven't already)
2. Download the app here!

Don't want to you your phone, but still want to help? They have apps for computers too. Download an app for your PC here.

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Enterprise Level Management of Apple Mac OS X Devices

Apple products seemingly are not designed with enterprise IT in mind. They do not facilitate centralized management natively, and it’s a pain point for many IT shops. Never-the-less, companies are still being infiltrated with these devices as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) concepts gain ground.

I came across a solution for this problem in one of the last places I expected. I was doing an on-site interview at Google. Over lunch, one of the employees there mentioned that they developed a product similar to SCCM, but to use with Mac OS X devices. Furthermore, this software is freely available in their code library! How about that? An enterprise level solution for managing software on Apple devices, developed by one of the largest and most innovative companies in the world, it’s available for free, and it’s open source so you can make modifications to it if you want/need to!

According to the Google Code page, Simian can:

• Deploy new or updated software by targeting a single Mac or tens of thousands.
• Deploy updates whether the Mac is on an internal network/VPN or not.
• Force unattended/background installation of some packages, while allowing others to be optional.
• Forcefully deploy security patches and reboot Macs after a given date, with varying levels of warning notifications.
• Tightly manage Apple Software Update catalogs and update release, or let updates auto-promote automatically.
• Dynamically target clients based on user, hostname, OS version, group (tag), and more.
• Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.

If this is something that you are interested in, you can check out this product at http://code.google.com/p/simian/

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