Daily Dose - GWT 2.1.1 - Just in Time for the Holidays

Google has just released an update to the Google Web Toolkit 2.1 released back in October.  The GWT Designer has added new annotations while the Google Plugin for Eclipse adds support for full J2EE publishing with Speed Tracer.  The GWT SDK has also gotten several updates based on community feedback.

LucidWorks Enterprise - A Free to Download, High-Grade Solr Development Platform
This week Lucid Imagination, a company built around Lucene and Solr technology, released an enterprise search development platform built transparently on Apache Solr.  The technology is free to download and use in development.  Lucid Imagination highlights the fact that this platform does not conceal the open source interfaces of Apache Solr behind proprietary controls, unlike some search technologies.

GPars 0.11 Speeds Up Actors
The open source project called GPars enables Java and Groovy concurrency through the actors concept found in Scala.  This latest update features P2P, pub-sub channels, and prioritySelectors in its new full dataflow implementation.  Actor messaging has gotten a speed boost and a new Java API has been created.

Using Twitter to Predict the Stock Market
Derwent Capital Markets, a British investment firm, has decided to launch a hedge fund that will use twitter 'sentiment analysis' to predict swings in the stock market.  The software comes from the University of Manchester, where it was reportedly able to predict the direction of the stock market with almost 90% accuracy.

If people tried to pay for other services like they try to pay for programming (Video)
Here's a nice bit of bitter humor for the weekend.