Source blog: Jeff Barr's Blog
Blogging Will Resume This Week
After spending the past three years in the UW’s MCDM program (one class per quarter), I graduated last week. I now have a lot more free time and I plan to use some of it on this blog. As soon … Continue reading →
Links for Monday, January 14, 2013
NYC Resistor: Vector Display Introduction – “Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam … Continue reading →
Links for Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Makeblock – “Makeblock is an aluminum extrusion based construct platform,provides integrated solution cover mechanical, electronic and software aspects. It can be used to bring your creations to life. With Makeblock you can make professional and stable robots, machines or even … Continue reading →
Links for Friday, December 28, 2012
KHK Stock Gears – “8399 types of Stock Gears for Robots.“ Welcome to RobotShop U.S.A. – “RobotShop, the World’s Leading Robot Store for Personal and Professional Robot Technology. Here you will find personal robots, professional robots, robot toys, robot kits … Continue reading →
Links for Friday, December 22, 2012
Time to clean out my browser menu before the holidays: BrickPicker: The End of Life is the Start of Profits) – “Missing out on a great LEGO set is a gut-wrenching feeling that happens all too often for the casual … Continue reading →
Links for Tuesday, August 22, 2012
OpenBeam – An open source miniature construction system – “$10/meter, ~$1.00 per joint, 100% off-the-shelf fasteners. By eliminating specialty screws, you get the best bang for the buck! “ Tam Labs: Behind the Scenes: Injection Molding – “Every day, we … Continue reading →
Puget Sound (Seattle + Eastside) Summer Movies for 2012
Back by popular demand, I present to you the definitive list of outdoor movies for the Puget Sound area. I’ve scoured the web to find every single venue. If I have missed any, leave me a comment or send me … Continue reading →
Im Still Alive&
I can’t believe I haven’t had time to write a single post so far this year. Here’s what I have been up to: Blogging up a storm on The AWS Blog. Taping episodes of my video podcast, The AWS Report: … Continue reading →
Links for Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Mastering Emacs: What’s New in EMACS 24 (Part 1) – “With Emacs 24 looming around the corner I figured it was time I took a close look at all the new features and changes” Part 2. Tilted Twister: Tilted Twister … Continue reading →
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Links for Tuesday, September 27, 2011
HTML 5 Rocks: How Browsers Work “This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code.“ Kickstarter: Teaguedino: Learn [...]
Links for Sunday, August 21, 2011
Hypergrid Business: 11 Tips for Successful Virtual Training - “It only makes sense to use virtual world technology if you are making use of its unique affordances. That is, if you are doing things that can only be done in a virtual world. If you bring your learners into a beautiful virtual environment and then [...]
Links for Monday, August 15, 2011
MicroRAX - “MicroRAX is a light weight mini T-Slot style building system. Suitable for use on your desktop or bench top to build science, engineering, or advanced hobby and DIY projects.“ Sparkfun Electronics: MakerBeam - “MakerBeam is a Mini-T open-source building system. Mini-T is a miniature version of T-slot. Not only is it small enough to [...]
Links for Tuesday, July 25, 2011
The Big Picture: Space Shuttle Era Ends With Atlantis - “When Atlantis touched down yesterday at Cape Canaveral, Fla., the high-flying era of the space shuttles came down to earth as well. After 30 years, the shuttle program, which began on April 12, 1981 with Colombia, has ended with the 135th mission. “ dygraphs JavaScript Visualization [...]
Seattle and Eastside Movies - 2011
The long-awaited Seattle summer is almost here. There’s nothing more fun than heading outdoors in the evening to catch a classic movie at a local park. The most popular nights are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On some nights you can choose between two or three different movies. Take some snacks, a blanket, and a low-profile [...]
Links for Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Network World: 3D Conferencing Hits the Enterprise - “Immersive virtual meeting environments allow participants to use avatars to walk around a virtual environment, and are useful tools for collaborating on and prototyping 3D designs, such as new products, buildings, or factories. Companies are also finding them useful training environments, since meeting managers can create virtual [...]
Links for Saturday, June 11, 2011
Stephen O’Grady: Why You Should Pay Attention to Node.js - “plicit in node is a fundamental rejection of traditional I/O. It's pushing an asynchronous agenda with its event loops, based on the assumption that concurrency cannot be achieved with a thread per connection. Having just recently suffered through a Daring Fireball induced meltdown of RedMonk.com [...]
Links for Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Hypergrid Business: Paper: Virtual Worlds Expand Uses of 3D Models - “Planners, developers, builders and architects should be looking to virtual worlds to provide a whole-life model of their project, according to a white paper released today by virtual worlds solutions provider Daden Limited.“ Vizworld: MUVE Market ¿ Virtual Patient Care Simulation Lab - “The MUVE [...]
Links for Monday, May 23 ,2011
The Daily Galaxy: Is Dark Energy “Antigravity” Leakage from an Adjacent Universe? - “Burt Ovrut, most famous for his work on string theory, currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, imagined two branes, universes like ours, separated by a tiny gap as tiny as 10-32 meters. There would be no [...]
Links for Thursday, May 12, 2011
Photopic Sky Survey - “The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we [...]
Links for Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Deconstructing Genius: There is no Magic - “We now understand that the third ingredient, raw intelligence, is necessary only as a dough, but it is the first which decides how many theorems the recipe makes, and how delicious they taste.“ TechCrunch: Why the New Guys Can’t Code - “I can guarantee you, without fear of contradiction, [...]
Links for Monday, May 9, 2011
ABC News: Some Black Holes May be Older Than Time - “Rather than everything merging back into a singularity, Professor Coley and Professor Carr speculate the densities reached as the universe transitions from big crunch to big bang, mean primordial black holes between a few hundred million kilograms and about the mass of our sun, [...]
Links for Sunday, April 10, 2011
Examiner: Prices at LDS canneries show inflation for food up between 11 and 49% - “The LDS’s raising food prices at their canneries by 11 to 49% in just three months should be a serious wakeup call to all Americans on the true inflationary conditions that exist in our economy, and that we need to [...]
Links for Sunday, March 27, 2010
Interplanetary Transport Network - “The Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN)[1] is a collection of gravitationally determined pathways through the solar system that require very little energy for an object to follow. The ITN makes particular use of Lagrange points as locations where trajectories through space are redirected using little or no energy. These points have the [...]
Links for Monday, February 14, 2011
NASA Science News: Robonaut 2 Set to Launch in February - “R2 will be the first humanoid robot to travel and work in space, so it’ll be training for some big responsibilities.“ Cory Ondrejka: HTML5 Games 0.1: Speedy Sprites - “With wide adoption and industry support, HTML5 will transform desktop and mobile gaming, creating amazing user [...]
PosterBurner is Cool!
I recently designed a poster to commemorate the launch of my AWS book. Starting with a high resolution PDF of the cover, I added images of the first page of each chapter, a picture of the product page on Amazon, a couple of reviews, and a picture of some Argentinian developers each holding a copy [...]
Building Sage (Open Source Math) on Amazon EC2
A quarter or two ago my son Andy took a rather unique course at the University of Washington. In his Math 480b: Programming for the Working Mathematician course, Andy learned about a number of important topics including the Unix command line, Python programming (including classes, exceptions and decorators). In the second half of the quarter [...]
Links for Thursday, January 27, 2011
SysAdmin 1138 Expounds: The Linux Boot Process, A Chart - “I did this because Things have Changed from the last time I really studied this. Back when I started it was BIOS, LILO, and Initd. I never did bother to wrap my head around Grub, mostly because the automatic tools have gotten a lot better [...]
Links for Monday, January 17, 2011
Penelope Trunk: How to Answer the Question, What Do You Do? - “3. Don't focus on your job. This is not a job interview–it's an attempt to get to know you so the person can connect with you. So you don't need to go straight to your job for an answer. Some people have a [...]
Finally - Linux on My Desktop
At the beginning of 2011 I finally made a big switch, one long overdue and one that I should have made 15 years ago. Way back in 1985 I was hired into a newly formed group at American Management Systems of Arlington, Virginia. The group was tasked with making Unix easier to use. I started [...]
Links for Monday, January 3, 2011
John Wiegley: Git From the Bottom Up - “In my pursuit to understand Git, it's been helpful for me to understand it from the bottom up–rather than look at it only in terms of its high-level commands. And since Git is so beautifully simple when viewed this way, I thought others might be interested to read what [...]
Links for Saturday, January 1, 2011
Hummingbird: Real Time Web Traffic Visualization - “Hummingbird lets you see how visitors are interacting with your website in real time“ Official 3DXplorer Blog: 3DXplorer at the University of Washington - “University of Washington is one of the most active universities in the field of Virtual Worlds and one of the rare ones delivering a certificate [...]
School's Out - My First Quarter in the UW MCDM Program - COM 529
This past May, in a post titled Heading Back to School, I talked about my decision to attend the Master of Communication in Digital Media (aka MCDM) Program at the University of Washington. This post is a review of my first quarter as a late-career graduate student. I spent the summer alternately elated that I [...]
Links for Thursday, December 24, 2010
MSNBC: Cosmic Log: 3 Billion-year-old Genetic ‘Fossil’ Traced - “The collective genome of all life on Earth today went through a rapid growth spurt between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, according to scientists who used computer algorithms to reconstruct the evolutionary history of thousands of genes.“ Varasona’s Pizzeria: Jeff Varasano’s Famous New York Pizza [...]
Links for Monday, November 29, 2010
BBC News: Cosmos May Show Echoes of Events Before Big Bang - “Professor Penrose, of Oxford University, and his collegue Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, have now found what they believe is evidence of events that predate the Big Bang, and that support CCC.“ Arxiv.org: Astrophysics > Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics: Concentric Circles [...]
Links for Friday, November 26, 2010
Search Engine Land: How Did The Beatles Sell 2 Million Songs On iTunes? Mostly Facebook (Not Search) - “According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media – not search – that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November [...]
Links for Tuesday, November 23, 2010
America Blog: US Banks Reportedly Short $100-$150 Billion Reserves - “Despite the outrageously high pay that suggest otherwise, the US banking industry is still in deep financial trouble. Anyone really interested in helping them out this time?“ Open Secrets Blog: Congressional Members’ Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour National Economy - “Despite a stubbornly sour national economy [...]
Links for Saturday, October 20, 2010
Codebox Software: BitMeter OS - “BitMeter OS is a free, open-source, bandwidth monitor that works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. BitMeter OS keeps track of how much you use your internet/network connection, and allows you to view this information in a variety of ways. “ Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly - “This [...]
Links for Monday, November 22, 2010
Colleen Moffit: Personal Awareness in a Social Media World - “think it is important for people engaging in social media to consider not only what they are communicating, but how that information may be perceived by others. Short messages of 140 characters do not afford an opportunity to provide context and individuals who do not [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 17, 2010
A Smart Bear: Why I Feel Like A Fraud - “I felt like a fraud every day. Here I was, selling a wobbly, buggy tool and pawning myself off as an expert in a field that didn’t exist. Every second I felt like I was putting one over on the world.“ CNBC: Dying With Debt: A [...]
Links for Monday, November 15, 2010
The Imprudence Blog: Announcing the Kokua Project - “Kokua Viewer is the spiritual successor to the Imprudence Viewer, but using the latest SL Viewer 2 source as the starting point. Many of the improvements we have made in Imprudence will be carried forward to Kokua Viewer, and we will be applying the same dedication to [...]
Links for Sunday, November 14, 2010
Popular Science: Astronomers Make Extraordinarily Detailed Map of the Universe’s Dark Matter - “The new map says Abell has a lot more dark matter than expected for a cluster of its size, which leads to some interesting questions about the genesis of galaxy clusters. In order to get so big, Abell and similar clusters must [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Hotel 1000 - “Hotel 1000: Seattle's Premiere Luxury Hotel Destination.“ Be Cunning and Full of Tricks: Join the Hypergrid Adventurers Club - “Are you an Adventurer? Looking for a friendly group of fellow travelers and pioneers interested in exploring Virtual Worlds? Join the Hypergrid Adventurers Club and let your journey begin! The Hypergrid Adventurers Club [...]
Links for Friday, November 5, 2010
BumbleJax: Handcrafted Wall Art From Your Digital Photos - “Have favorite digital photos archived away in a distant folder that few will see? How about bringing those memories to life by enlarging, printing and mounting to a cool material such as bamboo, acrylic, aluminum or gatorfoam? We specialize in creating handmade, gallery quality wall art [...]
Links for Tuesday, November 9, 2010
ReactionGrid: Hello 3D World - “ReactionGrid Inc. hosts and develops virtual worlds, and provides products that enable you to express your 3D ideas and share them with your colleagues, peers, and community. We deliver our systems virtualized on a platform we call Harmony. You can find a case study by Microsoft here illustrating our green [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 4, 2010
Smashing Magazine: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - “Let's take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.“ William Deresiewicz: What Are You Going to do With That? - “If you’re going to invent your own life, if you’re going to be truly autonomous, you also [...]
Links for Saturday, October 30, 2010
Business Insider: Bernanke’s QE 2 Will Sink Just Like The Titanic - “The Fed is quick to point to falling real estate prices. But a drop in real estate will no more cause consumer prices to fall than the real estate boom caused them to rise. Real estate prices are too high, and the economy [...]
Links for Friday, October 29, 2010
Tom’s Hardware: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: October 2010: Athlon III X3 450 - “This is the fastest triple-core Athlon II available, and it sports an ideal combination of three CPU cores, a high clock rate, a low price, and respectable overclocking headroom. Despite the deceptively low buy-in, this processor delivers some serious gaming [...]
Links for Thursday, October 28, 2010
Debuggable: Test Driven Development at Transloadit - “First of all, new features always start out as a system test. Each system test boots up the entire REST service, sends an actual HTTP request to it, and evaluates the response as well as the files that were created in the process. Files are verified by [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Pierre Khawand:Tip-Of-The-Month: From 500 Hats to 5 Hats: How to Focus, Collaborate, Play, do E-Mail, and Get Accomplished! - “Put on your Focus Hat and dive deep into an important task that is going to make a difference. Meaningful accomplishments don’t come from working a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Meaningful accomplishments [...]
Links for Sunday, October 24, 2010
Zero Hedge: Guest Post : Two Decades Of Greed - The Unraveling - “Reagan cut taxes and doubled spending during his eight year reign. This initiated the launch procedure for a US government debt rocket. It sent a message to the world and to its citizens that debt was not a bad thing. Interest rates [...]
Links for Monday, October 25, 2010
MCDM Flip The Media: All the Multimedia Gear You Need for Under $1000 - “Don't get me wrong, I love drooling over the latest DSLR features or bloviating about the superiority of Final Cut Pro. But the equipment doesn't make the journalist, and the people with the best story to tell usually aren't the ones [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academics Discuss Mass Migration From Second Life - “Officials at one discussion session here at the Educause conference yesterday spent an hour debating whether or not they should relocate their campuses–taking all the buildings, quads, and people and carefully moving them elsewhere.“ Space Shuttle Discovery - “En route to the launch [...]
Links for Monday, October 18, 2010
Pooky Amsterdam: SLCC Machinima Presentation at Metanomics Forum - “After a successful presentation at the Second Life Community Convention, the Metanomics team asked Pooky to give her talk live inworld. Here is a brief history and some tools of the trade.“ MovieStorm - “Make your own animated cartoons. Loads of styles and 3D tools. A complete [...]
Links for Sunday, October 17, 2010
Yahoo! News: Most Massive Galaxy Cluster of Early Universe Discovered - “The most massive conglomeration of galaxies ever spotted in the early universe has been found, astronomers say. This behemoth galaxy cluster contains about 800 trillion suns packed inside hundreds of galaxies. And it’s not even finished growing.“ Arxiv: SPT-CL J0546-5345: A Massive z > 1 [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 5, 2010
PookyMedia Films: The Troubleshooter - “Joining Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Sclera Design, to craft a series introducing The Troubleshooter, PookyMedia gives the Old West a Second Life. See what happens when the Troubleshooter rides into town. “
Links for Monday, October 4, 2010
Extreme Presentation Method: The Presentation - “The Presentation is an exercise in using storytelling for effective communication. It teaches the principles of the Extreme Presentation method, which I covered in all their scientific detail in Advanced Presentations by Design, in a fast, easy to read and enjoyable format.“
Links for Sunday, October 3, 2010
Troutgirl: 36 Hours in my Silicon Valley - “Before dinner, I like to take my friends to watch the sun set over the decades-old apricot trees at the Sunnyvale heritage orchard. Before it was called Silicon Valley, this area was known as the Valley of Heart's Delight, and it was a famous fruit-growing region¿ of [...]
CodeWorks Seattle 2010
This looks like an interesting Seattle-area conference for PHP developers: Speakers include Marco Tabini, Keith Casey, and Cal Evans. I have signed up and look forward to the event (November 9, 2010).
Links for Thursday, September 23, 2010
Sand Castle Studios: The Status of Mesh Support in Second Life - “Today Linden Lab gave Second Life users an update on mesh support and lifted the NDA for current beta testers. I can now tell you that for about the last year, we here at Sand Castle Studios have been deeply involved [...]
My AWS Book Is Now Available!
It has been a long journey, but my first book, Host Your Web Site in the Cloud, is now available. I didn’t actually set out to write a book. A while ago a SitePoint editor contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing some code samples for an upcoming book on the Amazon [...]
Links for Friday, September 17, 2010
Boeing: Randy’s Journal: A Day in the Life - “A full-scale airframe is placed in a test rig. There we simulate more than three times the design service objective for the 787.“ Tarpipe Blog: Embracing Open Source - “We’re happy to announce that we’re releasing a huge part of tarpipe core components as Open Source. [...]
Links for Tuesday, September 14, 2010
canvasXpress - “CanvasXpress is a javascript library based on the <canvas> tag implemented in HTML5. I developed this library as the core visualization component for our BMS systems biology platform which I hope to release soon. The basic idea was to have generic and simple way to display genomics data.“ SitePoint: Exclusive Webinar: Host Your Website [...]
Links for Sunday, September 12, 2010
Mike Graban: My Wood-Burning Pizza Blog - “A blog about my backyard wood burning pizza oven and my culinary (and otherwise!) adventures with it.“ YouTube: Starting a Fire in a Wood Fired Oven - “Process for getting a wood fired oven up and running quickly.“ Pizza Making: Welcome to the Home for Pizza Lovers and Pizza Makers! [...]
Gnomedex 2010 Mind Maps
Earlier today Chris Pirillo awarded me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro hard drive for taking notes in the most geeky way at Gnomedex 10. What did I do? I used an open source mind mapping tool called FreeMind to create a single mind map (pictured at right) of all the talks. I tend to take notes to [...]
Links for Thursday, July 29, 2010
Steve Blanding: Cancer Sucks and Some People Are Idiots - “People. If you have a friend who is suffering from cancer (or some other life threatening disease) the best thing you can do is just be their friend, let them know that you are willing to offer help and support if it’s requested and then [...]
Links for Monday, July 19, 2010
mindsensors.com: Your Number One Source for Advanced Electronics and Accessories for Robotics - “We design and develop advanced electronic products for educational and hobby applications. We hope that you find these products suitable for your creative projects. If you need something extra-ordinary, do let us know and we will consider developing it, like we have [...]
Links for Sunday, July 18, 2010
Ignite: Hilary Mason: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script - “This is not a tolerable situation, that we spend our time just repeating the same thing over and over again.“ Hilary Mason: Email Automation, Questions and Answers - “Welcome! I've gotten several hundred e-mails about my e-mail management code. I do want [...]
Seattle + Eastside Movies 2010 - Now in Convenient Calendar Form
I took the summer movie movie list that I generated last week and entered all of the data in to a Google calendar for your scheduling pleasure. There’s something to watch almost every night in July and August:
Links for Sunday, July 11, 2010
Every Car Listed - “Used Cars for Sale and New Cars for Sale“ Forno Bravo: The World’s Finest Pizza Ovens - “Forno Bravo imports and produces the world’s finest wood-fired pizza ovens for the home and garden, caterers, bakeries and restaurants. Since 2003, we have sold thousands of pizza ovens in North America and around the [...]
Seattle + Eastside Outdoor Movies - Summer 2010
My wife and I really enjoy watching outdoor movies in the summer. You wait until the sun goes down and the stars come up, in the company of others who are there for the movie and for the chance to be outdoors. Take a camping chair, a blanket, and some snacks and you’ll be all [...]
Vex-Based Webcam Platform
As part of my job as Amazon Web Services Evangelist, I am planning to record some screencasts and some videos later this year. I am in the process of adapting my home office to the task. So far I have set up a green screen (so that I can use the Chroma Key process to [...]
Links for Monday, June 28, 2010
Studica - “Students, Teachers, & Schools can save up to 80%.“ Robot Shop: Robotics At Your Service - “The World’s Leading Source for Personal and Professional Robot Technology.“ Al Aho and Jeff Ullman: Foundations of Computer Science - “This book has been taken out of print by W. H. Freeman. You are welcome to use it if [...]
Links for Monday, June 21, 2010
Los Angeles Times: Second Life’s Thriving Music Scene - “Lyons typically earns $100 to $200 per show, and he often plays as many as three gigs in one day for audiences logging into Second Life from different time zones. “ Paul Volcker: The Time We Have Is Growing Short - “One basic flaw running through much [...]
Links for Sunday, June 13, 2010
Metafilter: For Pity’s Sake, Don’t Go to Law School - “The expected economic payoff from any professional degree (JD, MBA, PhD) is negative, except possibly for the very top-tier schools. Going into debt in pursuit of a negative expected payoff is stupid.“ jQuery Tools: The Missing UI Library for the Web - “jQuery Tools is a [...]
Links for Saturday, June 12, 2010
Think Vitamin: 9 Magic Methods for PHP - “This next magic method is a very neat little trick to use ¿ it makes properties which actually don't exist appear as if they do.“ Seattle jQuery Open Space and Hack Attack - “Join John Resig, the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library, and the Seattle jQuery/JavaScript community [...]
Links for Monday, May 31, 2010
BBC News: Work Starts in £15m Plan to Get Concorde Flying - “It is hoped the jet will be able to fly as part of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. “ Gnomedex 10 - “Hundreds of the world’s leading bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, and tech-savvy enthusiasts will once again descend upon the city of [...]
Wanted: Brick Oven Builder in Seattle
Everyone in my family loves to cook. Our Sunday evening dinners have grown increasingly complex and correspondingly delicious. Friends and relatives far and wide clamor for invitations. Hungry strangers show up and beg for a seat at our table. The smell of garlic reaches out to the street, and the sound of sharp knives hitting [...]
Heading Back to School
I’ve been thinking about going back to school for a couple of years. I didn’t have a specific goal in mind at first, but I do think that it is important to keep learning over the course of one’s life, and I do enjoy being on campus. I also like the rhythm of the semester [...]
Links for Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Brier Dudley: Early Peek at Amazon’s Amazing new HQ - “Builders working for developer Paul Allen are putting finishing touches on the centerpiece, a cluster of buildings around an open amphitheater built into the historic Van Vorst building, which used to be a stable for the Frederick & Nelson delivery horses.“ The Mechatronics Guy: ArduinoCheatSheet - [...]
Links for Sunday, April 25, 2010
YouTube: Southwest Airlines The Making of Florida One - “Go inside Boeing as the newest Specialty Plane is unveiled!“ The Huffington Post: Somali Pirates Say They Are Subsidiary of Goldman Sachs - “In the aftermath of the shocking revelations, government prosecutors were scrambling to see if they still had a case against the Somali pirates, who [...]
Links for Friday, April 23, 2010
Tom Lowe: Timescapes: Death is the Road to Awe - “Production footage from my debut film ‘Southwest Light’” - Via Bad Astronomy. pluGGd.in: How to Price your SaaS Application ¿ The Definitive Guide - “Let's dive into a few of the popular pricing strategies to understand the available models and what could fit your next SaaS [...]
Links for Thursday, April 22, 2010
Snotr: Star Size Comparison - “You are not the center of the universe!“ Apply to TechStars - “TechStars is currently accepting applications for the Seattle program, to be held during the fall of 2010. The application deadline for our Seattle program is June 1, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Pacific Time.“
Links for Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Market Ticker: Bill Black Calls It As It Is - “What Bill Black has documented is not only how and why Lehman blew sky high, but that nothing has, in fact, changed - other than the fact that we have now effectively backstopped this activity among the current survivors by sweeping the truth under the [...]
Links for Tuesday, April 20, 2010
BrickCon 2010 - “Join us to view hundreds of models created by LEGO® Hobbyist Builders from around the nation and the world. Build your own masterpieces with LEGO® parts at our Building Zone. Purchase current, past and custom LEGO® sets, parts and minifigs at our Brick Bazaar. Win Prizes!“ Wall Street Journal: Entrepreneurs Doing Business by [...]
Links for Wedneday, March 31, 2010
Christie Wilcox: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs - “ Before domestication, dog’s life was tough, but when people pulled specific wolves out of their packs and began breeding them, we changed everything. There were some traits that made this easy - the social structure of wolves, for example, made them predisposed to belonging to [...]
Links for Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Cosmic Log: First flight for SpaceShipTwo - “The craft, which has been christened the VSS Enterprise, remained firmly attached to its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane throughout the nearly three-hour test flight. It will take many months of further tests before SpaceShipTwo actually goes into outer space.“ What’s Next: Stay Ahead of the Future - “Download the following [...]
Links for Friday, March 19, 2010
ThinkBalm: ThinkBalm Publishes Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide - “The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present “if/then” scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: [...]
Links for Friday, March 5, 2010
Canviz Demo - “Graphviz on a canvas.“ Canviz: JavaScript Library - “Canviz is a JavaScript library for drawing Graphviz graphs to a web browser canvas. More technically, Canviz is a JavaScript xdot renderer. It works in most modern browsers. “
Links for Thursday, March 4
Dave Schappel: Want Entrepreneur Advice Over Coffee? That’ll Be $1,000 - “You pay me $1,000 for up to 3 hours of my time talking with you about entrepreneurship. That will likely be spread over two 1-hour meetings, and another hour of my time making introductions, if I think they’re warranted. If I don’t, I’ll [...]
Links for Monday, March 1, 2010
Pooky Media: Second Life Viewer 2 - Videos of New Features - “Linden Lab had PookyMedia create videos to present new viewer and features supporting the platform of Second Life.“ Giulio Prisco: Google Street View in Second Life - “Perhaps with some clever coding we can implement Street View as a fully interactive multiuser metaverse within [...]
Links for Sunday, February 28, 2010
Flowplayer: jQuery Tools - “This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.“ Google: [...]
Links for Saturday, February 27, 2010
macetech.com: Live Twitter Table using New Bluetooth Shield - “By correctly formatting your tweet and including the #ledtable hashtag, you can help create an ever-changing work of art in our living room.“ Make: Open Structures: Help Create an Open-Source Building System - “Open Structures is a set of standards allowing product designers and architects to create [...]
Links for Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Guardian: Ten Rules for Writing Fiction - “Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.“ MonoDevelop - “MonoDevelop is an IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. MonoDevelop enables developers to quickly write desktop and ASP.NET Web applications on Linux, Windows [...]
Synchronicity in Tokyo
I am in Tokyo to speak at the Developers Summit 2010, JAWS (Japanese AWS User Group) and to meet with and potential System Integration partners. Yesterday was Saturday and the weather was great, so I rode the Ginza line of the Tokyo Metro to Kappabashi to pick up some things for my family. Also known [...]
Links for Sunday, February 14, 2010
Lifehacker: Build Your Own Pizza Oven - “Suppose you were inspired by the cheap DIY home pizza oven–but weren’t so sure your home insurance would cover oven modifications. It’s time to build a safer, more eye-pleasing oven, and we’ve got a thorough guide.“ Forno Bravo: Modular Pizza Oven Kits for the House and Garden - “Forno [...]
Links for Friday, January 29, 2010
CHDK: Unleash the POWER in your Canon PowerShot! - “ Canon Hack Development Kit; Temporary ¿ No permanent changes are made to the camera. Experimental - No warranty. Read about the risks in the FAQ. Free ¿ free to use and modify, released under the GPL.“ gPhoto: Freedom From Film - “gPhoto2 is a [...]
Links for Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Replicator: Replicator Cinema ¿ 3D Printing Videos - “A super clear and concise explanation of a MakerBot at CES 2010. Not addressed in the video is the fact that they are now selling ~150 kits a month at $750-950 each. putting them at $1-1.7MM in revenue“ Make: Build a Better 3D Printer, Win $100K! - “The [...]
Links for Monday, January 25, 2010
Reuters: Bill Gates Says U.S. Recovery to Take Years, Taxes Rise - “Gates also said the United States needs its leaders to level with the American people about the long-term challenges the country faces and the sacrifices needed to overcome them.“ Infoproduct Marketing: How To Make Your Own Green Screen Chromakey - “Basically, chromakey is the [...]
Links for Saturday, January 23, 2010
Second Life Blog: Coming Soon: Viewer 2 Public Beta - “With Viewer 2, our revamped web site, a new Orientation Island and much more, we’ve taken a step back and tried to create an end-to-end experience that will be much more compelling and relevant for a new Resident. There’s still more to do, but we [...]
Links for Thursday, January 21, 2010
Thinkbalm: The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide - “The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present “if/then” scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: [...]
Links for Monday, January 11, 2010
Official Second Life Blog: Diary of a Paranoid Mysql Upgrade - “We first tried to upgrade way back in November of 2007, but it turned out that 5.0 was just not fast enough, despite what sysbench and our other benchmarks had indicated. After two or three long, wretched days of cascading downtimes, degraded services, [...]
Links for Monday, January 4, 2010
Official Second Life Blog: Happy New Year! Looking Back…Looking Ahead - “You'll recall that we replaced the original LSL virtual machine with Mono in 2008 — which runs LSL much, much faster. Next up is allowing content creators to use a much richer language for scripting (C#) that will open up Second [...]
Links for Saturday, January 2, 2010
Wall Street Journal: Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind - “Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends“
Links for Sunday, January 10, 2010
New York Times: The Other Plot to Wreck America - “Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system [...]
Links for Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Oatmeal: Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling - “Its: This is indicating possession.“
Links for Wednesday, December 30, 2009
MicroISV: Twilio (Phone Call Web API) is Crazy Fun - “… a long-winded way of introducing why I love Twilio, a startup that makes it easy to script phone calls with an API.“ Wall Street Journal: ‘Smartbooks’ Latest to Join Crowded Computer Market - “The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show will be a coming-out party for a [...]
Links for Tuesday, December 8, 2009
James Grant: Requiem for the Dollar - “A monetary economist from Mars could only scratch his pointy head at our 21st century monetary arrangements. What is a dollar? he might ask. No response. The Martian can’t find out because the earthlings don’t know.“ Bill Frezza: Watching Social Security Eat the Young Alive - “Impoverished by our [...]
Links for Sunday, November 29, 2009
Wall Street Journal: Taking an Open-Source Approach to Hardware - “The Arduino represents an early entrant in the emerging open-source hardware movement, which like Linux and other open-source software projects is driven by the belief that allowing duplication is a better way to spur innovation than keeping designs under lock and key.“ Hypergrid Business: OpenSim in [...]
Links for Friday, November 13, 2009
Genetic Science Learning Center: Cell Size and Scale - “The smallest objects that the unaided human eye can see are about 0.1 mm long. That means that under the right conditions, you might be able to see an ameoba proteus, a human egg, and a paramecium without using magnification. A magnifying glass can help you [...]
Links for Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wall Street Journal: Tinkering Makes Comeback Amid Crisis - “The American tradition of tinkering — the spark for inventions from the telephone to the Apple computer — is making a comeback, boosted by renewed interest in hands-on work amid the economic crisis and falling prices of high-tech tools and materials.“ Seeed Studio: Electronic Bricks? - “By [...]
Links for Monday, November 9, 2009
Pixels and Policy: How Tough Economic Times are Encouraging Virtual Workplaces - “There are obvious cost benefits to working in the virtual world that stand out at a time of global recession and rolling bankruptcy. Travel costs are reduced to zero as avatars from around the world come together in one central space.“ Second Life Blog: [...]
Links for Friday, October 30, 2009
The Big Picture: Launch of the Ares I-X - “NASA’s Constellation Program’s 327-foot-tall rocket produced 2.96 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and reached a speed of 100 mph in eight seconds.“ Science at NASA: A Mars Rover Named “Curiosity” - “The small, car-sized rover will ramble about on the rocky surface, gizmos at full [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Replicator: For The Price Of A TV You Can Start A FabLab - “The educational applications of these tools are very exciting and can help bridge the gap between making things with Lego Mindstorms and having to outsource production to expensive machine shops. “ Contraptor: Open Source DIY Rapid Hardware Prototyping - “Contraptor is a DIY [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 20, 2009
SkyTran: It’s About Time - “SkyTran is a new transportation system, currently under development at NASA Ames Research and other locations. Light-weight vehicles ride above ground traffic on a magnetic levitation (maglev) micro freeway, also called the guideway.“ SkyTran: Personal Mobility for the 21st Century - “No need to drive. Enter your destination, then enjoy full [...]
Links for Sunday, October 18, 2009
MicroRax: Made Small for Big Ideas - “MicroRAX a light weight miniature T-Slot framing system. Suitable for use on your desktop or bench top to build science, engineering, or advanced hobby and DIY projects. This small rugged framing system is ideal for use in machines, school science projects, robotics, design houses, workshops, prototypes, repair, models, [...]
Links for Monday, October 5, 2009
MSNBC: Lack of Computer Skills Foils Many Job-seekers - “However deeply computers may have embedded themselves into modern life, there are still millions of people for whom they remain a challenge. For these Americans, finding a new job during a time of high unemployment can be especially difficult.“ Official Second Life Blog: Virtual Worlds Certificate Program [...]
Links for Sunday, October 4, 2009
Space.com: 5 Years After SpaceShipOne: Commercial Spaceflight Ready for ‘Go’ - “Within the next few months the first companies will begin flights and within two years the first paying customers will be flying. Within three years the first commercial facilities will be overhead and within five years you will be able to fly commercially [...]
Links for Friday, October 2, 2009
Discover Channel: ‘Ardi,’ Oldest Human Ancestor, Unveiled - “The world’s oldest and most complete skeleton of a potential human ancestor — named “Ardi,” short for Ardipithecus ramidus — has been unveiled by an international team of 47 researchers.“ Joel Achenbach: A Nation of Engineers - “Advice to graduates: Become an engineer. Design the future. Become someone [...]
Links for Thursday, August 20, 2009
Jet Propulsion Lab: NASA Researchers Make First Discovery of Life’s Building Block in Comet - “NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft. “ Starts With A Bang: Hell Yeah, Hubble - “The first thing we did was take a patch of sky [...]
Links for Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Second Life Blogs: Introducing the LLMedia API - “We're constantly working to enhance the Second Life experience, and I wanted to share an exciting development I mentioned in my keynote yesterday at SLCC: today's release of the LLMedia API, which lets developers create plug-ins for the Second Life Viewer to bring new media-rendering capability to [...]
Links for Monday, August 17, 2009
ThinkBalm: New ThinkBalm Innovation Community video: “The Bridge” - “The bridge is an immersive 3D space where decision makers and project team members can meet to view and interact with data, collaborate, and make business decisions. It can be the bridge between the physical world and the virtual world; an organization and the outside world; [...]
Links for Sunday, August 16, 2009
Cheese and Burger Society - “We are the Cheese & Burger Society. We believe that cheese is the Grand Poo-bah of every cheeseburger grilled at a backyard barbecue or flame-broiled at a roadside diner. But not just any slice of cheese, Wisconsin Cheese. So join us as we celebrate the greatest cheeseburgers ever made.” - [...]
Boeing 747-8F Photos and Movie
While the world watches Boeing’s struggle to get the much-delayed 787 Dreamliner assembled and off the ground, great progress has been made on another very cool Boeing product, the 747-8 Freighter. This plane is 18 feet longer than the already-massive 747-400, with an overall length of 250 feet. I ran into a few cool links over [...]
Yes, I am Still Alive!
I haven’t had the time to do a real post for quite some time. Here’s what’s been happening: Daughter Tina graduated from Eastlake High after spending her senior year in the Running Start program at Bellevue College. She’ll be entering the University of Maryland in the fall and plans to study Journalism. Son Stephen graduated from the [...]
Links for Sunday, July 26, 2009
jquerylist.com: The Ultimate jQuery List - “A really big 1-page list of plugins and examples for jQuery.“ 9 Lessons: Load Data while Scrolling Page Down with jQuery and PHP - “We have lots of data but can not display all. This script helps you to display little data and make faster your website. Take a look [...]
Links for Sunday, July 19, 2009
Ralf Ebert: Visual git tutorial I - “I hope I was able to provide a good starting point for using git. I'm a big advocater of versioning projects with the git system. I have been using it for one and half years now to keep track of all my projects and git has never let [...]
Links for Friday, June 26, 2009
jQuery Ribbon - “A ribbon control built on jQuery. It supports grouping, dropdown menus, nested lists theming and more.“ Beverly Coggins: 10 Ways to Double Your Time - “Would you like to squeeze more time out of your day? Who wouldn’t? Here are a few suggestions to help you do just that. Then hopefully you'll have [...]
Links for Thursday, June 25, 2009
Massively: Linden Lab releases Snowglobe 1.0 for Second Life - “One of the biggest developments you might see in the Snowglobe viewer is that the map is now an order of magnitude faster to load, rather than taking several fractions of forever, as is traditional. This is the start of a new texture-transfer pipeline, which [...]
Links for Thursday, June 18, 2009
Time: U.S. Shoots for the Moon, This Time to Stay - “In the past few years, the moon has once again become the hot place to go. Three countries with little spacefaring history – Japan, China and India – have all sent probes moonward since 2007, and China in particular has made it clear that [...]
Links for Thursday, June 11, 2009
Jeff Moser: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection - “In just 220 milliseconds, two endpoints on the Internet came together, provided enough credentials to trust each other, set up encryption algorithms, and started to send encrypted traffic.” - Very interesting to see how HTTPS works. Ditaa: Diagrams Through ASCII Art - “ditaa is a [...]
Links for Monday, June 8, 2009
The Messy Notebook: How To Build Something Real (In Your Spare Time) - “You need steady momentum to keep the project rolling. It’s much harder to sit down and work if you only do so every other week - you then need to use more time and energy to “spin back up” every time. You [...]
Links for Sunday, June 7, 2009
New York Times: The Economy Is Still at the Brink - “Why is the morphine drip still in the veins of the financial system? These trillions in profligate federal spending are intended to make us feel better again even though feeling pain, and dealing with it responsibly, would be healthier in the long run. It [...]
Links for Monday, June 1, 2009
Hackety: Control-B For Concurrency - “Abstracting concurrency away to a hotkey. Can you believe that? Wild.“ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: The CandyFab 6000 - “Here’s one of the first objects that we fabbed on the CandyFab 6000: a drilled sphere, about two inches in diameter and layer thickness of 1/15 inch. There’s plenty of room for [...]
Links for Friday, May 29, 2009
Probcast: University of Washington Probability Forecast - “This website provides uncertainty information along with a probabilistic weather forecast; move the mouse over a feature to learn more about its function. “
Recruiting for Hospitality Jobs in Second Life
According to a recent article, the Australia-based Manhattan Group is using an office in Second Life to recruit people for jobs in the hospitality industry. The jobs are located in Australia, Africa, the United States, and Asia. I am working with a team of colleagues to plan a job fair in Second Life, so I took [...]
Links for Sunday, May 24, 2009
SlogBase: Second Life Intelligence - “Slogbase is a lightweight database attached to objects in Second Life¿ that provides the same functionality as Apache Web server logs. It uses ordinary LSL code in Second Life to send sensor data to an external PHP/MySQL application.“ Field Commander Wieers: Improving Putty settings on Windows - “This is important advice. [...]
Links for Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Evil Mad Science: Peggy 2 Light Emitting Pegboard Kit - “Like its predecessor, Peggy 2 provides a quick, easy, powerful and efficient way to drive a lot of LEDs– up to 625– in a big matrix covering almost a square foot of area.“ jPolite: A Lightweight Portal Framework Based on jQuery - “The target of this [...]
Links for Saturday, May 16, 2009
New York Times: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - “I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.“ Seattle Times: Sammamish Trails Tied to Burke-Gilman For [...]
My Son Andy Is Heading to Sao Paolo¿
My 19 year old son Andy has been learning Portuguese and has booked a mid-June flight to Sao Paolo, with plans to see that city and a few others as part of a two month trip. His goal is to see the country, practice and improve his language skills, and to have a safe and [...]
Links for Thursday, May 14, 2009
Caleb Booker: Calling All Evangelists - “In every company there's one person willing to bring the big ideas forward. This is the visionary, the thought-leader that wants to bring the latest technology and business practices to their stakeholders. We call these people Corporate Evangelists.“
Classic Amazon Door Desk Modeled in Second Life
I’m gearing up to do some more work in Second Life and needed to regain my building skills. This evening I modeled the classic Amazon door desk and set it up with a laptop, a hamburger, a drink, and a picture of my wife. I think it looks quite realistic:
Links for Sunday, May 3, 2009
Bad Astronomy Blog: Launch Dates - “Planck may very well have the resolution needed to see that. Do you understand the implications? We may be on the verge of determining if the origin of the Universe was a singular event, or if it was due to some other mechanism.“ Gax Technologies Working Worlds: GAX Technologies launches [...]
Links for Friday, May 1, 2009
Tim O’Reilly: Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web - “The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we’ve used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone [...]
Links for Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Seattle PI: Boeing 737 Factory Tour Photos - “Boeing workers can finish final assembly of the single-aisle 737 in 11 days. In 2000, the process took 22 days, and the goal is to reach eight days, officials said Tuesday on a tour of the Renton factory.“ Sacramento Bee: Unemployment in California - “This interactive map shows [...]
Links for Tuesday, April 26, 2009
The New Scientist: 13 Things That do Not Make Sense - “TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you’ll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not [...]
Links for Thursday, April 23, 2009
Noupe: 10 Ways to Automatically & Manually Backup MySQL Database - “There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we'll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier. Starting with the mysqldump utility that [...]
Links for Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Wall Street Journal: Please, Pay Attention - “To preserve my own mind from electronic takeover, I spend an hour alone each afternoon, without a computer or phone, in a local coffee shop, and I ask my assistant to forward messages from my public email address only near the end of each day.“
Links for Monday, April 20, 2009
Second Life Blog: The Second Life Economy - First Quarter 2009 in Detail - “A number of factors drove the growth in the Second Life economy in Q1 2009: an increase in active users and user hours, a steady influx of new Residents, and continued improvements in grid stability. Anecdotal conversations with large estate owners [...]
Links for Saturday, April 18, 2009
The American Interest: Going Postal - “The Internet is still an inherently lawless medium. Emails are fraught with all sorts of malfeasance, from viruses to financial scams. The USPS could play a role in assigning legal online addresses for all citizens and businesses and providing a secure Internet-based channel for trusted communications. We only need [...]
Links for Thursday, April 16, 2009
IBM Developerworks: Utilizing Web 2.0 in Business - “There’s no denying that most Web 2.0 services have, until now, been mostly useful for consumers and small businesses. But whether your organization has 10 or 100,000 employees, you can leverage these tools to bring true business value to your company. The likes of Twitter, [...]
Links for Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Nancy Duarte: Tips for Presentations of a (Second)Lifetime - “Presenting via a webinar is tough to do. Presenting in a virtual world as an avatar will surely have nuances that are new for me.“ Seattle Post Globe - “Today, we — former P-I journalists — are embarking on a new stage in our careers, hoping [...]
Links for Sunday, April 12, 2009
Mint: A Visual Guide to Deflation - “Deflation is inflation's polar opposite. It's what happens when prices go down and you get more bang for your buck. Sounds good right? But deflation, like inflation is complicated and much less understood than inflation. It can lead to what's called the deflationary spiral and grind the whole [...]
Links for Monday, April 6, 2009
Noupe: 20 Useful PHP + jQuery Components & Tuts for Everyday Project - “The post below is made up of the best 20 PHP + jQuery Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure. Give [...]
Seattle 2.0 Awards
The first-ever Seattle 2.0 Awards event will take place on May 7th, 2009. Nominations have been made and the voting period will run from April 1 to 28. Awards will be given in 10 categories ranging from Best Startup to Best Social Event. The startup scene in Seattle is strong and active, but not entirely visible [...]
Links for Tuesday, March 24, 2009
John Hussman: Fed and Treasury - Putting off Hard Choices with Easy Money - “Make no mistake - we are selling off our future and the future of our children to prevent the bondholders of U.S. financial corporations from taking losses. We are using public funds to protect the bondholders of some of the most [...]
Links for Monday, March 23, 2009
Jim Kunstler: Full Commanding Denial - “I also think that circumstances will force Mr. Obama’s hand before long — specifically that a moment will arrive when he goes on TV and tells the American public that things have changed way beyond the scope of what they even imagined when they pulled the levers last fall [...]
Links for Sunday, March 22, 2009
Astronomy Buff: How Can We See Galaxies 47 Billion Light Years Away When the Universe is Only 13 Billion Years Old? - “What all of this means is that whenever you discuss the size of the universe, you need to apply a scale factor that is relevant TO THE TIME you are interested in. The [...]
Links for Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Spoon Graphics: Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices - “With Twitter quickly becoming the hottest site to be seen on, everyone wants to stand out from the crowd. There has already been a range of quality designs showcased on various sites, which has shown an emergence of trends such as the `sidebar'. Let's take [...]
Links for Monday, March 16, 2009
Linden Lab: How Meeting In Second Life Transformed IBM's Technology Elite Into Virtual World Believers - “The 200+ participants were offered pre-conference training on the basics of Second Life to make them comfortable communicating and navigating within the environment. IBM estimates the ROI for the Virtual World Conference was roughly $320,000 and that the Annual [...]
Of PL/I, Line Printers, Punch Cards, and Carriage Control
In the fall of 1979 I was living in Rockville, Maryland. I had been accepted at the University of Maryland, but decided to attend Montgomery College, right up the street from my house, instead. I wasn’t ready for that huge, sprawling campus or the large and apparently impersonal classes. I entered the computer science program, and [...]
Links for Sunday, March 15, 2009
Karl Denninger: Reserve Banking - “As the “spread” between production and net interest expense rises, the economy falters. A higher and higher percentage of the loans ultimately cannot be paid back, even productive loans, because the net interest expense over time exceeds the productive gain of the person who takes them out. The [...]
Links for Friday, March 13, 2009
Environmental Graffiti: 15 Beautiful Microscopic Images from Inside the Human Body - “Get up close and personal with your innards with these 15 amazing 3D-body shots. Almost all of the following images were captured using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), a type of electron microscope that uses a beam of high-energy electrons to scan surfaces [...]
Links for Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Jim Kunstler: Forget About “Recovery” - “he dangerous shift in public mood is liable to occur with shocking swiftness, in the manner of “phase change,” where one moment you see a bewildered bunch of flabby clown-citizens vacuously enraptured by “American Idol,” and the next moment they are transformed into a vicious mob hoisting flaming brands [...]
Links for Monday, March 9, 2009
Caleb Booker: ROI In Virtual Worlds - The New User Experience - “If we wanted to bring people in to engage in our experience, we needed to design an orientation that was going to get them there! I've broken it all down into seven basic steps.“ Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers - “If you don’t make eye contact [...]
Links for Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Industry Standard: Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon - “On the business and education side it’s very much about learning, it’s about in world training, it’s about collaboration. It’s also very much about changing work processes inside of a company, a company or an organization. Depending on who you are and what your [...]
Links for Friday, March 6, 2009
Sim On Demand - “ Sim-OnDemand Personal Virtual World Server - is a ready-to-use pre-configured packaging of OpenSim deployed on Amazon’s robust infrastructure. Sim-OnDemand comes with a GUI based launcher that makes it easy for anyone to click-launch their own virtual world.“ Studio Steel: Custom Metal and Glass - “Professional welding teacher Mimi Riley teaches ornamental [...]
Links for Thursday, March 5, 2009
Vanity Fair: Gates of Heaven: Melinda Gates - “There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household, but iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.“ Phil Windley: Guy Kawasaki: How to Drive the Competition Crazy - “Use Twitter - A bonus 11th tip. What good is [...]
Links for Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Vanity Fair: Wall Street on the Tundra - “Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth–geneticists often use them for research. They inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud.“
Links for Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: A visit To The Electronics Markets Of Shenzhen - “Shenzhen is a vibrant, bustling, young, and modern city of 8 million in southern China. Just across the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the region around it comprise one of the most active and important manufacturing centers in the world today.” [...]
Links for Monday, March 1, 2009
Robert Trigaux: How the Economic Crash May Reshape Us - “Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings where the greatest new ideas and productivity are concentrated. In America, for example, those regions include the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, the Charlotte-Atlanta corridor, the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver corridor [...]
Links for Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Christian Renaud: Traveling Well - “For what it’s worth, and there are plenty of websites who would probably argue with me on each of the following points, but here are the rules I travel by and am rarely disappointed.“ Steadfast Finances: Living Beyond Your Means: School Bus Driver Losing Her $800,000 Home to Foreclosure - “Just [...]
Links for Sunday, February 22, 2009
Catacombe: HFS Explorer - “HFSExplorer is an application that can read Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images. It can read the file systems HFS (Mac OS Standard), HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and HFSX (Mac OS Extended with case sensitive file names).“ Boston Globe: Finding the Lost City - “The settlement is so ancient that it undercuts [...]
Links for Friday, February 20, 2009
Flickr: Traffic Jam - “Often while shooting from Kerry Park, I notice a ridiculous number of airplanes flying around. Two airports lie just south of the city, so there is a substantial amount of air traffic. I wanted to convey the sheer volume in a single frame and this is the best idea I could [...]
Links for Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Big Picture: Progress on NASA’s Constellation - “Engineers are now busy refitting old facilities, running tests, building the infrastructure and working towards a planned first launch of a crew to the International Space Station in 2014.“
Links for Sunday, February 15, 2009
New Relic: Rails Application Performance Monitor - “New Relic RPM is a Ruby on Rails performance monitoring application that lets you see and understand application performance metrics in real time so you can fix Rails problems fast. RPM is intuitive.” - Via IT Management Podcast. Clever Zebra: Get The Book - “You can download the quarterly [...]
Links for Wednesday, February 11, 2009
devSnippets: Using jQuery to Style Design Elements: 20 Impressive Plugins - “Here are 20 more handy jQuery plugins that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.“ James Padolsey: New jQuery plugin: `imgPreview' - “The `imgPreview' plugin allows your users to preview an image before clicking on it and, out of necessity, will preload the image [...]
TweetGrid - Review and Suggestions
I’ve been on Twitter since the end of 2006. In that time it has grown from a curiosity to a plaything to a valuable part of my business and personal life. I can’t even begin to fully enumerate the number of different ways that it has been of value to me. From keeping track of [...]
Links for Friday, February 6, 2009
random($foo): Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites - “Friends will have heard me bemoaning this sad state of affairs - that while Rails and Django might make CRUD easier, that the ORMs weren't suitable for scaling beyond “toy” sizes, and that more importantly, they didn't seem to address almost any of the pain points of building [...]
Links for Sunday, January 25, 2009
Gnomedex 9.0 - “The Technology Conference of Inspiration and Influence: Register Now!” - I did! The Market Ticker: TARP Part Deux? Do It Right Or Don’t Do It - “The problem we face today and have since the summer of 2007 when the bubble burst is that Washington DC, heavily-influenced by the bribery of campaign contributions [...]
Microsoft Layoff Bumper Stickers
The much-rumored Microsoft layoffs finally took place last week. Let’s hope that this is a long-term positive move for them. As a long-time reader of the Mini-Microsoft blog, it is clear that they need to refine their vision, focus on their core strengths, and resist the urge to make a large bet on every last [...]
Links for Friday, January 23, 2009
Kevin Kelly: Unthinkable Futures - “This list of unthinkable futures — probabilities we tend to dismiss without thinking — was published 15 years ago in the Summer, 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Our intent was less to correctly predict the future (thus the silliness) and more to predict how unpredictable the actual [...]
Strange Loop - Hear the AWS Buzz Via The Cloud Droplets Podcast
I am trying to create a strange loop here! For the last couple of years I have been collecting articles about the Amazon Web Services and bookmarking them on the AWS Buzz feed on Delicious. As I’ve noted in the past, I devour podcasts, listening to them in my car and when I walk. A week or [...]
Please Vote for My Son Andy's AFI Video
My son Andy is a pretty cool guy. He’s now studying Astronomy and Latin American Business at the University of Washington, and he’s also spending a lot of time on his piano. He also finds the time to teach piano to about 20 students! Leaving him, as you can see from the video, way too [...]
Links for Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Oleg Burlaca: Graph Visualization for Apache Log Files - “I described just one scenario of how graph visualization can be used in apache log analysis. The intention was to create an overview report and see the whole picture, but the log file can be filtered to create some biased graphs.“ Steve Reynolds: WordPress Plugins: Implementing jQuery [...]
Links for Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Read-Write Web: Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln’s - “We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech through as well.“ OmniNerd: Automating [...]
Links for Sunday, January 18, 2009
Goodnight Bush: George W. Bush Presidential Librarium - “Dow Jones Rollercoaster - You won’t be able to keep your assets from flying out of your seats! WARNING: Do not ride if you’re planning to retire any time in the next quarter century.“ Smashing Magazine: 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience - “To help you [...]
Links for Friday, January 16, 2009
Official Second Life Blog: Second Life Residents logged nearly 400 million hours in 2008, growing 61% over 2007 - “User hours increased by 61% over 2007, highlighting the tremendous growth rate in user engagement that Second Life maintained throughout 2008. User hours increased steadily each quarter, culminating in a record-setting 112 million user hours [...]
Links for Thursday, January 15, 2009
Michael Rozeff: How to Steal Billions in Plain View: Bernanke's Robber Banks - “Bernanke urges Congress to absorb the bad loans. The details of his three alternative plans are secondary to the fact that they all ask that others pay for the losses that the bankers caused, or else they involve the government in a [...]
Links for Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Profy: Drowned in Emails? Just Drop Them! - “Usually we begin to skip some tasks only when they actually turn into something totally unmanageable but if they can be ignored when we don't have time for them, chances are they don't deserve paying attention to from the very beginning - and leaving more time for [...]
Links for Monday, January 12, 2008
Business Communicators of Second Life: 7 Days Magic Bakery Integrated Marketing Campaign Begins in Second Life - “The pre-production storyboarding, concept art and voice-over scripting took 8 weeks ¿ a bit more than half of the total production time. The 7 Days team were up to their elbows in commitment with the VP of [...]
Links for Sunday, January 11, 2009
Live Leak: Double Decker Smart Car - “The elk test was developed in Sweden, where swerving to avoid moose is part of everyday driving.“ LiquidWare: Open Source Electronics - “Shop for open-source hardware modules and to build your own gadgets.“ Replicator: Custom Manufacturing Videos: 1-9-08 - “Great time lapse video of a human face being milled from [...]
Links for Wednesday, January 7, 2009
OpenSim: Hypergrid - “The hypergrid is an extension to opensim that allows you to link your opensim to other opensims on the internet, and that supports seamless agent transfers among those opensims. It can be used both in standalone mode and in grid mode. The hypergrid is effectively supporting the emergence of a Web of [...]
Links for Monday, January 5, 2009
United Sailing Sims: Sailing, Flying, Scuba, Racing & More - “The residents and yacht clubs of the USS have been on the leading edge of developing sailing in Second Life. Whether racing, cruising, scuba diving, or surfing is your thing, the residents of the USS have worked to provide wonderful water recreational opportunties for [...]
Links for Sunday, January 4, 2009
Ted Nelson: Geeks Bearing Gifts - “Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you’ll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson’s telling of computer history, its personalities and infights.“ Zona Capalini: Installing OpenSim in Windows XP with MySQL - “The purpose of this post is to present [...]
Tarpipe Rocks - A Quick Review!
Yesterday I quickly link-blogged about Tarpipe and WireIt. Tarpipe is a very interesting visual programming tool and WireIt was used to build its user interface. Today I had a chance to spend some time experimenting with Tarpipe and I have to say that I am intrigued by the concept and impressed by the implementation. Modeled after [...]
Links for Tuesday, December 30, 2008
WireIt: A JavaScript Wiring Library - “ WireIt is an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages or graphical modeling.“ Tarpipe - “You can create tarpipe worfklows that will be executed whenever you trigger a specific event, like a received email message or a call to our API. To [...]
Links for Sunday, December 28, 2008
What’s My Pass: The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time - “To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has [...]
Links for Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Don MacAskill: Great Things Afoot in the MySQL Community - “For anyone who lives and dies by MySQL and InnoDB, things are finally starting to heat up and get interesting.“ MySQL Performance Blog: Announcing Percona XtraDB Storage Engine - “Percona XtraDB includes all of InnoDB's ACID-compliant design and advanced MVCC architecture, and adds features, more tunability, [...]
Links for Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Housing Bubble Blog - “Finally reaching out to the consumer the Fed has decided that it is now buying: Old Lotto tickets, checks from closed accounts, unpaid utility bills, cereal box lids, and even monopoly money in exchange for cash at face value minus a 'small haircut'. The fourteen trillion dollar plan will be [...]
Links for Monday, December 15, 2008
OpenSim Web Interface - “This is an PHP Web Interface for OpenSim (Open Simulator Project), it allows grid citizens to create User Accounts to access the grid. Grid Owners can also manage all users for the grid. with an very powerfull CMS system included. “ Foxit Reader for Windows - “Foxit Reader is a free PDF document [...]
Links for Thursday, November 27, 2008
Warren Buffett: 10 Ways to Get Rich - “When you first make money, you may be tempted to spend it. Don’t. Instead, reinvest the profits. Buffett learned this early on. In high school, he and a pal bought a pinball machine to pun in a barbershop. With the money they earned, they bought more machines [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Martin Weiss: Citigroup collapses! Banking Shutdown Possible - “The potential havoc that might be caused by a Citigroup failure, with bets that involve five times more money than Lehman's – and the financial holocaust that might be caused by a JPMorgan failure with close to 13 times more than Lehman – boggles the imagination. How [...]
Links for Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Credit Loan Blog: America's Debt to Income Ratio as Compared with Other Countries - “If you were to boil down what each person in this country contributed to the nation's income vs. debt ratio, the results would be startling. We would have to take into consideration the nation's population to better understand this. And some [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 19, 2008
TeachStreet Blog: San Francisco Bay Area - Here we come! - “At the end of a long week fueled by lattes and cuties (aka California clementines), it's official. TeachStreet is now live in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 65,000 new classes, instructors, teachers, tutors, and coaches. Woo-hooo!!” - Awesome, congratulations! Marcelo Calbucci : Finding [...]
Links for Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Virtual Worlds News: Quick Stat: KPMG Virtual Job Fair Draws 20k Registrants - “KPMG, a network of firms providing audit, tax and advisory service, held a 48-hour virtual jobs fair in Unisfair in September that drew 20,000 registrants and generated 9,300 applications for jobs at 45 KPMG member firms representing over 40 countries.“ Seattle’s Union Gospel [...]
Links for Monday, November 17, 2008
Phil Burns: Catching Up - “I burned out on life online and pretty much burned out on life. Getting through this has been the toughest thing I've ever had to do, and it's still going. As much as I love blogging, I had to huddle in a corner for a while to protect [...]
Links for Sunday, November 16, 2008
The Big Picture: Peering Into the Micro World - “For visualizing the scale, most measurements below are in microns - one micron is a millionth of a meter - human hair is approximately 100 microns thick. ” - Stunning pictures, don’t miss!
Using Google Docs Spreadsheet To Compute Recipe Costs
My teenage daughter Bianca is hoping to go to Spain next year for a semester of study abroad. The program is kind of pricey and we told her that she would have to raise half of the money herself. Since she’s a very accomplished cook and baker, she’s going to sell some tasty baked goods [...]
Links for Friday, November 14, 2008
Study Hacks: The Art of Speaking - “If you want to become a world class speaker, try to deploy Winston's Star. A five-point checklist of things to make your talk extra memorable.“ Mario Menti: Second Life Survey Bot With IronPython and Libsecondlife - “Nothing too earth-shattering here, reusing much of my previous prototypes, but I think [...]
Links for Thursday, November 13, 2008
AlterNet: Forget Red vs. Blue — It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda - “We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists [...]
Links for Friday, November 7, 2008
College Zapps - “CollegeZapps is the fast and easy way to apply to more than 1,100 four-year colleges!“ National Geographic News: Unknown “Structures” Tugging at Universe, Study Says - “The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger–a multiverse–and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe [...]
Links for Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Geekpreneur: Managing Your Career With Mind Maps - “If you find yourself in the state of mind of not knowing what to do long-term, consider using a mind map for career planning. Whether you're a freelancer trying to supplement your income with online and/or offline gigs, or you're transitioning between careers, you can apply the [...]
Links for Sunday, November 2, 2008
Seeking Alpha: The Shallowest Generation - “Based on the estimated $2 trillion of losses that our banks have generated, the CEOs certainly deserved annual pay 500 times as high as the average worker. There is no way an “average” worker could possibly be talented enough to lose $2 trillion. You would need to be truly [...]
Links for Thursday, October 30, 2008
Merrill Lynch US Economics: The Frugal Future - “Mean Reverting This Chart Points To A 30% Decline In Home Prices.“ Desktop Factory: Our Product - “The Desktop Factory 3D printer has a build speed comparable to existing 3D printing technologies, and produces robust parts that are strong enough to be thrown across a conference room table!“ Don [...]
Links for Monday, October 27, 2008
Scripting Your World - “Scripting Your World is the complete scripting introduction for anyone who wants to learn how to make their Second Life objects move, interact, and change. This book, written by an expert team of programmers, covers every aspect of LSL, from the basics of avatar movement and communication to physics and special [...]
Links for Monday, October 20, 2008
Tim Ferris: The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now - “Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers should strive to eliminate. The bullets are followed by more detailed descriptions. Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items.“ Linden Lab: LSL HTTP [...]
Links for Tuesday, October 14, 2008
BBC News: Your Credit Crunch Jokes - “BBC News website readers have been sending us their own humorous views about the credit crunch.“ Digital Urban: Cellular Automaton and Agents in Second Life: Game of Life, Segregation and Evacuation Simulation - “These are perhaps early steps but the ability to integrate human controlled avatars into models of [...]
London Eye Street Performers
I just got back from a week-long trip to London. After a busy working week, I spent Saturday walking around. The weather was perfect and I had some good tunes on my iPod, so I walked and walked and walked, a total of over 12.5 miles. My journey took me past the London Eye on the [...]
Links for Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Econ Steve: The Best Dang Blog Post In A While - “It is not about partisan politics, but the general feeling that our perception of America - as a collection of small towns - is not what it really is. U.S., like the rest of the world, is urbanizing.“ Sad Guys On Trading Floors - “Turning [...]
Funny Juxtaposition in Inbox
My sons Andy and Stephen are attending the University of Washington. The new semester started a week or two ago. Of course they were quick to email their tuition bills to me: I found this entertaining. I am happy to invest in their futures and didn’t mind paying the bills at all. And yes, for you eagle-eyed [...]
Links for Thursday, October 2, 2008
Hank Williams: You Really Can’t Get Something for Nothing - “We have a market that is driven by debt that no one understands, and by trading activity run by software programs that no one understands. We have created a hive. It operates with a collective mind, but a mind like that of an adolescent or [...]
Links for Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Brent Ozar: - “To my readers who are traveling to one of the upcoming fall conferences, here's a few of my favorite travel tips.“ Mind Mapping Software Blog: 8 Tips For Effective Presentations With Mind Mapping Software - “Most of the top mind mapping software programs now offer a presentation mode, which enable you [...]
Links for Friday, September 25, 2008
The Geek Stuff: Turbocharge PuTTY with 12 Powerful Add-Ons - “ have provided list of 12 powerful PuTTY add-ons with screenshots, that will solve few shortcomings of the original PuTTY. Play around with these add-ons and choose the one that suites your need.“ Igvita.com: Custom PuTTY Color Schemes - “I can’t help myself, I seem [...]
Links for Sunday, September 21, 2008
Karl Denninger: The Mother of All Frauds - “If Paulson and his successor decide to, they could literally cycle all $5.3 trillion of Fannie and Freddie’s debt through this scheme, potentially sticking the taxpayer for 20% or more of the total, plus as much private debt on various bank balance sheets as they can manage [...]
Links for Saturday, September 20, 2008
William Greider: Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle - “If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. “ Steve Fraser: Wall St. And Washington - “The government must figure out how to deploy its power to [...]
Links for Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Bluff: Beautiful graphs in JavaScript - “To draw a graph, you create a new Bluff graph object using the id of a canvas element on the page, set some options, add the data and labels, then tell the graph to draw. “ Box: The Figure Description Language - “Box is a vector graphics language developed to [...]
Links for Monday, September 15, 2008
5 Min Life Videopedia: Don McMillan: How Not to Use PowerPoint - “Number one. People tend to put every word they are going to use on their PowerPoint slides.“
Links for Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Greg Verdino: Social Media to the Power of 7 Squared - “Before you do anything, you need to listen tothe blogosphere. You need to understand who is talking about your clients'sbrands, what they're saying and what the impacts of those conversations are. But this principle runs deeper than that.” - Be sure to click through [...]
Links for Monday, September 8, 2008
Peter Laird: Visual Map of the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS Markets: September 2008 Update - “Below is the visual map as promised. An explanation of each category and a full clickable URL list of the solutions is offered below the map.“ Chris Brogan: Free eBook on Personal Branding - “personal branding ebook I've compiled a free ebook on [...]
Links for Saturday, September 6, 2008
Engineering Rapleaf: Goodbye MapReduce, Hello Cascading - “Internally, Cascading translates the pipe assembly into a series of MapReduce jobs. The taps specify the input and output formats along with the input and output paths. Cascading manages all the intermediate data necessary to get a sequence of MapReduce jobs to communicate.“ Cascading - “Cascading is a feature [...]
Links for Friday, September 5, 2008
Meetup: Using Second Life For Business Collaboration - “his meet-up will be in-world. If you are using Second Life in your work environment or you see ways you could use it at work, but are facing obstacles for success come and discuss them with the group.“
Links for Thursday, August 28, 2008
Mark Bao: 11 Things I Learned From Speaking and Networking at Gnomedex - “The way I'm going to look at this from now on is to think of the entire audience not as 200 people but a person directly in front of you that you're demoing your deck to. The seats are empty.“ FriendFeed: Simple Update [...]