Jeff Barr’s Blog

• 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. “

• 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 be honest with you, and we’ll spend that last hour working on your plans, or whatever. Then, when you’ve started your company and booked your first $1,000 in revenues, I’ll give you $700 back. “
• OnOrbit: Concrete Phase of Runway Begins at Spaceport America - “Measuring 10,000 feet long by 200 feet wide, the runway is designed to support nearly every aircraft in the world, as well as the day-to-day space tourism and payload launch operations like those for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The large concrete runway will accommodate returning launch vehicles, fly-back rocket boosters and other space launch and training vehicles.“
• Second Life Blogs: Second Life Viewer 2 Beta, Now Available - “We looked carefully at the experience design of other successful social media and technology platforms–such as the web browser, Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, etc.–and the key elements that enabled them to reach mass adoption. You’ll see much of that thinking baked into new Viewer 2 experience design. Our primary goal was to create a more consumer-friendly viewer–an imperative to bring in a new wave of Second Life Residents.“
• Second Life Blogs: Shared Media: Bringing the Web Inworld with Viewer 2 - “Second Life Shared Media, a new Viewer 2 capability, makes sharing standard Web-based media in Second Life easy and seamless. It enables content creators to make more compelling, interactive experiences. Basically, Shared Media brings the Internet inworld. For the more technically inclined, what this means is that you can now put media textures on any prim in Second Life. “
• Bunnie’s Blog: On MicroSD Problems - “Sample 6: This is a SanDisk card bought on the open market from a sketchy shop run by a sassy chain-smoking girl who wouldn’t stop texting on her mobile.“

• 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 Second Life, by converting avatar movement (walk, rotate, look around) to clicks and drags on a surrounding Street View display. Sounds doable.“
• Makedo: What is Makedo? - “Makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.“

• 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: Google Apps Script - “Google Web Scripts gives users a new level of control over Google products. Now you can access and control Google Spreadsheets and other products via JavaScript scripts you can write yourself and share with others. Unlike browser-based JavaScript, the scripts you write run directly on Google servers in order to provide direct access to the products they control.“
• Second Life Blog: Prototyping Real World Museum Exhibits in Second Life at The Tech - “As you can probably imagine, museums are challenged to develop very complex installations that not only have to be informative but interactive as well. This especially applies to science and technology museums that rely less on unique artifacts and more on interactivity. So the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funded this idea in 2007 (that’s Gordon Moore as in Moore’s Law). Basically they asked, what if you could use Second Life to prototype exhibits with simultaneous input from experts and casual visitors as well?“
• The Tech Virtual: Rapid Prototyping an Entire Museum Gallery - “The completed room is nearly indistinguishable in photographs from the real room without close inspection. “

• 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 hackable items — for instance, a sink or a bicycle — which could be recombined into new inventions. The system’s starting point is a 4×4cm grid that all components must accommodate.“
• Open Structures - “The OS (OpenStructures) project explores the possibility of a modular construction model where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of one shared geometrical grid. It initiates a kind of collaborative Meccano to which everybody can contribute parts, components and structures.“
• GigaOm: How Digg Found a Way to Make Money - “Digg Ads as a whole see about a 1 percent click-through rate, but what’s interesting is the spread between more successful ads and less successful ones. Campaigns that mimic the style of Digg — using a numbered list, for example, or pointing to articles rather than product information — were much more effective, with up to 4 percent CTRs compared to 0.3 or 0.4 for the worst-performing Digg Ads. “

• 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 and Mac OSX.“
• Igor Ostrovsky: What Really Happens When Your Navigate to a URL - “As a software developer, you certainly have a high-level picture of how web apps work and what kinds of technologies are involved: the browser, HTTP, HTML, web server, request handlers, and so on. In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL.” - Pay attention, this will be on the test.
• Visible Banking: AllState Runs a Virtual Career Fair Today + Financial Institutions Leverage Virtual Worlds & Online Games to Innovate in Recruitment - “Even in the current context, especially in the current context, it is critical for financial institutions to be seen as innovative to attract the best talent out there. But HR Teams are challenged to achieve their ambitious targets with smaller budget. It is time to be smarter, and embrace social media to initiate conversations, increase your reach, change brand perception, and eventually convince your future leaders to join your organization.“
• Evil Mad Science: Peggy 2LE Light Emitting Pegboard Kit - “Peggy LE 2 provides a quick, easy, powerful and efficient way to drive a lot of LEDs– up to 625– in a matrix designed for 5 mm LEDs. You can make an LED sign for your window, a geeky valentine for your sweetie, one bad-ass birthday card, freak the holy bejesus out of Boston, or instigate the next generation of low-pixel-count video games.“
• NASA Image Gallery: Apollo 4 On the Pad - Direct link to high resolution photo.
• NASA Image Gallery: Apollo 12 On the Pad - Direct link to a really nice high resolution photo.
• Second Life Blogs: Prototyping Environment in SL for Dow Chemical: Three Questions with Robert Emory from Scott & Miller Group - “Dow Chemical purchased a large sponsorship at one of their most important trade shows, the 2009 National Plastics Exposition in Chicago. Their sponsorship included an enormous exhibit space—a 36,000 square-foot ballroom and Scott & Miller, as their marketing agency of record, were asked to design the space. Now, 36,000 square feet is a very large space that needed to be thoughtfully planned, from an experience design perspective. So, the Scott & Miller team decided to build a prototype of several concepts in Second Life and walk the client through to evaluate the layout and design.“
• PBS: NOVA: Ghosts of Macchu Picchu - “There were probably three or four things that the Incas did simultaneously. One, they worked very hard in diplomacy, negotiating relationships with neighbors or with people who were targets for incorporation into their expanding territory, and they tried to work out amicable relationships through gift exchanges, marital exchanges, or political alliances. Failing that, they would threaten those people with military conquest, and that having failed, they would actually undertake military conquest. So there was a combination of diplomacy and inducement, coercion, and militarism all wrapped up into one strategic package.“

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 as Kitchen Town, Kappabashi consist of about 8 blocks of stores selling kitchen and restaurant supplies of every possible size, shape, and color. There are stores with a wide variety of goods (breadth) and others with a wide variety of one thing (depth). Stores that sell nothing but display cases, knives, signs, packaging, plastic food, and so forth. The entrance to Kappabashi is marked by the giant chef, shown in the picture at right.

Anyway, I picked up the things that my wife had asked for, and got back on the subway to return. I was listening to Sensored, Cory Doctorow’s newest podcast. In the introduction, Cory says that his daughter had recently turned two and that they celebrated with ice cream at London’s Fortnum and Mason.

Five or six minutes later, a woman boarded the train and sat down across from me. To my astonishment, she was carrying a bag labeled Fortnum and Mason! I was so surprised that I actually rewound the podcast to make sure that this was the name that Cory had mentioned. I had never heard of this shop before yesterday and the name was unfamiliar to me. This must be a billion to one coincidence.

Now that’s a case of synchronicity! This event also gave me a great idea for a sci-fi story. I need to think it through a bit more, but I may soon realize my dream of writing some fiction.

I will be heading to London next month for some talks and meetings. If I run into Cory, that would take the oddness to a whole new level!

• 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 Bravo provides residential modular pizza oven kits constructed from both refractory material and brick. Each Forno Bravo oven kit features a circular dome, enclosed refractory cooking floor, vent, stainless steel chimney, door high temperature mortar, and complete dome and floor insulation. Everything you need to assemble a pizza oven at your house—you provide the stand and enclosure.“
• The Kitchen: Tsukiji Fish Market - “The Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo is the world’s largest wholesale fish market. Strategically located near the mouth of the Sumida River, it is convenient for fishermen who sail up from Tokyo Bay to offload the day’s catch.“

• 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 free, redistributable, ready to use set of digital camera software applications for Unix-like systems, written by a whole team of dedicated volunteers around the world. It supports more than 1100 cameras.“
• Granite Bay Software: Time-lapse Software for Canon Digital Cameras - “In the past time-lapse photography was done with very expensive film cameras, but with digital photography it has become much cheaper and easier. If you have a Canon digital camera, you can create interesting and beautiful time-lapse videos.“
• ffmpeg - “FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library. “
• Audadcity - “Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.“
• VirtualDub - “VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.“

• 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 Foresight Institute has announced its Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize to design and build a better RepRap. There is an interim prize of $20,000, and a grand prize of $80,000. They consulted with the core RepRap team before the announcement and we were initially concerned that the prizes might drive developers to secrecy in order to give themselves a competitive edge.“
• Alex Bosworth: Building HTML5 Webapps - “In the revamp of TweetBe.at and for another contract project for the iPhone browser I’ve been working a ton with new HTML5 (+CSS3) features, and I’m finding them very very useful in building rich web applications, although new capabilities are not without their perils.“

• 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 technique you’ve seen weathermen use for years to superimpose an image behind you – triggering on the consistent color such as green or blue.“
• TopUp: The #1 Javascript Pop Up / Lightbox - “TopUp is an easy to use Javascript library for unobtrusively displaying images and webpages in a Web 2.0 approach of popups. “
• Wiseheart Design: The Demise of Plain CSS: Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph - “Sass is essentially a programming language for designers. It is extremely limited when compared with other languages, but it does a magnificent job of translating the core concepts of a programming language in a way that makes sense for styling a document.“
• Sass: Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets - “Sass makes CSS fun again. Sass is CSS, plus nested rules, variables, mixins, and more, all in a concise, readable syntax.“

• 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 believe we’ve made a pretty dramatic step forward.“
• Lifehacker: Learn Proper Sushi Etiquette to Make a Good Impression - “Like many aspects of Japanese culture, there’s a certain etiquette to eating sushi. Take the time to peruse these helpful tips so you can make the best impression on your sushi chef or dining companions the next time you’re downing some maki“
• OpenShot: OpenShot 1.0 Has Arrived! - “I am proud to announce that OpenShot Video Editor 1.0 has just been released! This release is jam-packed full of new features, bug fixes, and some shiny new graphics! We hope you enjoy it!“

• 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: meetings, conferences, and learning and training.“

• 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, and intermittent data loss, we gave up and rolled back to 4.1, all thoroughly traumatized by the experience. This is the story of our successful second attempt, and all the things we learned and checked and verified in order to make it successful.“

• 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 Life to a larger community of developers“
• Caleb Booker: Virtual Worlds as Green Workplaces? - “At a recent panel discussion in Second Life, hosted by the US Department of State, experts from industry and the non-profit world pondered some fairly topical questions: to tele-commute OR not to tele-commute?“

• 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“

• 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 that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport.“
• Lifehacker: Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010 - “What good is all the computing power of the pre-1960s world sitting on your lap if you’re not using it to make college life easier? The following is a guide for students everywhere that want to spend less time on the tedious stuff, and more time on the things like study and research that actually produce results.“
• Machinimatrix: Primstars - “This is a short film about a builder who receives the order to create a five pointed star. Unfortunately she has not the slightest idea how to manage this built in the given time. So she activates her strongest weapon against lack of knowledge (again) …“

• The Oatmeal: Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling - “Its: This is indicating possession.“

• 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.“
• The Neologist: Facts - “Stephen Barr is really smart. He helped me with my latest art project. Clever guy!” Seconded!

• 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 incessant demands for free government services, our children will most likely get revenge by not providing us with any grandchildren.“
• Six Minutes: The 25 Public Speaking Skills Every Speaker Must Have - “7. Start strong and close stronger – The body of your presentation should be strong too, but your audience will remember your first and last words (if, indeed, they remember anything at all).“