Jeff Barr’s Blog

7/29/2010

Links for Thursday, July 29, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 9:06 am
  • 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 leave it at that
  • Alyssa Royce: Practice Safe Business - Use Protection! - “I’m never sure whether trust plays too great or too small a role in our business relationships. That’s likely because it means different things to different people, which is part of the problem. But, at the end of the day, having unprotected business isn’t a whole lot smarter than having unprotected sex.
  • Barry Ritholtz: Updating the Case Shiller 100 Chart & Forecast - “I asked Steve to update Shiller’s NYT chart, now that much of the government intervention has run its course. There is still massive Federal Reserve subsidies in the form of record low rates. But the short term bounce caused by HAMP, Foreclosure abatements and first time home buyers tax credits are mostly over.
  • Recave: 49 Futurama-Inspired Artworks - “Futurama is an animated show created by Matt Groening (of The Simpsons). The series follows the adventures of a late 20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who, after being unwittingly cryogenically frozen for a thousand years, finds employment at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company in the retrofuturistic 31st-century. We present 40 great artworks inspired by the Show.
  • Hubspot Blog: 4 Business Blogging Lessons From Google’s Chief Blogger - “Don’t just wait till you have a big announcement. However, the more often you post, the higher the demand for resources. The people who work on it day in and day out MUST be at ease. If it feels like homework or takes too many revisions, they’re not the right ones to do it.
  • Cory Ondrejka: Angry Dinosaurs - “This was a fun talk to put together. Thank you to Wharton for the chance to speak and great engagement from the audience!
  • CreatePDF - “Just type in your URL below and click ‘Create PDF’
  • Make: Automatic Time-Lapse Photography of a MakerBot Print - “Marty McGuire has been hard at work teaching his Makerbot to take automatic time-lapse videos as it prints parts. To achieve this, he started by hacking a digital camera using CHDK, then wiring it up so that the MakerBot can cause it to take a picture. He’s still working on a tutorial to document the process, but the first results look great!
  • Computer History Museum: MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code - “For those who want to see how it worked “under the hood”, we are pleased, with the permission of Apple Inc., to make available the original program source code of MacPaint and the underlying QuickDraw graphics library.
  • Focus: WTF is HTML5 - “HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes. Here are the most important of them.” - Via Hiten.

7/18/2010

Links for Monday, July 19, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 9:28 pm
  • 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 done for some of our customers in the past.
  • nxtwallet: Nxt-WALL-E-Transformable - “The Lego NXT wall-e transformable robot is fully self controlled It uses Lego Mindstorms programming environment. It is for all I know the first Lego build look-alike wall-e which is capable to transform automated. This transformation is quite similar to the way the original wall-e does it.
  • Make: Controlling a Lego Robot With an Arduino - “MAKE subscriber Clinton Blackmore of Alberta wrote in to share a project he’s working on: NXT I2C Devices for Arduino, which aims to let you control Lego actuators and sensors using a Mindsensors motor multiplexer (NXTMMX) controlled by an Arduino — no NXT brick required.
  • Deepak Singh: Recommendations: Data-Intensive Text Processing With Mapreduce - “Tom White’s book is a great place to start if you have an interest in the framework itself, but the book I wanted to point out was Jimmy Lin’s book on Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce (there is a pre-production PDF of the book from the homepage) and it’s a great dive into algorithm design.
  • Brand X Daily: Rock star via avatar on ‘Second Life’: ‘It’s Facebook on steroids.’ - “Despite declining media coverage after a few years of overexposure, Second Life lives on, and within its virtual borders a music scene has been thriving, with independent artists such as Lyons leading the charge. These artists are earning livings, promoting their music and supporting causes they believe in by performing in this virtual space, which has approximately 1 million users each month.
  • YouTube: Across The Universe: Craig Lyons - “This video features an international cast & crew of professionals and fans in a highly collaborative effort, working simultaneously from all corners of the globe via the world’s largest free-content virtual platform. We hope it illuminates our commitment to environmental consciousness while demonstrating the limitless possibilities of low-impact filming.
  • Harvard Business Review: 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life - “It’s time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline. Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet’s transformative potential opens up:
  • Drew Houston: Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned - “100,000 -> many millions of users in 18 months since launch. No ad spend.
  • Krishna Shankar: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to NOSQL v1.0 - “Goal: Understand and get a broader technology view of NOSQL eco system. A slice of the NOSQL eco system - explore further. Balancer between discussion & hands-on (~80-20).
  • nTeams: Engage. Inspire. Innovate. - “Building a virtual world for distributed teams to innovate together every day.
  • Janet Thaler: What I LOVE/HATE about Social Media - “People are fond of saying something like this: if you’re not getting so many retweets or comments or followers on Twitter, you suck. You’re boring. You’re irreverent. This line of thinking has made me want to stop blogging and tweeting so many times. I start to judge myself by these numbers.

Links for Sunday, July 18, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 7:18 pm
  • 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 to share it as soon as possible. Here are the answers to the most common questions.
  • Today Moms: Five Secrets to Stop the Entitlement Epicdemic - “Many parents are frustrated these days by a feeling of entitlement by today’s youth. Whether it’s getting almost anything they ask for or expecting everything to be done for them, today’s kids have learned how to get their way and the problem is out of control like a run-away train.
  • MSNBC: Tough Lesson in High School Econ - “Students graduating from high school this spring may be collecting their diplomas just in time, leaving institutions that are being badly weakened by the nation’s economic downturn.
  • Inferno Catering: Authentic and Fresh - “Our pizza dough is made fresh for each event from the finest Neapolitan Caputo flour. Staying true to Neapolitan tradition we use only flour, yeast, salt and water in our dough. Each individual pizza is hand pinched and made fresh right in front of our guest’s eyes and not rolled with a rolling pin.
  • ArchVirtual: H-Town Goes Live! - “H-Town, the OpenSim neighborhood previously posted HERE, is now open to the public! This is a most impressive application of building real-world architecture using the OpenSim platform, and by far the largest expanse of contiguous virtual land dedicated to it, covering 3 full sims featuring 8 full-size replicas of real-world homes they well on the Hometta website.
  • Corey Goldberg: 6 Command Line Tools for Linux Performance Monitoring - “So you need to monitor a Linux system for performance metrics… CPU, Memory, Network, Disk, etc. Here are 6 of my favorite command line tools for monitoring a Linux system from the command line.
  • News at Princeton: 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks: Jeff Bezos - “What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
  • Dstat: Versatile Resource Statistics Tool - “Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.
  • Bad Astronomy Blog: Hubble Sees Spectacular Star Birth and Death - “This is an image of NGC 3603, a vast cloud of gas and dust that is cranking out stars like no one’s business. It’s one of the busiest stellar nurseries in our entire galaxy. That cluster of stars in the center has thousands of newly-born stars in it, including one named NGC 3603A. This bruiser is the most massive star ever to have its mass directly measured: it is a whopping 116 times heftier than the Sun. That’s about as massive as a star can get without tearing itself apart!

7/13/2010

Seattle + Eastside Movies 2010 - Now in Convenient Calendar Form

Filed under: Seattle — jeff @ 7:02 am

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:

7/11/2010

Links for Sunday, July 11, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 3:42 pm
  • 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 world.
  • Contraptor: Open Source DIY Rapid Hardware Prototyping - “Contraptor is a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping.
  • Seattle 2.0: Geek Week in Seattle - “I just wanted to let everyone know that there’s a neat movement occurring in Seattle. GeekWeek is happening the week of Aug 13 to Aug 20, 2010. The week is bookended on one side by TechStars inaugural office opening in South Lake Union : And on the other side: Gnomedex.
  • Stanford University: Protovis - “Protovis composes custom views of data with simple marks such as bars and dots. Unlike low-level graphics libraries that quickly become tedious for visualization, Protovis defines marks through dynamic properties that encode data, allowing inheritance, scales and layouts to simplify construction.
  • Seattle Date Night - “After moving in together in 2008, Brett and Mandy decided that, although they spent every waking day together (literally), they felt it was important to pick one day a week to actually spend QUALITY, pre-planned, thought-out time together…
  • Queen of Seattle: Paddle Wheel Cruises - “Relive the days of the 1890’s Gold Rush when fortune seekers journeyed from Seattle to the Yukon Territory and paddle wheelers plied the waters of Alaska’s Yukon River. Blending the past and present, your narrated cruise aboard the largest steam powered paddle wheeler west of the Mississippi, will include fun and historical information about this period in Seattle history, along with fascinating facts about the sights you will be seeing.
  • The Electric Boat Company: Boat Rentals - “Come and rent an Electric “Duffy” boat on beautiful Lake Union. Our boats are 21′ long and seat a maximum of 10 adults comfortably! Be your own captain. The boats are equipped with two tables, a CD player and sound system and plush leather seats. They are fully enclosed and heated or the windows can be opened for those beautiful Seattle days as well!
  • Gizmo’s Zone: A Place for Movement, Robot Design, and Innovation - “Offering various mechanical parts and accessories to our customers, automation engineers, researchers, robot enthusiasts, railroading hobbyist and modelers to build their own gizmos. Also, we introduce some unique house-brand products here, hoping to provide you more choices to make your things a little easier, smaller and cheaper.
  • TheJit: JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - “The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

7/3/2010

Seattle + Eastside Outdoor Movies - Summer 2010

Filed under: Seattle — jeff @ 8:49 am

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 set.

Here’s a roundup for the summer of 2010 in Seattle and the Eastside. Some of these locations are pet-friendly, in case your dog likes to watch movies:

Enjoy!

6/29/2010

Vex-Based Webcam Platform

Filed under: General, Syndication — jeff @ 6:41 am

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 put myself in front of an interesting background scene) and I have purchased a nice Logitech webcam.

The green screen is a simple piece of fabric from EEFX. They sell “remnants” for very reasonable prices. The remnants are very small when compared to the giant pieces that they sell to their commercial customers, but are perfectly adequate for use in a home studio.

I want to be able to use the same webcam to record myself while sitting at the desk or standing in front of the green screen. I explored a number of different ways to do this and finally decided to use some Vex Robotics parts to build a webcam platform that I could activate using the Vex remote control. Years and years ago, Radio Shack dumped their entire inventory of Vex parts at half price and I picked up everything I could find and tucked them away on a shelf.

Here’s what I came up with:

Here are two videos of the platform in operation:

And here’s the view from the camera as it pans up and down in front of one of my shelves of programming books:

I still have room to make this better, and I want to add a third servo so that I can rotate it, but I am pretty happy with my progress to date! Stay tuned for some AWS videos starting next month.

6/28/2010

Links for Monday, June 28, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 5:27 am

6/21/2010

Links for Monday, June 21, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 3:50 pm
  • 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 of the recent financial innovation is that thinking embedded in mathematics and physics could be directly adapted to markets. A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties.
  • Resources for Science Fiction Writers: 10 Laws of Good Science Fiction - “One of the things that makes SF so compelling is that there is a feeling that what we read is real. It may be happening to fictional characters in a fictional situation, but the science and technology are a very real and important part of a reality that affects our lives.
  • Tout Your Product - “Tired of re-writing the same e-mails? Reach out to potential customers, journalists, and bloggers faster using Tout.

6/12/2010

Links for Sunday, June 13, 2010

Filed under: 1, Second Life — jeff @ 5:51 pm
  • 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 collection of the most important user-interface components for modern websites. Used by large sites all over the world.
  • lsyncd: Live Syncing (Mirror) Daemon - “Lsyncd uses rsync to synchronize local directories with a remote machine running rsyncd. Lsyncd watches multiple directories trees through inotify. The first step after adding the watches is to rsync all directories with the remote host, and then sync single file by collecting the inotify events
  • Warehouse Deals by Amazon - “Deep discounts on open-box and like-new products from Amazon.com .

6/11/2010

Links for Saturday, June 12, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 3:05 pm
  • 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 at Amazon’s brand new Van Vorst Meeting Center in South Lake Union for an afternoon of learning, openspace, hacking and, of course, pizza!

5/31/2010

Links for Monday, May 31, 2010

Filed under: General — jeff @ 10:06 pm
  • 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 Seattle, Washington from August 19 – 21, 2010.
  • The Heart of Innovation: 20 Ways to See the Invisible - “Given our tendency to miss what’s right in front of us, is there a way to increase our ability to see the invisible?
  • The Automatic Earth: Lent, Spent, and Guaranteed - “This thing can blow up in our faces any moment now, with one fire igniting another across countries and within them. There’s just too many people falling by too many waysides, and too many of them will very simply not go gently into that night without a fight.

5/25/2010

Wanted: Brick Oven Builder in Seattle

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 5:22 pm

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 the chopping board sets the pace.

We love to make pizza from scratch. For years we’ve looked at pictures of various wood-fired pizza ovens and told ourselves that we’d buy or build one sooner or later. Well, it is now later and we really want one now (in time for the summer of 2010). We want something like The Pompeii Oven, large enough to let us cook pizza, bread, and other goodies.

If you are in the Seattle area and if you’ve built and used one of these before, I’d like to talk to you ASAP. I’ve got the cash, the backyard, and the appetite. I’d like to see some pictures of your work and I’d like to talk to one or two of your clients.

Email me (jeff@vertexdev.com) and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

I know that there are plenty of “build your own oven” guides online. I’ve read several of them and I’m positive that I don’t have the necessary mechanical or artistic skills. I want the finished product to be sturdy, functional (from what I’ve read it is necessary to get the proportions just right), and attractive.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be able to help me in my quest.

5/3/2010

Heading Back to School

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 8:06 am

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 — start a class, meet the professor and the other students, go to class each week, study, learn, succeed (hopefully), and then wrap it up at the end.

I looked in to the University of Washington’s Technology Management MBA program last year. It is a good program, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I decided that I was more interested in enhancing my existing skill set than in learning entirely new skills.

A few years ago I was invited to join the advisory board of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. The advisory board met each quarter to review the state of the program and to make recommendations to the staff and faculty.

As part of the planning for each quarter, program director Hanson Hosein would send around the course list. Last fall I looked at it and thought that every last one of the courses looked interesting. Hanson said that I was welcome to sit in on a class or two and I considered doing just that. However, I gave the whole matter some thought and decided that it was time to go back to school, and applied to the MCDM program!

I spent some time going through the application process — getting letters of recommendation, ordering transcripts from schools that I’d attended over 25 years ago, and writing a statement of intent. I got it all in by the deadline, and awaited the response.

I received notification last week that I had been accepted, and I am really looking forward to becoming a student at the ripe old age of 50.

My son Andy is already at student at the UW, and my daughter Tina is awaiting word on her application. With any luck, all three of us will be on campus at the same time.

Wish me luck!

4/28/2010

Links for Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 8:50 am
  • 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 - “I really love cheat sheets. In a lot of cases they can take the place of an entire manual. So I was surprised, given its popularity that I couldn’t find a single-page reference for the arduino online. I tried to make a sheet that captured all the things I hit the reference for while programming. What data type does the millis() function return? How long till that overflows again? How large can a long get? What baud rates can the serial handle?

4/25/2010

Links for Sunday, April 25, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 7:39 pm

4/23/2010

Links for Friday, April 23, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 6:08 am

4/22/2010

Links for Thursday, April 22, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 10:34 am
  • 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.

4/21/2010

Links for Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 4:24 am
  • 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 rug! If we do not stop it now the system will blow sky-high - again - and this time there won’t be enough money or credit available to the United States Government (or any other government) to stop it.
  • Bill Black: Public Policy Issues Raised by the Report of the Lehman Bankruptcy Examiner - “The economic substance, in every case, of Lehman’s Repo transactions was a loan, not a true sale. The sole purpose of entering into the transactions was to attempt to achieve an accounting treatment directly contrary to the true nature of the transaction for the purpose of deceiving investors and regulators. If these transactions are not frauds, then accounting and accountancy have ceased to have any value or integrity. It is time for accountants, business people, and regulators to demand an end to the deliberate use of accounting to deceive.

4/20/2010

Links for Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Filed under: 1 — jeff @ 4:53 pm
  • 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 Avatar - “Two years ago Second Life, the largest of the virtual sites, with 1 million monthly visitors, created an enterprise group, to better cater to businesses. Companies like Dell shut storefronts and retooled their virtual-world platforms for meetings and training. A whole flock of specialized sites now provide business services, such as hosting conventions.
  • The Arch Network: Welcome to H-Town - “Rather than flipping through the pages of a magazine, or browsing a website as a passive observer, H-Town gives you a presence – a place where you can see and be seen. To me, this is so much closer to the way we actually experience architecture in the real world, and represents the future of every kind of online architectural resource. Looking at a picture of a house is great, but experiencing a house in an immersive, realtime environment alongside others is much better.“.
  • Quicklycode: Firebug Cheat Sheet - “KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS / MOUSE ACTIONS
Next Page »

Powered by WordPress