Jeff Barr’s Blog

• 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.

• 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.“

• 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!“

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:

• 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. “

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:

• Redmond - Alternating Fridays and Saturdays at the Redmond City Hall and Idylwood Beach Park. They’ll be showing Iron Man, Monsters vs. Aliens, Invictus, Where the Wild Things Are, The Blind Side, Mama Mia, and Mulan.
• King County Parks - Wednesdays at Marymoor Park. Austin Powers, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, The Blind Side, The Neverending Story, Star Trek, and The Princess Bride.
• Issaquah - Monsters vs. Aliens on a Saturday in September.
• Bellevue - Tuesdays at the Bellevue Downtown Park - Lineup includes Cloudy With a Chance Of Meatballs, Where the Wild Things Are, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Monsters vs. Aliens, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Spy Next Door, The Blind Side, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
• Kirkland - Saturdays at Carillon Point. The lineup includes Star Trek, Moulin Rouge, Monsters vs. Aliens, Overboard, Twilight New Moon, and Up.
• Woodinville - Thursdays at the Redhook Brewery. They’ll be showing Step Brothers, The Sandlot, The Hangover, Super Troopers, Blow, and Fight Club.
• Fremont - Dawn of the Dead, Ghostbusters, The Hangover, Zoolander, Metropolis, Pretty in Pink, Goonies 25th Anniversary, all on Saturdays in a Fremont parking lot.
• Seattle Center - Saturdays in August at the Seattle Center Mural. Lineup includes The Princess Bride, Twilight, Twilight New Moon, and Star Trek.
• West Seattle - Saturdays in July and August. They’ll be showing Mama Mia, War Games, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Star Trek, Wayne’s World, and Up.
• Seattle - Fridays at Cal Anderson Park. The “Blonde But Not Forgotten” lineup includes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Legend of Billie Jean, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Candleshoe.

Enjoy!