Jeff Barr's Blog
Sun Apr 24 04:45:23 EDT 2011
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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 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 Saturday, November 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 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 [...]