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Jeff Barr: Jeff Barr's Blog

Life, cool stuff, newsfeeds, Syndic8

Links for Monday, January 5, 2009January 5

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 all SLers.“
Washington Post: O Brave New World That Has Such Avatars in It! - “Those who promote the idea of offering government services in digital worlds say the benefits aren’t always obvious until people discover that virtual settings can stimulate the imagination. ” - Visit Arlington County in Second Life.
New York Times: The End of the Financial World as We Know It - “The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.“

Links for Sunday, January 4, 2009January 4

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 a short, comprehensive, do-it-yourself tutorial for the installation of OpenSim in a Windows XP machine, using MySQL as a back-end for persistence. “
OpenSim Wiki: Running - Server Commands - “On the OpenSim server console you may do some basic administration.“
TwitchBoard - “TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears.“
Tweet Grid - “Create a twitter search dashboard that updates in real time.“
Strategy+Business: Beyond Borders: The Global Innovation 1000 - “More and more companies are conducting critical R&D outside their home countries. Thus, this year, we took on two new questions: How far have major multinational corporatio

Tarpipe Rocks - A Quick Review!December 31 2008

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 (but more general than) Yahoo Pipes, Tarpipe is a very usable tool for building visual workflows. The workflows can invoke web services on a number of social networking, messaging, and photo storage sites, as shown in the picture on the right). Each of these sites is represented by a Tarpipe connector. There’s a configuration page which accepts account names and passwords for each site:

The Tarpipe builder is used to create workflows. A workflow can be initiated by an email address associated with the workflow or by a REST-style API call to an endpoint at Tarpipe.com. The initiators are currently called Receptors but I’d prefer to see them called Trigger

Links for Tuesday, December 30, 2008December 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 do that, you open the workflows tab where you can create, edit and manipulate your workflows. “
Trinity Rescue Kit: CPR for your computer - “Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.” - Via Jeremy.

Links for Sunday, December 28, 2008December 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 been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.“
The Daily WTF: Now That’s A Neat Trick - “The CTO managed to avoid the Stored Procedures, the Data Access components, the Business Logic components, and smooch SQL, PHP, HTML, and JavaScript into a single statement. A neat trick indeed.“