Author: Jeff Barr

Today I had lunch with Peter Nixey of Web Kitchen. We talked about all sorts of interesting topics, including his recent blog posting, Why XHR Should Become Opt-In Cross Domain. This posting was written in a very interesting style and compares cross-domain scripting permissions to ordering beer in a pub. Peter explains the problem, the […]

img {border:2px solid orange;} Earlier today I logged in to Second Life and was greated with an IM (instant message) and a teleport invitation from a woman by the name of Tabatha Hegel. She indicated that she knew of my interest in Amazon interfaces within Second Life, and that she had something cool to show […]

Salon has published “I Make $1.45 a Week and I Love It“, a very interesting article on the Amazon Mechanical Turk. You will need to watch a short ad in order to read the entire article. The article covers the historic origin of the Mechanical Turk name, Amazon’s rollout of the web site, and requesters […]

Join the AWS Developer Relations team as a Developer Support Engineer and you will get the chance to exercise your programming and communication know-how. You will get to partner with and support developers who are building business critical applications on top of AWS. Ideal candidates will have: Working knowledge of Web services technologies, such as […]

Lately I’ve been spending some of my personal time in another world, a world called Second Life, to be precise. Second Life is a 3D virtual world. When you log in to Second Life for the first time you choose your “in-world” name and you create your own avatar. Once inside, you can chat, run, […]

Jon Udell’s newest InfoWorld column talks about Amazon’s pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure. The entire article is worth reading, but I like this part the best: ” Amazons S3/SQS duo is a green field that invites entrepreneurs to think way outside the box.” Definitely! — Jeff;

Noted author Jason Gilmore slipped me a note about his new article, Automating Amazon Research with the Zend Framework. In this article, Jason talks about how he used the Zend Framework to write an application to track the Amazon sales rank of Apress’ line of computer science books over time. Jason uses 5 Zend components […]

Time to clean out the inbox with some interesting quick picks: Good article from Microsoft: Web Services and the Microsoft Platform. The BitPorters blog talks about the Amazon Mechanical Turk: Micro-Compensation – Affordably Driving User Incentive. Long-time AWS developer Francis Shanahan is writing a new book, tentatively titled Beginning Amazon.com Mashups. There’s more info and […]

I met Marc, the developer of Secret Prices, at Mashup Camp last week. Marc was eager to show me his site, and I found it quite interesting. Secret Prices is a comparison shopping tool. You can compare product prices across multiple vendors in 18 different categories including books, movies, music, electronics, and event tickets. The […]

On the way to work this morning I stopped by my local gourmet supermarket for some Aztec Trail Mix. I went to the bulk foods aisle, found what I wanted, and used the dispenser to measure out exactly what I needed — just enough for the next couple of days of random snacking. I hopped […]