Author: Jeff Barr

I use a handful of web and blog search engines which produce RSS feeds that I monitor to find interesting developments for this blog. Here are a few recent findings: There’s a new version of Ruby/Amazon. Brian Krow is looking at S3 and Jungledisk, and wondering where he left his tape drive. David Aiken is […]

Last month I blogged about the Life2Life store in Second Life. This store smoothly bridges the virtual and the real, making it possible to search the Amazon catalog from within Second Life. For a week or so, Tabatha and Hugo (the store’s proprietors) had kept me apprised of their work to integrate Amazon’s Remote Shopping […]

There’s a really interesting post over at the BitPorters blog today. Read it, think about it, and let us know (via comments here or on the original post) what you think. I regularly tell my audiences that our services allow developers to be innovative and creative. I also tell them that innovation and creativity isn’t […]

In conjunction with author Jason Levitt, we are pleased to bring you a chapter-length excerpt from his AWS book. This chapter covers the use of browse nodes to make searches return results that are more relevant. Thanks, Jason, for helping to make this happen. — Jeff;

The ever-popular AWS Zone site was recently updated to include better support for Amazon S3 and some of the other new services. One especially cool new feature is the ability to compute signatures for requests in a safe manner. After entering your AWS Access Key and your AWS Secret Key, pressing the Generate Signature button […]

YouOS is a complete operating environment which runs inside of a browser window. Within the window is a complete virtual file system, a web browser, a note pad, a rich text editor, a command line shell, and more. This is cool enough all by itself, but to make it even cooler, the virtual file system […]

Dominic Da Silva has written a new article, Ruby for the REST of Us: Using Ruby and REST to Integrate with Amazon S3. In the article, Dominic introduces Ruby, REST and Amazon S3. He then goes on to cover the AWS registration process, and then proceeds to describe rSh3ll (pronounce it “r-shell” and your tongue […]

The Amazon Mechanical Turk was upgraded earlier today. The new release includes the ability to use XHTML formatted content as part of HIT Questions, and the ability to host Question on an external web site, framed within the Mechanical Turk user interface. The API version is still 2006-06-20, but the like-dated documents have been updated […]

On Tuesday, August 8th, representatives from Amazon, Intel, and ElephantDrive will join forces to present a Dr. Dobb’s Net Seminar on Making Mashups Mobile. The seminar is free but advance registration is suggested for best results. To register, click here. Experience suggests that you should plan on getting to the site a few minutes ahead […]

The Alexa Site Thumbnail Service was announced last week. I’m still playing catch-up after my trip to London, so here goes. Using this new service, developers can request site thumbnails in small (111 x 82) or large (201 x 147) format. If the thumbnail is available it will be returned, otherwise a placeholder image will […]