Author: Jeff Barr

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 […]

The Stardust @ Home project at UC Berkeley is using Amazon S3 to store tens of millions of scanned images. Each image is a virtual slice through a chunk of an amazing material known as aerogel. The aerogel was dragged through the tail of a comet and then returned to Earth. Buried within the outermost […]

Long-time AWS developer MrRat wrote a really nice article for Revenews. In The Profit in Altruism, MrRat recounts the story of how his Amazon Products Feed script came to be. At first he was looking to make an immediate profit from his script (I guess that would be a rats to riches story). After a […]

I’ve started up a little “link blog” on the left side of this blog. I’ll fill this with interesting links which include a mention of an AWS service. At this point there’s no way to get an RSS feed of the blog’s contents; sorry about that. — Jeff;

This is pretty embarassing, but I don’t have another way to retrieve the email. Sometime late last week I received an email from someone. I am pretty sure that his name was Steve. It was a fairly long email, and I was looking forward to reading and responding to it. Unfortunately, I was a bit […]

I am back from London and I have some interesting stuff queued up for you. Here goes: Eliotte Harold shows you how to “Debug XSL Stylesheets With xsl:message.” As he says, “Echo printing is one of the oldest ways to debug a thorny problem. Nonetheless, it’s still one of the simplest and quickest ways. When […]

I had lunch with Paul Miller of Talis yesterday. As I have blogged before, they are running a contest for library mashups. You’ve still got 2.5 weeks to build your mashup — plenty of time to build something cool using the Talis APIs in conjunction with ECS or some other interesting web service. — Jeff; […]

A colleague sent me a link to Google’s new Project Hosting site. The site is a handy place for developers to maintain project membership, store source code, and track bugs. Out of curiosity I ran a query for Amazon and found four interesting projects: amazonws shows how to call ECS from Java using JAXB and […]