Author: Jeff Barr

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, […]

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 […]

We’re hitting the road and heading out to speak at a whole bunch of user groups and conferences. Here’s our schedule: July 22, Portland Code Camp – Vancouver, Washington. July 25, Portland Java Users Group – Portland, Oregon. July 25, Open University – Milton Keynes, UK. July 26, Portland Area .Net Users Group – Beaverton, […]

A few paragraphs into yesterday’s press release was an important note about the Amazon Simple Queue Service, or SQS. SQS is now in production. The production release allows you to have an unlimited number of queues per account, with an unlimited number of items in each queue. Each item can be up to 256KB in […]

Developers have been pouring data into Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) at a prodigious rate. In fact, there are now over 800 million discrete objects stored in S3. Earlier today we announced some of our successes in a press release. Some of the highlights include: The aforementioned 800 million stored objects. Argentinian newspaper La Nacion […]

PEAR is a set of classes that simplify the process of writing PHP code by providing robust, high-level abstractions. The current version of PHP contains a SOAP class which fits this model quite well. Instead of having to deal with many of the gory details intrinsic to making SOAP calls and to handling results, you […]