Links for Sunday, February 21, 2010

• The Guardian: Ten Rules for Writing Fiction – “Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.“
• MonoDevelop – “MonoDevelop is an IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. MonoDevelop enables developers to quickly write desktop and ASP.NET Web applications on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.“
• Igor Ostrovsky: What Really Happens When Your Navigate to a URL – “As a software developer, you certainly have a high-level picture of how web apps work and what kinds of technologies are involved: the browser, HTTP, HTML, web server, request handlers, and so on. In this article, we will take a deeper look at the sequence of events that take place when you visit a URL.” – Pay attention, this will be on the test.
• Visible Banking: AllState Runs a Virtual Career Fair Today + Financial Institutions Leverage Virtual Worlds & Online Games to Innovate in Recruitment – “Even in the current context, especially in the current context, it is critical for financial institutions to be seen as innovative to attract the best talent out there. But HR Teams are challenged to achieve their ambitious targets with smaller budget. It is time to be smarter, and embrace social media to initiate conversations, increase your reach, change brand perception, and eventually convince your future leaders to join your organization.“
• Evil Mad Science: Peggy 2LE Light Emitting Pegboard Kit – “Peggy LE 2 provides a quick, easy, powerful and efficient way to drive a lot of LEDs– up to 625– in a matrix designed for 5 mm LEDs. You can make an LED sign for your window, a geeky valentine for your sweetie, one bad-ass birthday card, freak the holy bejesus out of Boston, or instigate the next generation of low-pixel-count video games.“
• NASA Image Gallery: Apollo 4 On the Pad – Direct link to high resolution photo.
• NASA Image Gallery: Apollo 12 On the Pad – Direct link to a really nice high resolution photo.
• Second Life Blogs: Prototyping Environment in SL for Dow Chemical: Three Questions with Robert Emory from Scott & Miller Group – “Dow Chemical purchased a large sponsorship at one of their most important trade shows, the 2009 National Plastics Exposition in Chicago. Their sponsorship included an enormous exhibit space—a 36,000 square-foot ballroom and Scott & Miller, as their marketing agency of record, were asked to design the space. Now, 36,000 square feet is a very large space that needed to be thoughtfully planned, from an experience design perspective. So, the Scott & Miller team decided to build a prototype of several concepts in Second Life and walk the client through to evaluate the layout and design.“
• PBS: NOVA: Ghosts of Macchu Picchu – “There were probably three or four things that the Incas did simultaneously. One, they worked very hard in diplomacy, negotiating relationships with neighbors or with people who were targets for incorporation into their expanding territory, and they tried to work out amicable relationships through gift exchanges, marital exchanges, or political alliances. Failing that, they would threaten those people with military conquest, and that having failed, they would actually undertake military conquest. So there was a combination of diplomacy and inducement, coercion, and militarism all wrapped up into one strategic package.“