Eric Hartwell's InfoWeb

Friday, September 24, 2004

Build Your Robot Online: Ever needed a custom part for a robot, case mod or hardware hack but lacked the tools or a machineshop to make one for you? Ever needed a custom circuit board? Well, PC Magazine's Bill Machrone writes about a few websites, Emachineshop and Pad2Pad, where you use their free software to design, price, and order anything you can design with the software. This is more useful to slashdotters than 3D 'printing' technologies like rapid prototyping since you get real working parts. It looks like they support a number of machines and fabrication techniques beyond traditional machining, like plastic injection molding and waterjet. As Machrone says, this is empowering stuff. This is something that should ignite a creative spark to all you hardware tinkerers out there in Slashdot land." [Slashdot 7/16/2004]
10:38:42 PM

Tookie Tracks. Tookie Tracks is a transaction and contact manager for Real Estate Agents and integrates seamlessly into Microsoft Outlook. It uses your existing Contacts and has a transaction scheduler, a real estate listing tool, a transaction finances calculator as well as create custom client and productivity reports. [Slipstick - Outlook and Exchange News 6/6/2004]
6:14:56 PM

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6:13:07 PM

.Net On Lego Mindstorm: The University of Potsdam has a project to develop a .NET VM for the Lego Mindstorms system. While the thought of using .Net to program Lego Mindstorms may not be palatable, having a mainstream dev environment sure is. [Slashdot 9/12/2004]
6:11:20 PM

The new Mail To The Future is ready to try out. It's remarkably like the app that was first deployed in early 1999, before easy blogging tools, when XML-RPC was still very new. It was a milestone, and today it's a vault for memory and visions of the future, with messages scheduled for delivery through 2030. It's important that the app be handled with care, over the years. UserLand is focused (correctly) on Manila and Radio, so I offered to host MTTF on the Scripting News server. If you have questions or comments, please post them here. If you can add to the history of MTTF, post comments here. [Scripting News 5/12/2004]
5:51:27 PM

Flash MX based UML Modelling Tool.
Grant Skinner has just launched the beta of one of the sweetest RIAs that I've seen. GModeler is a programming tool for developers working with ECMA-Script and deriviative languages such as ActionScript and JavaScript. It's a UML modelling tool built entirely in Flash and supports importing XML exchange formats for UML. It also does a beautiful job generating HTML documentation and XML content for integration into the Flash MX dev environment directly. It's beautiful, useful, and also a great example of Grant's other pioneering work creating an operating-system style UI shell for Flash applications. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio 4/14/2004]
5:50:37 PM