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Kevin Farnham

Biography

Kevin is the owner of Lyra Technical Systems, Inc, a small consulting and publishing company. He is Community Manager for the Threading Building Blocks open source project, and he also works on software engineering projects involving mathematical modeling and simulation, and scientific data analysis.

Kevin blogs on many different sites, writes technology articles, and is co-author of the book "MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents".

Articles

Blog

Defensio API Wants to Defend Your Site Against Spam

October 07 2008

Defensio, the anti-spam service, offers an API that can be integrated into blogs and web sites to fight spam comments and other unwanted spam (details at our Defension API profile). The service appears to be run by a small team, and is similar in purpose to Akismet, the much larger… read more

Craigslist Rental Property Search via the RentRent API

October 02 2008

RentRent.org has announced the creation of an API that searches local Craigslist entries for rental properties including apartments and houses. This gives developers the ability to integrate rental searches with mapping applications and APIs (our RentRent API profile has details). [Note that RentRent.org is not associated with Craigslist.org.] read more

Track Stocks via Xignite’s Stock Market Quotes API

September 22 2008

Xignite, the provider of commercial APIs for financial data, has announced a new addition to its web service suite: XigniteGlobalQuotes. The new XigniteGlobalQuotes API provides users with programmable access to delayed stock quotes from global stock markets, including the Mumbai Stock Exchange (India), the Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore stock exchanges,… read more

Huddle API: Facebook Meets Sharepoint

September 22 2008

Huddle, the online project management and group collaboration service, has been releasing new Huddle API updates quite frequently. Huddle employs an agile development process with a two-week release cycle, so Huddle users and community developers are becoming accustomed to seeing new features and bug fixes regularly. We've created a new… read more

iLike Launches API for Music Playlists

September 19 2008

iLike, Facebook's favorite music service, has officially launched their new API. TechCrunch reports that iLike is partnering with Google, TypePad, Flixster, Connected Weddings, and others, in the launch. The music itself is provided by Rhapsody. read more

Skydeck API Fuses Mobile Phones and Social Networking

September 08 2008

Skydeck announced their new APIs, with the objective of enabling developers to create applications that integrate personal cell phone data into their daily online experience, including email and calendars, Facebook, MySpace, and Salesforce. "Very few developers have ever had the chance to work with cell phone data, so we're excited… read more

The World Bank Opens API to Key Global Data

September 07 2008

The World Bank, whose mission is to end world poverty by providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world, is now offering developers a new API (our World Bank API profile).The bank considers the development of its API a component of this mission. read more

Big Huge Thesaurus API: Access 145,000 Words and Phrases

September 03 2008

The Big Huge Thesaurus API provides a convenient interface for initiating a search based on an English word and retrieving related words and phrases. The Big Huge Thesaurus includes more than 145,000 english language words. read more

Substance Version 5.0RC Provides Significantly Enhanced Performance

September 03 2008

Kirill Grouchnikov has announced a release candidate for Substance 5.0. In its recent development, Substance "has undergone significant internal and external changes to address major performance issues and to ensure the long-term code health of the project." read more

JSR-166y Provides New Concurrency Benefits

August 27 2008

Development of new and improved methods for programming multithreaded applications has never been as critical as it is today, due to the emergence of multicore processors. I've been developing multithreaded applications since the early 1990s, when I was implementing mathematical models on multi-processor Sun machines using Sun's threading libraries... read more

The Importance of APIs in the Arab Web

August 25 2008

Technology blogger Mohamed Marwen Meddah wrote an interesting post recently on his StartUpArabia site: "The Importance of Having An API for Arab Startups". Mohamed notes that, thus far, relatively few Arab online startups have opened up their platforms through APIs. However, he believes that providing an API is crucial for… read more

JCODER Opens Windows for Java Development on Modern Devices

August 25 2008

Many experienced developers have had the opportunity to work on a variety of operating system platforms, developing applications using multiple languages. In a large corporate environment, the established technology is likely to include representations of all the best technologies of the past several decades -- as well as (unfortunately) representations… read more

LWUIT Released as GPL Open Source

August 24 2008

LWUIT has been released as GPL open source: "today Sun is announcing the release and immediate availability of the complete source code of the LWUIT framework under the GPLv2 license with the Classpath Exception. This license choice provides the benefits of open source innovation and collaborative development while offering a… read more

Best News Mashups Announced in Daylife Challenge

August 19 2008

Daylife has announced the winners of the 2008 DayPI Developer Challenge. Their DayPI is a unique API for building news-based applications. We wrote about the DayPI Developer Challenge last month. read more

Top 5 AOL Video Contest Winners Announced

August 14 2008

AOL and TopCoder have announced the winners of the Truveo Developer Challenge. As I described in May, the contestants applied AOL's Truveo Video Search API to develop "a cool widget, gadget, mashup or web application." The $100,000 contest awarded $10,000 first place prizes to nine competitors. read more