There’s no substitute for documentation written, organized, and edited by hand.

Le CITU part du constat de la rencontre entre création et recherche scientifique sur le terrain des nouveaux média. Les nouvelles formes d'écriture et de création prennent en compte et questionnent les enjeux technologiques. Le regard porté par les artistes sur le monde contemporain constitue simultanément un facteur réel d'innovation et un moteur de réflexion confrontant en permanence potentiel et limites. En effet l'innovation provient souvent de la demande singulière des artistes et auteurs qui cherchent dans les nouveaux moyens de communication de nouvelles modalités d'expression et de représentation. C'est pourquoi le CITU entretient cette capacité à être au plus proche des projets artistiques, tout en restant dans la dynamique de réflexion et d'évolution que représente la recherche la plus actuelle.

Le CITU part du constat de la rencontre entre création et recherche scientifique sur le terrain des nouveaux média. Les nouvelles formes d'écriture et de création prennent en compte et questionnent les enjeux technologiques. Le regard porté par les artistes sur le monde contemporain constitue simultanément un facteur réel d'innovation et un moteur de réflexion confrontant en permanence potentiel et limites. En effet l'innovation provient souvent de la demande singulière des artistes et auteurs qui cherchent dans les nouveaux moyens de communication de nouvelles modalités d'expression et de représentation. C'est pourquoi le CITU entretient cette capacité à être au plus proche des projets artistiques, tout en restant dans la dynamique de réflexion et d'évolution que représente la recherche la plus actuelle.

Until now, Sidewiki was available only through Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Today, we're excited to release the official bookmarklet for Sidewiki, which lets you easily read and write Sidewiki entries in Google Chrome, Safari and others browsers.

Whatpm is a work-in-progress set of Perl modules for Web hypertext application technologies. It is part of the manakai project.

Whatpm supports various Web standard technologies, including HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, HTTP, and URL.

Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

Sept mois après le rendu des études stratégiques, six mois après les fermes prises de position présidentielles, où en sommes-nous ? Nulle part. La confusion est totale. Pourquoi ? Nous allons essayer de suivre les méandres de cette histoire.

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It has two components: the physical part supports the close inspection of high quality reproductions of maps for display at conferences and education centers; the online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of how these maps work. The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014.

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API’s are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don’t just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

What, a performance regression? But we threw more memory at it!! How can that be!

Memcached is not a cure all.

When searching for something on the web we’ve all had the experience of clicking on a link in a search engine’s results page only to find that the page no longer exists. If there’s no information on that page other than a default error message, the most likely course of action on the user’s part is to press the back button and try the next search result.

As site authors we can make our error pages more meaningful to our users, so that an error becomes an opportunity to bring the user back into a site and show them content that’s relevant to what they’re looking for. In this article I’ll show you how to do just that.