Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

Sure, sure, sure, Tokyo's all steel, plastic and concrete. They don't let anything get old here; they tear it down and rebuild it all bland and sterile the moment anything approaching "charming patina" encroaches. But, but, but there are nooks and niches where old things persist. Oldie restaurants, for instance.

/Georgina Spelvin

And Massive Attack

The music video to end all music videos: 'Paradise Circus' from Massive Attack's forthcoming album Heligoland (out Feb. 9th). Vocals by Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star).

It features an absolutely entrancing Georgina Spelvin, performer/vixen from the 1973 porn flick The Devil in Miss Jones.

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

A picture is worth a thousand words.No need to type your search anymore. Just take a picture.

Find out what businesses are nearby.Just point your phone at a store.

This is just the beginning - it's not quite perfect yet.Works well for some things, but not for all.

Your pictures, your control.Turn on 'visual search history' to view or share your pictures at any time. Turn it off to discard them once the search is done.

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors."

The rumors about publishers who already have big plans for the device, however, are galore. The latest on the list? Condé Nast, which – according to All Things Digital – claims it’s preparing a digital version of Wired magazine for the Apple Tablet by the middle of next year, followed by its other 18 titles.

"For 45 years or so, people have been claiming computers are going to save vast amounts of money and that the payoff was just around the corner," he said. "So the first thing we need to do is stop claiming things there's no evidence for. It's based on vaporware and [hasn't been] shown to exist or shown to be true."

Un RSI, ça se calcule, mais pour ça, il faut oser regarder le passé en face : ça c'est innovant.

In this post I want to give a brief introduction to Django project layout from a Rails developer point of view, on what is there, what is not there and where to look for things. It should help a rails developer working on django be able to find the necessary files and underatnd the layout of the project files.