PUBLIC MARKS with search electronicfundtransfer(eft)systems

* Fixers. People that can repair existing equipment to maintain its previous function. (these people are the staple of almost all disaster fiction).

* Makers. People that repurpose existing technology through the implementation of alterations to change its function. A corollary to Makers are people that improve existing products/systems (make them more powerful/better/faster).

* Creators. People that create new tools or unique systems from scratch using raw materials (think fab lab hacks).

Recently InfoQ did a good summary of the debates around the apparent (to some) limitations of REST when it comes to creating good Web services. At issue is that REST APIs seem to expose "CRUDy" services that fly in the face of years of good services design, particularly when they are just read/write interfaces instead of the richer, full REST architecture (more on what this is later.) The discussion was spurred by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz's assertion recently that CRUD is bad for REST, which in my opinion is close but not quite right.

And so for 20 years now these folks --- *the* shining lights, in many ways, of "practical" programming language, operating systems, and general systems research --- have continued to fail to "get" the fundamental practical needs of everyday programmers working in The Real World.

a systems programming language

expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected

a systems programming language

expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected

I have gathered some notes on my use of machine tag for biology taxonomy. So you can express easily the classification on web services using tagging (like flickr or del.icio.us) a machine tag that can be read by human and by machine (read information automated systems) :

Infrastructure provides the basic needs for society, and sustainable infrastructure systems are essential for the survival, health and well-being of a society. For developing countries, the civil and environmental engineer are at the epicenter in seeking means to enhance human life through modernization of infrastructure as evidenced by provision of shelter, water, and transport, amongst others.

The current rate of urbanization and industrialization has caused a rise in environmental issues, involving environmental mismanagement which has been associated with unforeseen global catastrophes. The problems are further aggravated with environmental degradation such as soil erosion, depletion of water resources, etc.

In order to meet these multifaceted challenges, proper planning, implementation and verification exercises are required, via an integrated, multidisciplinary and holistic approach. The global momentum for sustainable development must now lead to practical applications of the engineering and science of sustainability.

One-handed operation wasn’t feasible on stylus-based systems.

Parfois on peut invoquer l'ignorance ; mais pas toujours. Alors on doit faire appel à la stupidité.

In the 1960s and 70s research chemist and amateur photographer Derek Fairbrother made over 20 photographic time-lapse sequences showing the demolition of old buildings and their replacement by new buildings and road systems in Birmingham city centre.

Project: tree.growth

Date: September, 2006

Language: Processing

Key Concepts: Lindenmayer Systems, recursion, biomimicry

The USGS is now testing out Twitter to collect early response information about earthquakes: “the USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and quantity data to provide geo-located earthquake detection within 60 seconds of an event’s origin time.“ Social media can be a valuable tool in helping to assess earthquake hazards through anecdotal information from hundreds and potentially thousands of local users.

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.

Basic logging of errors to text files and system logs is an old technique, but not very flexible. In this post, I introduce a logging system for the Python programming language. This system, while it borrows ideas from other systems, is not a port of anything but an independent implementation for use by Python developers.The logging package has been part of Python since Python 2.3 (released in 2002).