Sponsorised links
December 2009
Metabolic Dark City: Observatory: Design Observer
In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon, was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence. The area was a diplomatic black hole, the model of an anarchist society somehow allowed to grow organically without the aid of any government, existing somewhere outside of both British Hong Kong and China.
The buildings of "Hak Nam" folded into one other in a dense configuration of labyrinthine corridors and seedy brown shacks stacked up 10, 12 and 14 stories high. It was a solid building, 200 x 100 meters, a pulsating anomaly, one of the most densely populated places in the world at the time of its destruction. It was called "the world’s first flexible megastructure, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self determining modern city that has ever been built," "an environment as richly varied and as sensual as anything in the heart of the tropical forest."
WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates on Vimeo
Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen.
support structure
Support Structure is an architectural interface. Support Structure aims to create a space which is continuously reinvented by its users in relation to its context. Support Structure houses artefacts as well as activities and aids reconsideration of existing spaces as an impulse for future change. Support Structure is an evolving collaborative project between architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade. Our aim is to design and create a universally adaptable support structure that approaches the specific rather than the generic. To achieve this we are putting Support Structure through a learning process.
click opera - A passion for polished concrete
"The existing floor was uneven from inaccurate construction," writes Schemata architect Jo Nagasaka, "so we poured epoxy mixed with pine ash on the floor to create a flat surface. The transparent black liquid made different shades of black, following the uneven surface on the floor. It looked like gradation of color on a gradually shoaling beach."
Sponsorised links
November 2009
Freevo Media Centre | Home Theatre Platform HTPC & PVR
Mythbuntu
Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Are Hackers Essential to Resilience?
* 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).
Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software
Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface.
Bring Me Sunshine | Artists' eBooks
Tony White is the author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber) and the non-fiction work Another Fool in the Balkans. Tony also co-edited the fiction anthology Croatian Nights (Serpent’s Tail/VBZ). Balkanising Bloomsbury is a fiction project by White which reworks the archive of existing texts about the Balkans, from travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, using experimental literary techniques to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity.
Google Latitude
upfrontPrivacy Notice
* Your history will not be visible publicly or to your Latitude friends.
* You may delete your entire location history or portions of it whenever you like.
* Disabling the feature will not remove existing history already stored. To delete that, go to History management.
Free Online Javascript WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor
October 2009
Raindrop Design Development Page
Bespin » Code in the Cloud
Memory and forgetting in the digital age - opinion - 24 October 2009 - New Scientist
And he comes up with an interesting solution: expiration dates in electronic files. This would stop the files from existing forever and flooding us and the next generations with gigantic piles of mostly useless or even potentially harmful details.
LESS - Leaner CSS
The IBuySpy Portal architecture (PDF)
In this book, we'll be using the freely available IBuySpy Portal as a starting point for our intranet development. We'll look at both why we are modifying an existing intranet application rather than creating our own, and why we choose the IBuySpy Portal in particular. Once we have covered the basics, we'll take a tour of its features, looking at the files and types it consists of, how they function and fit together, and general principles behind the site. Finally, we'll take a brief look at how security is handled.
twebevent
Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash
tiltshiftmaker.com - Transform your photos into tilt-shift style miniatures
The URI microformat, OpenURL and COIns, will be very interesting to library application - in "Programming" (Tricks/tips learned in daily programming work)
Marshall Alexander - Paper Engineer
September 2009
Dapper: The Data Mapper
BBM
WOFF File Format
User:Gerv/BugzillaAPIDesign - MozillaWiki
This is a design scratchpad for an HTTP RESTful API for Bugzilla. It will be implemented as a proxy, using a variety of methods (the existing API, web scraping) on the back end and with a clean interface as defined here on the front end.
