PUBLIC MARKS with search issue

The November issue of Metropolis magazine is on newsstands and I can't think of a better way to ring in the holiday season than with a quote from the piece I wrote on the Deform Courtyard by Thom Faulders. Here's what Thom's client had to say:

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.

ARCHIGRAM dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by a group of young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb.

“A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

So wrote David Greene in a poem published in the first issue of Archigram magazine or, as Greene’s co-editor, Peter Cook, called it “a message, or abstract communication”. It was published in 1961 on a large sheet of the cheapest available paper. Filled with Greene’s poems and sketches of architectural projects designed by Cook, Michael ‘Spider’ Webb and other friends, the magazine voiced their frustration with the intellectual conservatism of the British architectural establishment.

That issue has recently been fixed on the current trunk builds (Minefield 3.6a1), but not in Firefox 3.5.x

15 Questionnaire

It would be very interesting if you could share a mockup, template of your questionnaire. Or if specific to each projects you are creating, at least, the type of questions in the questionnaire.

On the side of the No No for projects, setting a deadline for delivery of the projects or even a step without having all the materials which guarantee the delivery date.

We have to be very careful when committing to dates, to also set the right expectations of the client. Too often, in a project, it is possible to say, let’s release this section at this date YYYY-MM-DD, the materials will be given to you in the next two weeks. Red flag. It is often better to say, once given this list of items (deliveryDate), we will be releasing this section at “deliveryDate 10 business days”.

In middle size agencies, there is also an issue of resources management. There is more than one project in parallel. Explaining to the client that if he/she misses a particular window, the project will be delayed.

Keep written records of every discussions you had, put down the RESOLUTION and the ACTION. After each meeting, send your meeting minutes to the project participants and the client. It is often better to have a scribe. If you get phone calls from the clients (which is fine), send a summary of the discussion just after.

If you are using a project management system (be mail, sharepoint, basecamp, etc. anything), if the client says “It is not the way I work”, rise a red flag again.

Be careful also of the “just this time” or “just for once” on a exceptional work issue, because if you authorize it once, the client will keep the foot in the door, to reuse it again.

posted at 10:38 am on October 21, 2009 by karlcow

Thomas Ruff insists that his photographs capture only 'the surface of things'. But is there more than meets the eye? As an exhibition of Ruff's work opens at Tate Liverpool, Viviane Rehberg investigates

16. Why does Firefox load my SWF twice?

Firefox 3 has a known issue that sometimes causes a swf to be 'double initialized'. The problem appears to be fixed in their codebase, but has not been released yet. See the following bugs for more details: bug 438830 and bug 445599.

Or, if you have "Disable cache" selected in your Firefox Web Developer Toolbar extension a double load will occur.

n the same vein, our goal is to capture the world’s geography as it is used by the world’s people.

Behavioral Inference across Cultures: Using Telephones as a Cultural Lens

Eagle, N.

Intelligent Systems, IEEE

Volume 23, Issue 4, July-Aug. 2008 Page(s):62 - 64

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIS.2008.58

Summary:Most people carry mobile telephones, which automatically capture behavioral data and store it in service provider databases around the world. The different types of captured data can provide insight into human cultures. Examples from various cultures and hundreds of millions of individuals illustrate how phones can serve as a cultural lens, improving our understanding of social networks, outlier events, and a culture's pace of life.

Introduction to Special Issue on Spatial Hypertext

The Whole Earth Effect

How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today? Forty years after the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, this oral history of the publication, as told by those who made it and those who read it, tracks the long-lasting impact of a short-lived journal that altered the course of the world.