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October 2009
Creating Offline Web Applicat...
No country has perfect system, but there are lessons to learn
Coming At You Like A Pydermonkey at Toolness
Pydermonkey’s mission is pretty simple and straightforward: it’s just meant to wrap Spidermonkey’s C API as faithfully as possible—including its debugging API—while enforcing the memory safety that Python is known for. This makes it awfully low-level for casual programmers, but thanks to Python’s awesome support for magic methods, it’s not hard to create high-level wrappers that provide much more convenient bridging between JavaScript and Python code.
Toward urban systems design « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
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.
Sound advice - blog
A significant weakness of HTTP in my view is its dependence on the MIME standard for media type identification and on the related iana registry. This registry is a limited bottleneck that does not have the capacity to deal with the media type definition requirements of individual enterprises or domains. Machine-centric environments rely in a higher level of semantics than the human-centric environment of the Web. In order for machines to effectively exploit information, every unique schema of information needs to be standardised in a media type and for those media types to be individually identified. The number of media types grows as machines become more dominant in a distributed computing environment and as the number of distinct environments increases.
Web Development: How to Judge the Technical Quality of a Site? | NexusLab
The technical qualities of a website largely depend on how hard the web development team has worked on it. When qualifying a website on the code level, you need a different set of metrics than you did some years ago. This article is our attempt at specifying what metrics you should use.
Dell PowerEdge R210 Server
Sift a Page! - siteSifter Journal - sitesifter.co.uk
Want to test siteSifter — for free? Just enter the address you want to sift in the form below, select either WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0, and one page will be tested to level “AAA” of the baseline. The report will be returned to you, right here in your browser, as soon as the test is complete.
Sponsorised links
September 2009
interactions magazine
Waste is part of life. Human and animal bodies produce natural waste, whereas societies produce synthetic waste. While we cannot control the level of natural waste as its production is an organic part of biological survival, we can drastically reduce the production of synthetic waste. Natural and synthetic waste come in two varieties - reusable and nonreusable. The aim of a sustainable waste economy is to reuse as much waste as possible, even to the point of reducing waste surplus to zero.
The Art of zen-coding: Bringing Snippets to a New Level - Monday By Noon
The biggest calling point for zen-coding for me is its implementation of HTML selectors as snippet triggers. zen-coding includes an entirely new angle to writing markup, and it facilitates the feature by letting you write HTML based on CSS selectors
Exists for a wide range of editors, if you like snippets.
The Big Screen in Big D: Observatory: Design Observer
gigantismeEven more likely, they were gawking at a very, very large scoreboard — the 160-foot-long, 1.2 million pound, Mitsubishi Diamond Vision true HD display, that is the centerpiece of Cowboys Stadium. This is a spectacular object, this scoreboard. It cost, by itself, twice as much to build as the previous Cowboys Stadium. It is maintained via a ten-level internal scaffolding system and its use requires the services of a full-time, highly trained operations team. Its display capacity is equal to 4,920 52-inch flat panel televisions, and it is illuminated by 30 million pulsing light bulbs. In short, it makes your typical Jumbotron look like a 13-inch TV/VCR.
Google's R Style Guide
R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google.
Laurent Haug’s blog » Blog Archive » Street computers
Seoul is one of the world’s most wired city, and the recent “ubiquitous city” project aims to increase the level of connectivity citizens experience on the street. One of the most visible part of the u-city is the media poles forest, tenth of computers embedded into high poles offering services like news, submay and bus maps, email postcard, 3D avatar game, casual games, shopping/restaurant locator and Flickr photo gallery (more). This sort of rich country’s version of the hole in the wall is extremely popular, and many couples and groups gather around the screens to share a moment playing games or sending a postcard.
Snakes on the Web
The big problem, though — the elephant in the room — is that gateways suck, too. Gateways aren’t APIs. There’s a limit — and it’s a low one — to the level of inter-op you can obtain when the only interface you have is a gateway. Even if we improve WSGI — and we should — it’ll only take us so far.
August 2009
keybr.com - take typing speed test and practice typing online
VnTutor: Ubuntu Linux Ebook - Download free
About « Web Hooks
Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data — PNAS
Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.
Bintro - Online Business Matchmaking
What makes Bintro special is its use of advanced semantic technology for the purpose of matchmaking. There are no multiple choice questions. There are no numbered scales. All you need to do is describe yourself and your needs and Bintro will take care of the rest. All the words and phrases you use are analyzed to an extremely high level on the basis of similarity and usage. This process is completed within seconds and matches are presented to you as they become available. After this, Bintro will continue to find more matches for you every minute of every day.
