PUBLIC MARKS with search real

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.

On November 4-5, 25 Real Good Chairs will be dropped around NYC. Many chairs will be GPS-enabled. You can follow their journeys here.

Image [&] Narrative is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term. Beside tackling theoretical issues, it is a platform for reviews of real life examples.

Zoie is a real-time search and indexing system built on Apache Lucene. In a real-time search/indexing system, a document is made available as soon as it is added to the index. This functionality is especially important to time-sensitive information such as news, job openings, tweets etc.

Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

As updates and content flow in real time around the Web, conversations around the content are becoming increasingly fragmented into individual silos. Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources -- and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle. It's open, decentralized, abuse resistant, and user centric.

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.

Developing Flowdock, a real-time environment allowing teams to work together seamlessly, we needed a database able to scale horizontally for huge amount of write operations. Cassandra’s data model and performance characteristics made it a perfect fit for our needs.