PUBLIC MARKS with search side

On November 5, Urban Age will inaugurate an intensive two-day conference on the future of cities in Istanbul, an expanding metropolis and one of the worlds first global cities. 100 innovators of urban change from 15 countries, half a dozen mayors, renowned scholars and authors side-by-side with architects and developers leading major urban regeneration projects around the globe will offer presentations about urban transformations in 25 cities. The conference will engage an invited audience of over 300 urban policymakers, academics, designers, planners and developers to explore the vast and complex challenge of contemporary city making and the interconnected issues of the impact of the global economic condition on world cities, the effect of climate change on urban sustainability and the role of urban design in creating socially cohesive environments.

AKS KEN is basically a textual search engine and the matching entires from Freebase are visualized as a ring chart. The user can then drill down the wedges and unveil related ring charts. Images and a textual description to each topic are shown in a separate drawer on the right hand side.

Last week, in conjunction with its latest redesign, Facebook released “suggestions for helping friends,” a feature that aims to get you to assist your friends that don’t appear to be actively using the site and “reconnect” you with old contacts.

One unfortunate side effect of the feature: it started recommending those you’d rather not connect with, and in some cases, deceased friends.

getElementsBySelector is a python function which takes a standard CSS style selector and returns an array of elements objects from the document that match that selector. This is a frequently used function in JavaScript - if you use a library. Its kind of meaning less to have this function in the server side - unless you are doing screen-scarping. Then its very useful. Recently, I had to work on a Django app that does a bit of screen-scrapping - so I created this function to aid me.

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

This project aims to provide an easy to setup continuous integration server and client. The server side infrastructure is built on top of django. The tasks are described using fabric.

tracking Aptimize for about a year since they contacted me about their Website Accelerator. I was psyched to have them present at and sponsor Velocity. Website Accelerator changes web pages in real time and injects many of the performance best practices from my books, plus some others that aren’t in my books. It’s a server-side module that runs on Microsoft Sharepoint, ASP.NET, and Linux/Apache.

Comparing Python and Java

A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java.

How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times. On the basis of my own personal experience with the two languages, I agree with this estimate.

MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is a publication of research and visions; research into territories, which can be concrete or abstract, but always put into question. Map is not a magazine (it only has two pages) and is not a book (it is issued twice a year). Map presents itself as a folded poster (A1) where information is immediate, dense and objective in one side, and architectural and subjective on the other. Map is a guide to potential actions in the built environment, a folded encyclopedia of the possible, a topography of ideas, or a poster on the wall.

Eucalyptus - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.

A GPS tracker, complete with visual display of your recent waypoints, that would continue to work if your phone reset, powered off, or lost network connectivity half way through your hike. Build it fast, simple – and entirely web-based without any native code.