PUBLIC MARKS with search small-worldnetwork

This page explores the idea of encoding URIs/IRIs in audio, eg. computed melodies or synthetic birdsong. It can be considered a form of audio steganography, or a kind of aesthetically pleasing but very slow modem. Unlike modems and much steganography, the payload is pretty small.

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Branching and merging are fast and easy to do.

Mer is a new operating system for small, mobile touch-screen devices.

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.

This API defines a language- and platform- neutral protocol for Consumers to request address book, profile, and friends-list information from Service Providers. As a protocol, it is intended to be easy to understand and implement, either as a Service Provider or Consumer, using any language or platform of choice. It is also intended to be implemented by both individuals and small services as well as large providers, in any case where a service contains data about who a user knows and wishes to make that information portable, under the user's control.

Snowball is a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. This site describes Snowball, and presents several useful stemmers which have been implemented using it.

Clarke is a small OS X application for updating your Fire Eagle location quietly, in the background. On Leopard (10.5) it uses Skyhook's API to triangulate your position from nearby wireless access points. On Snow Leopard (10.6) it uses Core Location. It's free, and the source code is available on Github.

Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.