PUBLIC MARKS with search thought

Multiple trips to Japan and constant frustration at being unable to read the language has sparked off an unusual typographic project at johnson banks. Earlier in the year we started seeing if we could combine the English language and Japanese script in some way.

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.

As someone who has written serious, production-quality code for WM5 and WM6, I say this from many months of hard experience:

I WOULD RATHER STICK A FONDUE FORK THROUGH MY SCROTUM.

Never the fuck again will I develop for that platform. My god, I thought X11 was bad...

C'est ça la véritable expérience Windows Mobaïle.

When the idea came up, we thought “wow, this is really innovative and smart”. But quickly we found out that we had not invented anything: Tupperware has been doing for years. And since 1907 a famous movement has functionned in a similar way, groups of people getting together following guidelines expressed in a book. It is of course Scouting. Scouting spread all around the world based on Baden Powell’s book. So if you thought Barcamp and Pecha Kucha’s concept of decentralized events was new, unfortunately it is not really. Welcome to the frustration of living in the 21st century, almost everything has already been done :)

On taking over the world, and other things…

It’s been a month of milestones for Tumblr, and we thought it would be a good time to stop and say: Thank you to everyone for making this possible.

We can still remember watching your new posts come in one-by-one the day we launched. Now we’re waiting for five new servers to arrive to help us handle the 330 million (that’s 0.3 billion!!) hits and 20 million new posts we’re projecting for August.

More than anything, you continue to blow us away with the amazing things you do with Tumblr.

As our team gets bigger (we’re up to 9 people!), we promise we’re as committed as ever to making Tumblr the greatest place for everyone in the world to share the stuff they love and create.

We love you

When I saw the results I thought “yeah, that’s right.” Uh… but I don’t feel enlightened. Just a nagging feeling that I need to tidy up my tags ;)

21. I also notice that the times I've had a shaved head tend to correspond to times I've had a surprising amount of success with women. Even if I thought I looked bad, something seemed to appeal. I think one reason might be that when you have a shaved head you look like a huge, erect, walking penis. That works, you know, subliminally on women. When they look at you, something deep in their subconscious says "Penis!"

A while back I wrote a little RDF vocab that extended the 2006 vCard vocab. It introduces a few extra terms which I thought were useful, mostly taken from the vCard 4.0 drafts at the time. e.g. a "lang" property to indicate languages spoken by the person represented. One other thing it has though is a more vCard-like way of representing telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.

We thought it appropriate to allow Twitter to be more than just an on monitor phenomena. To accomplish this we have combined an Arduino, Ethernet Shield and typewriter. We added a little bit of solder (we’re spoofing keystrokes) and some coding (available here) and what we have is a twitter monitoring machine.

We collected some things from the internet we thought would work well on paper and we made it into a newspaper with a limited edition run of 1,000.

You can read more about it over here and you can follow the developing adventures of Newspaper Club over here.

I’m just a spectator, albeit a very interested one, but I have long thought that Hickson possesses just the right mix of pragmatism and idealism for this job.

Sauf que le pragmatisme 2.0 ressemble bigrement à de l'infantilisme.

a Web of Data version of a simple authorization scheme and protocol called WebAccessControl (WAC). It includes a draft of a vocabulary and a protocol (see also open issues with it). I thought it might be nice to have a visual representation of the schema

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector

Adding persistence is something that we will typically all have to do at sometime in most real world web applications and will definitely slow things down a little; so I thought I’d approach the problem using my latest favourite storage engine, CouchDB

a Restish example using CouchDB

I have a no asshole rule which is really simple: I really don’t want to work with assholes. So if you’re an asshole and you work on my team, I’m going to fire you. Now, if the whole team says gosh, that’s awful. We want to work with as many assholes as we can! then we have a simple solution. I’ll fire me!

from the build a community section.