How Buildings Learn TV series
http://www.kottke.org/08/08/how-buildings-learn-tv-series

How Buildings Learn TV series

In 1997, the BBC aired a three-hour documentary based on Stewart Brand's book, How Buildings Learn. Brand has posted the whole program on Google Video in six 30-minute parts: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six.

"all fields become optional" etc. good stuff.

Rule 3. (too true!) Chatter Always Expands

This will be incomprehensible to non developers in the audience, but oh god, this is so painfully, painfully true.

"I mentioned I’ve learned some rules of how database apps change over time, now that I’ve done a few dozen. They are: ... "

the concepts are generic, examples are mostly from Linux and Windows on 32-bit x86.

Excelente artículo de Gustavo Duarte sobre la administración de memoria.

Article intéressant et illustré sur la manière dont les systèmes d'exploitation gèrent la mémoire des processus.

In October of 1994, I’d just started as an honest-to-goodness videogame programmer at a small startup called SingleTrac – which later went on to fame and glory (but unfortunately not much in the way of fortune) with such titles as Warhawk, the Twisted Metal series, and the Jet Moto series. But at the time, the company was less than 20 employees in size and had only been officially in business for about a month. It was sometime in my first week – possibly my first or second day. In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success. Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.

"We came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as 'black triangles.' These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it."

Sometimes the big victories look pedestrian at first glance.

A great term for those things that take so much effort for seemingly little output.

Black Triangles. They're not just for programmers. (via merlin, via kottke)

sometimes I feel like I'm still trying to get that black triangle to show up...

awesome.

Portland, Oregon has already used his open-source software to plan its bus routes. San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of a private company that provides sub-par support.

Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools. Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

"Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable."

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data

leonard lin's weblog. topical geek news.

list of backend and frontend requirements

「無言語化: 機能を言葉で説明しない」これ、素敵

事例

* 質を高める ユーザに狙った価値を提供できているのかテストするためのもの ユーザテストのときには質問には答えない、質問が出るインターフェースは失敗 顔マーケティング ライバルに勝てる「ウリ」

Joe Stump, Lead Architect at Digg, gave this presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo. I couldn't find the actual presentation, but fortunately Kris Jordan took some great notes. That's how key moments in history are accidentally captured forever. Joe was also kind enough to respond to my email questions with a phone call.

Scaling Strategies

SAVE N SHARE

database blog

A database lib

bdb alternative und sehr schnell

Try before choosing by Erik Doernenburg

Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

And so it goes, quite predictably too.... "As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?"

"people who have hundreds of millions or a billion in the bank are not going to change their lifestyles"

Need to gather the linked PDFs sometime

Resumo do livro GoF Design Patterns com exemplos usando Java e UML2.

Design Patterns Explained With Java and Uml2

Four Design patterns with examples in Java

Interesting article about MySQL scalability problems.

Matt Jones talk at Webstock. Superb!

Fabulous slideshare presentation by Matt Jones about city magic drawing connections between urbanisation and digitalisation.

so cool

It's about technology and the city. Or if you'd like, the city as technology. The car changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I'd claim that mobiles will do the same in the 21st.

hackers are building sensors, bots and software into everything around them bottom-up, fast, cheap and out-of-control. They're creating environments that react, adapt and respond to us - and perhaps more importantly - each other: The Demon-Haunted World. Matt's session will be a whistlestop tour of those days of future past and pointers to some practical futures we can start building right now, together.

Matt Jones on "city magic"

"Archigram thought of behaviour as the raw material they were building with". They also used the term "social software" in 1972... motherfuck the fringe is hard to mine for valuables! :0

Captured » Blog Archive »Captured » Blog Archive » Venice from Above from Above venicevenice venice photo italy pictures amazing VenicefromAbove

Weekly spotlights on some of the best Industrial Decay photography from photographers all over the world. Started in 2005, our Flickr group has over 40,000 images from over 4500 members. Documenting Industrial ruins through Photography.

level design inspiration

Blog fotografico di archeologia indistriale

"Database sharding is the process of splitting up a database across multiple machines to improve the scalability of an application. The justification for database sharding is that after a certain scale point it is cheaper and more feasible to scale a site horizontally by adding more machines than to grow it vertically by adding beefier servers."

SELECT Name, Address FROM Customers WHERE CustomerID= ?", conn);

DESIGN

abandoned industrial island in sydney harbour

10 articoli che ogni architetto software e/o sviluppatore DEVE leggere

Papers on Programming

Documentary photography of New York City, from 1885 to 1958.

Fotos, edificios, vida cotidiana de NY

Pictures from an underground city built circa 1400 BCE. The map is amazing.

In 1963, an inhabitant of Derinkuyu (in the region of Capadocia, central Anatolia, Turkey), demolishing a wall of his house-cave, discovered astonished that behind the same was a mysterious room that never had seen; this room took to another one, and this one to another one and another one… By chance the underground city of Derinkuyu was shortage, whose first level could be excavated by hititas around year 1400 a.C.

Derinyuku es una de las ciudades subterráneas antiguas más fascinantes que se han encontrado hasta ahora, una autentica ciudad bajo tierra.

Information architecture is an often misunderstood job title. Are they Designers? Developers? Managers? All of the above? In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture is, why it’s related to usability, and what are the common tools/programs used in information architecture. Along the way we’ll share some of the tweeters, books, and resources we found useful for budding information architects. Even if you’re familiar with the discipline already, you can probably pick up something you’ve missed.

toolkit audit IA

Information architecture is an often misunderstood job title. Are they Designers? Developers? Managers? All of the above? In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture is, why it’s related to usability, and what are the common tools/programs used in information architecture.

In an information space, a human’s needs are simple and his behavior straightforward. Find. Read. Save. But once you get a bunch of humans together, communicating and collaborating, you can observe both the madness and the wisdom of crowds.

site with thousands or millions of people, how do you make sure you can keep track of the people you care about? Resolution: Create ways for people to identify, connect, and organize the people they care about, as well as the information those people produce. The complexity of relationship classification depends on how your customers will use your website.

Artículo de ALA exponiendo algunos patrones de interacción social de redes

Take the Linux Filesystem Tour

Wonderful Wine Cellars For Any Room in Your House | http://dornob.com/wonderful-wine-cellars-for-any-room-in-your-house/ wine cellar winecellar winewine

distinctive designs

cardboard office

nice website, great illustration of Fiodor Sumkin

Two French photographers immortalize the remains of the motor city on film

Through the ruins of Detroit..

Could this be more depressing? The once-beautiful Detroit, formerly the economic engine of a nation, is a ghost.

Maybe it's all I've been reading about the collapse of the classic Maya lately, but this seriously gives me the creeps.

"Mainstays of application architecture such as the relational database model, monolithic run-times, and even deterministic behavior are being challenged by non-relational systems, cloud computing, and new pull-based systems where consistency and even data integrity sometimes take a backseat to uptime and performance."

We are on the edge of two potent technological changes: Clouds and Memory Based Architectures. This evolution will rip open a chasm where new players can enter and prosper. Google is the master of disk. You can't beat them at a game they perfected. Disk based databases like SimpleDB and BigTable are complicated beasts, typical last gasp products of any aging technology before a change. The next era is the age of Memory and Cloud which will allow for new players to succeed. The tipping point is soon. Let's take a short trip down web architecture lane: # It's 1993: Yahoo runs on FreeBSD, Apache, Perl scripts and a SQL database # It's 1995: Scale-up the database. # It's 1998: LAMP # It's 1999: Stateless + Load Balanced + Database + SAN # It's 2001: In-memory data-grid. # It's 2003: Add a caching layer. # It's 2004: Add scale-out and partitioning. # It's 2005: Add asynchronous job scheduling and maybe a distributed file system. # It's 2007: Move it all into the cloud. # It's 2008: Cloud +

What makes Memory Based Architectures different from traditional architectures is that memory is the system of record. Also discussed Jim Starkey NimbusDB

Object-oriented programming was supposed to unify the perspectives of the programmer and the end user in computer code: a boon both to usability and program comprehension. While objects capture structure well, they fail to capture system action. DCI is a vision to capture the end user cognitive model of roles and interactions between them.

Jinming

IKEA has released its own 3D room design tool to help you plan the modernist, clean-lined kitchen, bedroom, or workspace of your dreams.

<blockquote>...the true accidental brilliance of Java is that it has created a very smooth path for its own replacements, even if Java itself has reached the point where it can no longer evolve.</blockquote>

In a recent discussion, there were assertions that C++ was a poorly-designed language. I was on the C++ Standards Committee for 8 years, and saw the decisions take place. I think it's helpful to understand the language choices for both C++ and Java in order to see the bigger perspective.

A List Apart: Articles: The Elegance of Imperfection

design aesthetics

Very interesting.

A taxonomy of elegance Jeremy Alexis, of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, asks us to consider three types of elegance when we face a design problem: logical elegance, systemic elegance, and aesthetic elegance.

Design your house plan blueprints online with smallblueprinter, then take a 3D walkthrough your design, check out an isometric view and print out your plan. Design your dream garden online. An easy to use interactive online tool. drag - drop - print .... your new garden design.

garden and home designer. Free, online

Now you don't need to travel across the world to experience some of the world's greatest architectural treasures because here you'll find 100 excellent collections of buildings, details, and more.

100 Amazing Flickr Collections for Architecture Buffs

Being an OfficePOD user will bring a positive change to life. A chance to cut down on commuting, to be more productive, to spend more time at home but at the same time keep your work separate. A major way to getting a better balance into your life. (Será?)

The ability to work from home is a trend that is here to stay. Technology allows it, legislation permits it and employers often now encourage it. An OfficePOD provides a working environment that is separate to home life. The hassle free OfficePOD service deals with everything from site survey and installation through to customer services and POD relocation in the case of moving house or employer.

Unresolvable

Pretty amazing outdoor office furniture designed to help the environment.

Cachr

"Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai."

If it's too good to be true...

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Excellent Article on Dubai: "Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

LittleDiggs - http://www.littlediggs.com/

Small spaces livable — 500 sq ft or smaller.

blog little homes

Unlimited Novelty

How many of Twitters issues caused by succumbing to NIH (Not Invented Here)

In-depth discussion of message queuing systems and systems architecture, with Twitter representatives speaking up in the comments thread.

Long, but very interesting analysis of ruby, message queue systems, and Twitter's use thereof

twitter and ruby

http://www.tervela.com/tmx

Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 At OpenX we recently completed a large-scale deployment of one of our server farms to Amazon EC2. Here are some lessons learned from that experience. Expect failures; what's more, embrace them Fully automate your infrastructure deployments Design your infrastructure so that it scales horizontally Establish clear measurable goals Be prepared to quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks As you carefully watch various indicators of your systems' health, be prepared to.... Play wack-a-mole for a while, until things get stable

facebook structure

Changing attitudes towards work.

v swissmiss

Get the latest in science news, including space, physics, planet earth, discoveries, NASA, satellites, and space travel from Wired.com

Stonehenge in Georgia

Fascinating, thanks Pam!

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern.

googleのサーバーは一台ごとにバッテリーがついていて、1160台１セットでコンテナに収まっている。

Unresolvable

Googleサーバで非常に驚くのは、サーバ1台1台が、それぞれ12Vのバッテリを備えていて、メイン電源に問題がある場合には電力を供給することだ。Googleはまた、2005年以来、同社のデータセンターが標準規格の運送用コンテナで構成されていることを初めて明らかにした。1つのコンテナには1160台のサーバが搭載され、その電力消費は250KWに達する。

Let me know if you have no interest in the things I randomly send you - this made me think of your union rant plus your blog about shoes on wires :)

Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

Not sure I'm the target audience for this, but the article does mention *many* interesting companies that I should probably be checking out

Brilliant!

article about data architecture for facebook's photo system. Seems interesting

The Photos application is one of Facebook’s most popular features. Up to date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo sharing website. For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates to a total of 60 billion images and 1.5PB of storage. The current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. These numbers pose a significant challenge for the Facebook photo storage infrastructure. NFS photo infrastructure The old photo infrastructure consisted of several tiers: * Upload tier receives users’ photo uploads, scales the original images and saves them on the NFS storage tier. * Photo serving tier receives HTTP requests for photo images and serves them from the NFS storage tier. * NFS storage tier built on top of commercial storage appliances. Since each ima

Since each image is stored in its own file, there is an enormous amount of metadata generated on the storage tier due to the namespace directories and file inodes. The amount of metadata far exceeds the caching abilities of the NFS storage tier, resulting in multiple I/O operations per photo upload or read request. The whole photo serving infrastructure is bottlenecked on the high metadata overhead of the NFS storage tier, which is one of the reasons why Facebook relies heavily on CDNs to serve photos. Two additional optimizations were deployed in order to mitigate this problem to some degree:

WebUrbanist has covered everything from abandoned wonders of the world to the illicit art of exploring deserted places. These thirty-three core articles cover hundreds of abandoned buildings, vehicles, towns and cities from around the world - highly organized, summarized and collected for the very first time. Consider this our must-bookmark essential guide to the world of haunting abandoned places and daring urban exploration. 7 Abandoned Wonders of America (Part Two - Part Three): Most Americans don’t realize just how close their nearest abandonment might be. Some of these remarkable abandoned buildings and places - from prisons and asylums to entire islands - may be closer than you think. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the European Union: While American abandonments are impressive, European ones can be even more so. Some of them have long pasts and beautiful spaces filled with intrigue and many played critical roles during pivotal points of world history. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former

houses constructed out of metal containers

arquitectura: casas hechas con containers

Excellent description of BASE design patterns

If ACID provides the consistency choice for partitioned databases, then how do you achieve availability instead? One answer is BASE (basically available, soft state, eventually consistent).

I've been reading a bunch of papers about distributed systems recently, in order to help systematize for myself the thing that we built over the last year. Many of them were originally passed to me by Toby DiPasquale. Here is an annotated list so everyone can benefit. It helps if you have some algorithms literacy, or have built a system at scale, but don't let that stop you.

The Journal of Information Architecture is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

Sitio con artículos sobre la arquitectura de informacion

to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

Including transparent sending of production traffic to staging.

Maybe for Omniture testing?

Lift the curtain behind any modern web application and you will find at least a few proxy servers orchestrating the show. Caching proxies such as Varnish and Squid help us take the load of our application servers; reverse proxies such as Haproxy and Nginx help us partition and distribute the workload to multiple workers, all without revealing the underlying architecture to the user. In the Ruby world, Rack middleware and Rails Metal are sister concepts: both allow the programmer to inject functionality in the pre or post-processing step of the HTTP request.

Three clusters Production (Huge!!) Staging (one) Benchmarking (same as staging)

Europe history photography Abandoned information Archive russia ukraine blog photos 2009 chernobyl nuclear documentary pripyat ussr community.livejournal.com/abandonedplaces

Haunting images of the literal fallout from Chernobyl.

FOTOS SENSACIONAIS de lugares abandonados na ucrania

I should just learn this and Django rather than bothering to waste my time with PHP and other rudamentary languages that these systems make obsolete.

Okay, yes, but these are not aspects of Rails per se. Rather these are qualities of well-designed, well-factored architecture. Which is still a compliment to Rails, but not exclusive to it!

Ruby on Rails, an open source web development framework, has revolutionized the way we create web applications. In this article, we discuss some of the ways Ruby on Rails can help you in rapidly building fully-featured web-based applications.

just use http already. don't invent your own wire format!

Why HTTP? The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will have to rebuild. Anytime you choose to use a service based on a non-HTTP protocol, look over this list and think carefully about what you’re giving up.

I like how this posts list out some of the great reasons to just use HTTP and the method of interop communication. So much is already built on HTTP and there are more than enough great tools ubiquitously available for interacting and communication over HTTP. The post also has a long discussion thread.

Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry. Until the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States. It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods. Increasing of segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967. The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew. Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states. Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied. Since the 50's, "Motor City" lost more than half of its population. Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization. Many thanks to : Daniel & Silke Seybold, Guillaume Amiot, Frédéric Champion, Lowell Boileau, ...

衝撃　かつてモーターシティとして輝いたデトロイトが　日本も他人ごとじゃないよ（←時流に乗った発言）

"Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization."

photos of Detroit's modern ruins. Breath-taking

Brain research can help us craft spaces that relax, inspire, awaken, comfort, and heal. By Emily Anthes.

Ever wondered what that off-ramp configuration was called? Now you know.

Fascinating description of motorway/freeway interchanges. I didn't know they all had names. The Maryland Braid is my favourite.

I really thought this was a joke.

A very exciting day for LEGO enthusiasts, the company has announced a Frank Lloyd Wright Series to their new division, LEGO Architecture. The division will also feature other works from around the world and different architects. I shed a tear today wishing this division had existed in my youth. /AMC

80+ Strange and Fantastic Buildings Architecture

The term Architecture can refer to a process, a profession or documentation. As a process, architecture is the activity of designing and constructing buildings , Daily Resource for Web Designers and Developers.

On the difference between the ideals of “architecture” and mere “construction”, the renowned 20th C. architect Le Corbusier wrote: “You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture”.

In the late 20th century many new concept was included in the compass of both structure and function. Now days, before performing any action we keeping future in our visions. same applies in Architecture also. In the selection below, we present over 80 Strange & Fantastic Buildings Architecture of modern world. All photographs are linked and lead to the source - the respective photographers.

Online Room Planner

3D room design tool from Autodesk. Experimental.

http://www.downloadblog.it/post/9318/progettare-gli-interni-della-casa-con-autodesk-dragonfly

nice summary of different data stores...

Needle in a haystack: efficient storage of billions of photos

your new office sucks next to this.

beautiful architecture offices in spain

Once again, Iwan Baan amaze us with this great project between the woods by Spanish practice Selgas Cano: Their own architecture office.

[Lighting your house for pictures.]

i see you in one of these someday

Prefab green homes with style, efficiency, and affordability.

Clayton Homes introduces the i-house, the new Revolutionary thought in home building.

How we do MVC

using the ASP.NET MVC framework on a production application for about 9 months now, and in that time, we’ve crafted a number of opinions on how we want to design MVC applications.

In a word "yes". Search around for benchmarks on the net and you'll find numerous surveys that show that, even by the standards of scripting languages, Ruby is a tortoise.

Martin Fowler - detailed, but not too long, well presented pros and cons on ruby

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

"In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside. 'The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way. Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.'"

"The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area."

top

For some people it’s castles with their noble history and crumbling towers, for others it’s abandoned factories or lost cities. But for those who enjoy reading, a huge beautiful library is a place of endless pleasure. Meet 20 of the biggest and most beautiful libraries around the globe, as presented by Curious Expeditions.

Not one of those "we're using hadoop, now we're cool" articles. Well written!

Hadoop

architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures

A project proposing to build a 6,000 km wall across the Sahara to stop desertification using bacteria which solidify sand into sandstone and could be used almost like a giant 3d printer. The future is here.

Larsson's project deservedly won first prize last fall at the Holcim Foundation's Awards for Sustainable Construction held in Marrakech, Morocco. One of the most interesting aspects of the project, I think, is that this solidified dunescape is created through a particularly novel form of "sustainable construction" – that is, through a kind of infection of the earth. In other words, Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a "microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone," he explains.

An awesome app. wow!

mapa TOKYO

animacion en after o por lo menos eso creo

Artful statement about Civilization - Western Style

Installation Credits Title: Civilization (MEGAPLEX), 2008 By: Marco Brambilla Client: The Standard Hotel, New York Editor/Research Assistant:

Honorable Mentions

This article takes you through 12 easy steps to understand how OSGi bundles can be used within an existing classic WAR application. Prior experience with Eclipse Web Tools (Tomcat runtime and launcher) is recommended. The code referred to in this article is available for download here [1].

And this is what we wanted a year ago. At least.

define

I'm a big fan of ceilings and it never fails to amaze me how drastically they can change the appearance and atmosphere of a space yet at the same time be completely ignored by most of the room's occupants. it's incredible how some people live their lives looking either straight ahead or down at the ground, the only ceiling they ever notice being the one above the bed.

Such lovely ceilings here...*waves cigarette in face threateningly*

art

Wow, now that's some serious origami!

"The city resembles a jungle in principle. There is the shrub layer, consisting of millions of 1-3 story buildings, then there is the canopy made of 4-12 story buildings and the emergent layer, towering high above the rest, represented by skyscrapers. Leaves and branches are mimicked by the millions of air conditioners and antennas on the rooftops. Everything is interconnected through a liana meshwork, consisting of roads, railway tracks, stairs, pedestrian overpasses, elevators and escalators."

Gorgeous photos of Tokyo. The 1st one especially

This is a demonstration of a program I wrote to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city. You can read the step-by-step of how it was made at my...

街　ジェネレート　ビル

RT @AliyCia Pixel City. Programando la belleza (urbana). http://bit.ly/eHmY1 Me ha encantado el video. [from http://twitter.com/FelipeMorales/statuses/1904325110]

Pretty slick

The best part about Webhooks is that most of us are already familiar with them: callbacks over HTTP. Pioneered by PayPal and Subversion as a way to send real-time notifications to the client, they have found their way into many dozens of products we all use every day. Need pre or post commit hooks for your SVN or Git repository? Both GitHub and SVN support HTTP callbacks. Need a payment alert from PayPal, or an alert when a wiki page is modified? There are webhooks for that too. This simple mechanism allows us to build web services that work together via a simple and ubiquitous protocol we can all understand: HTTP!

"We offer this spec in hopes that it fills a need or at least advances the state of the discussion in the pubsub space. Polling sucks. We think a decentralized pubsub layer is a fundamental, missing layer in the Internet architecture today and its existence, more than just enabling the obvious lower latency feed readers, would enable many cool applications, most of which we can't even imagine. But we're looking forward to decentralized social networking."

With all the recent buzz about real-time web, surely this is the year XMPP/AMQP Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) makes it to the big leagues! Or maybe not. Ejabberd (XMPP), RabbitMQ (AMQP) and other pubsub server implementations have come a long way but they remain cumbersome to setup and maintain,

grid design with Flash

列の長さによってスクロールスピードを変えてあって、 上端と下端がビッタリ揃うようになっている。 スクロールが気持ち気持ち悪い。

Teruhiro Yanagihara was born in 1976 in Kangawa Prefecture, Japan. After graduating in space design from Osaka University of Art in 1999, he established his own design company, Isolation Unit.

敷き詰めるタイプのレイアウト。どんな状態でも一定のマージンをとる徹底さ。最後までスクロールしてもきちん揃うようにずらすのがにくい。

nice flash

No, you couldn't. Why programmers say this sort of thing, hilariously dissected.

Very interesting look at what`s really required to have a complete web app.

Good rant about how the little touches that make great things great are invisible to many engineers (and users). It's strange that he thinks that this blindness is peculiar to the open source community, though.

"Do you have five minutes? No. Why? Because I’m lying. It would take much longer than five minutes. That’s the eternal optimism of programmers."

Very good critique of the notion that a web app which at its core may just be an interface to a couple of database tables is a trivial thing that can be banged out in a few days. While it's possible to put up a basic front-end that quickly, all the extras that go on top of that to make a real, usable application take much, much longer. User interface matters.

why it's hard to clone a major s/w site (stackoverflow)

Nice article by Benjamin Pollack in the discussion about cloning Stack Overflow.

"Lifehacker reader agmk and his girlfriend hated the look of their cluttered home office and computer den. It seemed like even when the rest of their place was clean, their home office was always a little bit too messy. In an effort to make it easier to hide the nook that served as their home office they turned some Ikea bookshelves they scored off Craigslist into a pretty awesome office-concealing secret doorway."

Dude makes a batman-style hiding passageway on the cheap

SQL Databases Are An Overapplied Solution (And What To Use Instead)

Stack Overflow Architecture | High Scalability

Stack Overflow is a much loved programmer question and answer site written by two guys nobody has ever heard of before. Well, not exactly. The site was created by top programmer and blog stars Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. In that sense Stack Overflow is like a celebrity owned restaurant, only it should be around for a while. Joel estimates 1/3 of all the programmers in the world have used the site so they must be serving up something good.

Case study on Redis

Just wanted to add that even though there is a single point of failure the reliability due to software bugs has not been an issue and the dfs Namenode has been very stable. The Jobtracker crashes that we have seen are due to errant jobs - job isolation is not yet that great in hadoop and a bad query from a user can bring down the tracker (though the recovery time for the tracker is literally a few minutes). There is some good work happening in the community though to address those issues.

I few weeks ago, I posted about a conversation I had with Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera, in which he discussed a Hadoop-based effort at Facebook he previously directed. Subsequently, Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sarma of Facebook contacted me to expand upon and in a couple of instances correct what Jeff had said. They also filled me in on Hive, a data-manipulation add-on to Hadoop that they developed and subsequently open-sourced.

The Abandoned & Industrial Edges of New York

Next stop: Cholula!

Amazindly, the list misses China!!!

Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.

The oldest thriving cities, travel-porn pics.

mouais, mieux vaut (re)créer soi-même qqch à partir d'une boite classique.

2009

555 KUBIK "How it would be, if a house was dreaming" The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture - the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers "Galerie der Gegenwart". Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself. Production: www.urbanscreen.com Art Direction: Daniel Rossa - www.rossarossa.de 3D Operator: David Starmann Sound Design : Jonas Wiese Realized with www.mxwendler.net mediaserver A extended version of this documentation can be found here: vimeo.com/5677104

Excellent work in architecture+projection

Wow. Astounding.

diseño 3D en las calles. buenisimo

URBANSCREEN INSZENIERT ARCHITEKTUR. Urbanscreen hat eine innovative Form der Fassaden-Projektion entwickelt: Lumentektur - ein Verfahren zur passgenauen Projektion auf Gebäude und Objekte

Grupo de investigación de proyeccioones interactivas, sobre fachadas y ojeos tridimensionales

行ってみたい所ばかりなのでメモ。

読子・リードマンがいそうな風景だ

Good description of thinking thru feature implementation. error handling, sync failures, user feedback, etc

Anatomy of a feature: http://bit.ly/3R0Ws Great step-by-step guide on how an idea gets turned into software. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/2954188093]

NetNewsWire's developer Brent Simmons describes all the UI decisions he had to go through before adding the Instapaper functionality to the feed reader's latest beta : "It’s not enough just to write the basic functionality and add a menu item that runs it. Even a feature as simple as this one requires some up-front thinking, some design."

A great post on just how much it really takes to "add this simple feature that does XXX" to software.

Great post!

Checklist when to use an ESB

モバゲーのインフラの話

1日6億PVを6人のインフラ担当で支えられる理由

Wonderful stuff - constructing 3D models of Rome based on Flickr photos alone, with no geodata

Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city

Wow!

Cool project at the Univeresity of Washington: "Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images."

The technical geekery required to make this happen is just too damn cool.

Intéressant, une étude des différentes db alternatives sous l'angle de la scalabilité

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

data store scaling technologies

detroit pics

Google File System

ACM Queue, August 7, 2009

设计自己的起居

DesignYourDorm.com is a web-based 3-D interior design tool that allows college students to customize their dorm room interiors and purchase their favorite room selections online.

3-D interior design tool for students, parents, and universities

InfoQ: RESTful HTTP in practice - http://bit.ly/Zrqmk Great article but leaves out hypermedia side [http://bit.ly/UhPEK] completely. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/3428371918]

I have no idea what half of this means but I think It's worth some bedtime reading

WebHooks or PubSubHubBub are designed to simplify and optimize the web.

nature eats houses

"real" Obstructed Views

Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards.

oh jebus.

corridors

Yes, it's geeky, but any industrial designer's gotta love this stuff.

Awesome and extensive post exploring the history of Sci-Fi corridors...

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

man, i love super obsessive blog spots like this

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

[en] ... ils recevraient un descriptif aussi précis que celui-ci!

Old but so true...

If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

answer is 3TB database???

"The fundamental problem is endemic to the relational database mindset, which places the burden of computation on reads rather than writes."

Wow, cassandra uses a lot of disk space. Trade offs!

Casey: We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day. We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX. Actual requests that hit Rails per day is 10 million. 900 new users sign up per day. The forums are very active with about 50,000 new posts being written each day. Some various numbers — 2.3 million knitting/crochet projects, 19 million forum posts, 13 million private messages, 8 million photos (the majority are hosted by Flickr).

Some various numbers — 2.3 million knitting/crochet projects, 19 million forum posts, 13 million private messages, 8 million photos (the majority are hosted by Flickr).

Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis

«Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis»

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks

y this is a felt need that's spreading across the Net. Interestingly, they approach the questions from a list of what information needs to be shared and how it needs to be transmitted; I come from the angle of what people want from each other and how their needs can be met. The two approaches converge, though. See the comments for other interesting related blogs.

How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails

Interessantissimo articolo su un sito web fatto in rails (www.ravelry.com) che ha raggiunto volumi di traffico davvero ragguardevoli. L'articolo illustra come è nata l'idea per il sito (si tratta di un sito per gli appassionati di cucito e lavoro a maglia), come si è arrivati a quei numeri (10 million requests a day hit Rails, 3.6 million pageviews per day, 430,000 registered users. 70,000 active each day. 900 new sign ups per day), dell'architettura adottata, e delle lezioni imparate.

Tim Bray has a wonderful interview with Casey Forbes, creator of Ravelry, a Ruby on Rails site supporting a 400,000+ strong community of dedicated knitters and crocheters.

Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Spot on.

Clojure is a LISP for the JVM created by Rich Hickey.

FlightCaster, a realtime flight delay site, is built on Clojure and Hadoop for the statistical analysis. The web frontend is built with Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku. We talked to Bradford Cross about Clojure, functional programming and tips for OOP developers interested in making the jump.

Another critical piece of infrastructure is Cascading; an excellent layer on top of Hadoop that adds additional abstraction and functionality. We definitely recommend Cascading to anyone doing serious data processing and mining with Hadoop.

maravilhoso site em flash e portfolio fantástico!

片山正通

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Ruby, similar to Mongrel or Thin. It uses Mongrel’s Ragel HTTP parser but has a dramatically different architecture and philosophy.

Persistent Data Structures and Managed References

Rich Hickey

good overview of concurrent data structures, refs and STM in Clojure

Rich Hickey is my new favourite presenter. The bloke is awesome (well except for the mullet you can see in this video)! In this video he discusses time as it relates to variable state, briefly applying it to clojure. What makes it great is his practical focus and his use of a really simple example to get across the point.

Cogent

Great presentation about good SQL practice.

interesting but it's a slideshow rather than an article

Construct 3D buildings on your own.

"Building Maker is a 3D modeling tool for adding buildings to Google Earth. It's fun to use, and an easy way to get on the 3D map."

Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it's accurate, that it stays current and that it's useful to everyone who might want to use it?

"Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth?"

Create 3-D buildings from major cities worldwide.

technical debt

Analysis of when and why having bad / no tech design does / doesn't pay. Basically it's a metaphor for thinking about how and why we make tech design decisions.

Facebook, Digg, Twitter が、なぜスケールするのに困難なのか？すべてはリアルタイムに更新されるデータだからという見解であっているかな？

Architect's home office!

とても勉強になる。

awesomeness, people holding snapshots from the past onto settings from today :-)

InformIT: Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson > Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson

Entrevista com os autores do livro Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, 15 anos após sua publicação.

development then? (Tony whispers) Oh, I see. He's not very good at magic either – his repertoire is extremely limited. Basically he's a one trick pony.

A few reasons why writing software is hard

Article summarizing presentation by Facebook on some of their scaling challenges and solutions.

Interesting to see the problems that are present at Google regarding staying in sync with the latest kernel code.

This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr's Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queuing system to do the rest. Flickr uses a queuing system to process 11 million tasks a day. Leslie Michael Orchard also does a great job explaining the queuing meme in his excellent post Queue everything and delight everyone. Asynchronous work queues are how you scalably solve problems that are too big to handle in real-time.

Good introduction to the "NoSQL" space (initially not a fan of the term, but I guess it is going to stick...), highlighting the different designs used by the options in the space, and the benefits/drawbacks of those designs.

Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as “NoSQL databases.”

"Sharding kills most of the value of a relational database."

sql database db

Poor SQL; even with DSLs being the new hotness, people forget that SQL is one of the original domain-specific languages. It's a little verbose, and you might be bored with it, but it's much better than writing low-level mapreduce code.

Presentation on how googleapps datastore implements filtering and sorting on top of bigtable. Basically, all queries are translated to bigtable prefix scans or range scans, without needing any in-memory postprocessing, all rows returned from the scan are relevant to, and in order, for the query. There's a built-in 'single property index' (or two actually: one asc and one desc) which can obviously be used for single-property searches, but also for queries consisting of only equals clauses, by doing multiple range scans and taking the intersection (not sure at which level this happens). More complex queries need specific pre-defined indexes. Index tables only have keys, no columns with values. Indexes are updated synchronously, so everything stays consistent (at the cost of contention problems?). Some mention of string-byte considerations when doing range queries. No fulltext queries. Ends with some talk on transactions.

Startup qui commercialise un service de geolocalisation indoor.

屋内のGoogle Mapsを目指すサービス。

like google maps for indoor

indoor location-based service for mobile devices

[Image: Ruined swimming pool at Uday 's Palace, Jebel Makhoul, Iraq (2009)

"Vast, self-indulgent halls of columned marble and extravagant chandeliers, surrounded by pools, walls, moats, and, beyond that, empty desert, suddenly look more like college dormitories. Weight sets, flags, partition walls, sofas, basketball hoops, and even posters of bikini'd women have been imported to fill Saddam's spatial residuum. The effect is oddly decorative, as if someone has simply moved in for a long weekend, unpacking an assortment of mundane possessions."

A nice overview of some of the more popular patterns in NoSQL architecture

You should care because webhooks will be ubiquitous. You should care because they’re going to reshape the internet. You should care because webhooks are the next step in the evolution of communication on the internet and nothing will be left untouched.

"Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Here’s a common example: You go to github. There’s a textbox for their code post webhook. You drop in a URL. Now when you post your code to github, github will HTTP POST to your chosen URL with details about the code post. There is no simpler way to allow open ended integration with arbitrary web services. -- You should care because webhooks will be ubiquitous. You should care because they’re going to reshape the internet. You should care because webhooks are the next step in the evolution of communication on the internet and nothing will be left untouched." -- Timothy Fitz

arquitetura antiga de Sao Paulo.

Site que cataloga edifícios abandonados ou subutilizados em Sampa.

Desenvolvido a partir da ideia apresentada pelos site português Lisboa Abandonada e pelo argentino Basta de Demoler, onde cidadãos de uma maneira informal criam arquivos fotográficos e iconográficos registrando construções esquecidas na cidade, elaborou-se o projeto de catalogação e histórica da cidade de São Paulo chamado: “São Paulo Abandonada”. Alguém poderia fazer um blog chamado Curitiba Abandonada

Abandoned São Paulo

Summary of the Facebook architecture and the bottlenecks they have had to work around

After considering a variety of data clustering algorithms, found that there was very little win for the additional complexity of clustering. So at Facebook, user data is randomly partitioned across indiviual databases and machines across the cluster. Hence, each user access requires retrieving data corresponding to user state spread across hundreds of machines. Intra-cluster network performance is hence critical to site performance. Facebook employs memcache to store the vast majority of user data in memory spread across thousands of machines in the cluster. In essence, nodes maintain a distributed hash table to determine the machine responsible for a particular users data. Hot data from MySQL is stored in the cache. The cache supports get/set/incr/decr and

"pubsub via webhooks"

Looks awesome. Going to dig into the implementation Real Soon Now...

GR: Watercoolr - Gossip for web applications http://tinyurl.com/lz8uxf [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/2092003645]

The Architects' Journal lists its top ten comic book cities.

via ll.d

From Gotham City to Mega City One, the Architects’ Journal presents a selection of the greatest illustrated urban spaces

Russian artist Andrei Molodkin poses next to his version of the statue of Nike of Samothrace, filled with oil, part of an installation where two similar sculptures, one filled with oil and the other with blood, pumped in by a motor, are projected live on a wall and transformed into a third sculpture, during the vernissage of the 53rd Biennale International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy, June 4, 2009. (AP Photo/Alberto Pellaschiar) #

If you're considering doing large scale analysis of structured data (access logs, for example), there are dozens of enterprise-level solutions ranging from specialized streaming databases, to the more mundane data warehousing solutions with star topologies and column store semantics. Google, facing the same problem, developed a system called Sawzall, which leverages their existing Map-Reduce clusters for large scale parallel data analysis by adding a DSL for easy manipulation of data.

Map/Reduce Toolkit by NY Times engineers is a great example of a Ruby DSL on top of the Hadoop Streaming interface. Specifically aimed at simplifying their internal log processing jobs, it exposes just the necessary bits for handling the access log inputs and provides a number of predefined reduce steps: unique, counter, etc. For example, to get a list of all unique visitor IP's, the entire program consists of:

Jim Rossignol on the villains lair (nice HL2 and Shadow of the Colossus refs)

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

Compare the recent sale of Friendster for a reported $26.4 million with Facebook’s projected 2010 revenues, of $1 billion, and we have a stark reminder of how the inability to scale can kill a startup. “All they had to do was keep the damned servers up and running,” Matt Cohler, a former Facebook executive and general partner at Benchmark Capital, says in Adam L. Peneberg’s book “Viral Loop,” but Friendster failed to scale and the cost was enormous.

Top 10 Internet Startup Scalability Killers – GigaOM

Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts

Cutaway illustrations of Nuclear Power Reactors. Linked via John Nack at Adobe.

Research behind design

Provides examples that include 'Kingsdale School in London [which] was redesigned, with the help of psychologists, to promote social cohesion; the new structure also includes elements that foster alertness and creativity.'

How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood

ists are giving their hunches an empirical basis

How Google Works

'...while both [Google] search queries and processing power have gone up by a factor of 1000, latency has gone down from around 1000ms to 200ms. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999.'

The

These designs are reproductions of Eiffel's original designs included in his book "The 300 Meter Tower", Lemercier publications, Paris 1900.

para Histourist

I'm on the fence about this. There's a lot of comparison of stuff that can't figure out how to make money (Facebook, Twitter) to stuff that needs to make money/simplify stuff/track money (CRM, accounting, etc.).

Tim Bray rant on the difference in user experience between Web consumer sites and Enterprise IT. "Obviously, the technology matters. This isn’t the place for details, but apparently the winning mix includes dynamic languages and Web frameworks and TDD and REST and Open Source and NoSQL [...] More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. " His conclusion is: "Plan A: Don’t Build Systems [...as defended by ] Nicholas Carr: everything would be better if we could do IT the way we do electricity Plan B: Do it better: [but you cannot do it without adopting the agile ways of the web startup] that kind of thing simply cannot be built if you start with large formal specifications and fixed-price contracts and change-control procedures and so on."

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

pretty good about going with the web dev model. But then he says buy Oracle or SAP which I don't understand.

Study on REST and Enterprise Development

Mind blowing full CG video (architecture photography)

<Vigil> http://vimeo.com/7809605

restimate the impact that cloud computing is going to have on our industry. All of the sudden, the cost of hiring / fir

Prefabricated buildings and flat-pack furniture blend creative designs with sustainable style using portability, modularity and the possibility of mass-production.

人工生態系Biosphere2が廃墟に

The fertile promise of the microcosm has been abandoned.

how to store tree structure on RDB

階層構造

A stunning HD quality video, full CG

Recomendado!

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click discusses the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, examples of memory/CPU cache interaction, and tips for improving performance. -- It's a shame I would of liked to see the presentation on their hardware transactional memory implementation and why "it doesn't work as all the academics would have you believe."

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click discusses the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, etc.

Below are a collection of resources to get you going down the information architecture and data visualization path. Whether you just want to become more familiar with infographics and data visualizations for occasional use or are thinking of making it a career, the resources below will surely come in handy. There are also some beautiful examples and more roundups to see even more fantastic graphics.

By Cameron Chapman Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who've never tried it before. Also, creating successful infographics and...

urban geography

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network. Networks of secret passages and tunnels have been built on a giant scale, from components of the Maginot line to the Viet Cong Cu Chi Network. Others perform a peacetime function, such as the half mile tunnel network H.G. Dyar built under his Washington home, as a hobby, the passageways under Disney’s Magic Kingdom or the unbelievable 5000 year old Lizard People tunnel network under Los Angeles that the L.A. Times published a diagram of during the depression. Here is a collection of our favorite tunnel network diagrams, drawings or models.

interesting subterranean stuff

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network.

My friend Chris would like this. So sweet.

""

From Jeremy Miller

Jeremy Miller's Presentation Patterns Wiki

Typically excellent post from Ilya Grigorik.

An indepth look at disk i/o throughut, measurement and performance monitoring within Linux

あとで

creativas creativos diseños

"And one day, a ladder appeared. Julien climbed with guarded optimism; could this be the way out for which he’d been searching all these weeks?"

It's lonely in the modern world: http://j.mp/dxLDDc

Repurposed from Dwell magazine.

It's lonely in the modern world.

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/riue/20090710/1247227463 July 10(Fri), 2009 ところ変われば品変わる - Excel 方眼紙CommentsAdd Star 21:04 Lifehacker 経由で知った PC Magazine の記事。Excel の列幅を 1、行の高さを 9 にすることによって方眼紙を作成するという Tips。 方眼紙といっても日本の「Excel 方眼紙」の目的で使うわけじゃない。この記事で取り上げられているのは、「この方眼紙を使ってフロアの模様替えの構想を練ったりするのはどうよ」というお話。「橋やショッピングモール」を造ったりするのでなければ…つまり、犬小屋の設計をする程度なら、この方眼紙で十分らしい。 「Excel grid paper」でググってみると、この手の「本当に方眼紙的に利用する」話はそこそこヒットする。意外と需要があるんだね。

If you love modern design but you also have a great sense of humor, you'll love this new blog called Unhappy Hipsters. It's where they pair a modern decor pic with a funny caption. Eye-candy and some chuckles. Now that's just my cup of tea.

Trapped by the tawny palette, he struggled through yet another brown knit scarf.

Step into my cardboard office…

CR Blog - news and views on visual communications from the writers of creative review

CR Blog » Blog Archive » Step into my cardboard officeâ¦

Escritório feito em reboard

Note about Code-State-Cache-Data (CSCD) pattern in scalable web applications.

Short Article propounding the use of a "Code-State-Cache-Data-Architecture" (CSCD) instead of just CD or CCD applications. Basically saying that you should forget about stateful apps if you wan't maximum performance...

Application state - Data you can restore from the database or afford to lose if server is restarted (logged in users). He recommends storing this in-memory. "Application state goes into an in-memory key-value store like Tokyo Tyrant. Cache data goes into Memcached. Persistent data goes into a database"

"What he needs is the insight to identify state, cached data and persistent data in his application. Application state goes into an in-memory key-value store like Tokyo Tyrant. Cache data goes into Memcached. Persistent data goes into a database. Note that the seperation of code and application state may be beneficial later, because it allows you to scale easily by adding new memory servers. ... Let's call this the Code-State-Cache-Data (CSCD) pattern. What Damian originally had was a Code-Data (CD) pattern, and later he optimized to get a Code-Cache-Data (CCD) pattern"

a comprehensive and efficient research, communication and advertising platform for the building & design industry.

Received this from Frances as a design reference.

"Designguide.com is a comprehensive and efficient research, communication and advertising platform for the building & design industry."

"The line between software development and software architecture is a tricky one. Some people will tell you that it doesn't exist and that architecture is simply an extension of the design process undertaken by developers. Others will make out it's a massive gaping chasm that can only be crossed by lofty developers who believe you must always abstract your abstractions and not get bogged down by those pesky implementation details. As always, there's a pragmatic balance somewhere in the middle, but it does raise the interesting question of how you move from one to the other." -- Simon Brown

まさに親方日の丸な力技ですね

で、お聞きしたのが分散自立システム。 スイカのサーバーって単純に二重化とかしているんじゃないんですって。 えっと、俺人に説明するのがへたくそなので、また下手な喩え方をしちゃうけど、俺の理解ではDNSみたいのにちかいかも。 マスターがあるP2Pとか？ マスターノードみたいのがあって、駅ノードがあって、クライアント(改札機)があって、クライアントでチェックを行うと。多分無ければセンターにいくんだろうね。 プルとプッシュのタイミングが結構工夫されてるのかもしれない。 こっから先は多分だけど、駅ノードのレベルで横の連携があるので、マスターは最悪３日ぐらい停止していても実際に影響はなかなか出ないのかな。 もしこれが、センター問い合わせ系だったらもっとお金が掛かった上に、安定性がなかったことだろうとのこと。 やっぱり、これはちょっとしたインターネットの世界ですよ。うん。

suicaのサーバーはみんなの知らないところで、実はたまに落ちているそうだ。 だがシステムが止まることはない、計算上センターは3日ぐらいは止まっていても大丈夫だそうだ。 だからサーバーが落ちたなどとニュース沙汰になることは殆ど無い。

"These two seem like an interesting combination. Imagine the possibilities...kill your database, simple POJO applications, free distributed transactions, clustered JVMs with limitless memory...it would make your hair would grow back, you'd get women, and become filthy rich...well...maybe not, but at least you'd have more fun writing software." -- Paul Stadig

photos a montrer

A set on Flickr

ingekleurde zwart-wit foto's

In 1900, Goodyear traveled to the Paris Exposition with photographer Joseph Hawkes. They brought back numerous images from the exposition including street life, vistas, pavilions, statues, and other structures and decorative details.

William Henry Goodyear (1846–1923), whose image collections are presented here, was the Brooklyn Museum's first curator of fine arts (1899–1923) and a renowned art and architectural historian. In addition to being a vital force in the early years of the Museum's fine arts department, Goodyear did extensive research in art history and architectural theory. In 1900, Goodyear traveled to the Paris Exposition with photographer Joseph Hawkes. They brought back numerous images from the exposition including street life, vistas, pavilions, statues, and other structures and decorative details.

Flickr set of photography of the Paris Exposition. William Henry Goodyear (1846–1923), whose image collections are presented here, was the Brooklyn Museum's first curator of fine arts (1899–1923) and a renowned art and architectural historian. In addition to being a vital force in the early years of the Museum's fine arts department, Goodyear did extensive research in art history and architectural theory. In 1900, Goodyear traveled to the Paris Exposition with photographer Joseph Hawkes. They brought back numerous images from the exposition including street life, vistas, pavilions, statues, and other structures and decorative details.

Series fotográficas que nos muestran la vida en el pasado de las gran ciudad de Paris

Building burning at the end

An incredible series of photographs, with a spectacular, stunning conclusion: "Marking the end of the Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival takes place on the 15th day of the year - during the first full moon. People across Mainland China and Taiwan celebrate the festival in many colorful ways, from fiery folk traditions to firework displays and laser shows. Unfortunately, this year's festival ended on a somewhat sour note as an unauthorized fireworks show set an unoccupied skyscraper on fire in downtown Beijing, and one firefighter lost his life fighting the blaze. Collected here are 27 photos of the festival, and a handful from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire in Beijing."

Marking the end of the Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival takes place on the 15th day of the year - during the first full moon.

August 24, 2009 Hemcrete®: Carbon Negative Hemp Walls

"MVC is all about separation of concerns. […] Now, here's the test of a true MVC design: the program should in essence be fully functional even without a View/Controller attached. OK, the outside world will have trouble interacting with it in that form, but as long as one knows the appropriate Model API incantations, the program will hold and manipulate data as normal."

Very good description of MVC

"MVC is all about separation of concerns."

In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan College, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan. If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.

Underwater discovery 2

three peat

15 Dazzling Modern Library Designs | Design + Ideas on WU

http://www.webcitation.org/5fhaamuLl

The key thing to remember is that REST is about building software that scales to usage on the World Wide Web by being a good participant of the Web ecosystem. Ideally a RESTful API should be designed to be implementable by thousands of websites and consumed by hundreds of applications running on dozens of platforms with zero coupling between the client applications and the Web services. A great example of this is RSS/Atom feeds which happen to be one of the world's most successful RESTful API stories.

Mongo DB Production

Interesting blog post detailing production experiences with mongodb.

I've recently been working on a fairly large project that that has contact information for almost 2 million people. These records contain details for both online and offline actions. Since the data can come from multiple sources there exist many duplicate records. Duplicate records mean more processing for our code, more storage space and more hassle for our clients who have to deal with these duplicates. All in all, bad things to leave lying around. In this article we'll look at some strategies that I used to identify and remove these duplicates. All code in this article are samples, and we'll leave the task of assembling them into a final working program up to the reader. CPAN is your Friend Like all good Perl projects, we will make heavy use of the CPAN. It makes our lives so much easier and every day I'm more in awe at the quality and bredth of solutions I find there. For this project we'll be using Text::LevenshteinXS, Lingua::EN::Nickname and Parallel::ForkManager. What is a Du

Funny to see people still using perl these days but great example

Ache inspiracao, 12 lugares para olhar... bem interessante

วิธีการหา inspiration แบบต่างๆ

RT @kvz: Why Twitter is dropping MySQL in favor of Cassandra: http://bit.ly/dyeiXF

RT @DZone "Cassandra @ Twitter: An Interview with Ryan King « MyNoSQL" http://dzone.com/WbTY

MyNoSQL: Please include anything I’ve missed.

SQL is Scalable and NoSQL Isn’t For Everyone The point is one that I think all rational people already realize: The ACID RDBMS isn’t appropriate for every need, nor is the NoSQL solution.

"[Though as Michael Stonebraker points out, SQL the query language actually has remarkably little to actually to do with the debate. It would be more clearly called NoACID]"

# My own setup.

An architectural approach that uses mostly static HTML and JSON, powered by CouchDB.

In my last post I promised to talk a little about the technology that underlies Urbantastic. It’s not the usual suspects, so it’s worth some explanation.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fblog.urbantastic.com%2Fpost%2F81336210%2Ftech-tuesday-the-fiddly-bits

Splitting static and dynamic data, moving the synthesis of the two to the client with javascript.

Neben dem Film mein Favorit: Top 10 Code-Gerüche in Unternehmen

http://qconsf.com/sf2008/file?path=/qcon-sanfran-2008/slides//NealFord_10_Ways_to_Improve_Your_Code.pdf

An infoq presentation on 10 Ways to Improve Your Code...

"This room — the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it — and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.”"

Gary Chang's transforming apartment in Hong Kong

How to use minimal apartment space to best effect

Really awesome creative use of a very small space.

would love to see a video of this

A tiny Hong Kong apartment is a model of flexible living, featuring sliding wall units and fold-down tables and chairs.

trics on eBay’s main Teradata data warehouse include: * >2 petabytes of user data

Millions of queries per day

Statistieken over de databaseverwerking van ebay

Keep this as a reference to common couch FUD :)

Design and architecture are two adjacent walls of the blogging garret, where we are not only blessed with the writers having a bent towards it but also readers cum customers who make the best of products posted here. Go ahead and enjoy the ride on this designer road, furnished with creative architecture that adds to its beauty.

Richardson Maturity Model : A staged approach towards RESTfulness by @martinfowler http://ff.im/-hUO5V

/via Leonard Richardson

A model (developed by Leonard Richardson) that breaks down the principal elements of a REST approach into three steps. These introduce resources, http verbs, and hypermedia controls.

I want one of these. I really liked the "old and new" by Mouzon Design

The Green House of the Future We asked architects to draw up plans for the most energy-efficient houses they could imagine. They imagined quite a bit.

We asked architects to draw up plans for the most energy-efficient houses they could imagine. They imagined quite a bit.

The Beauty of #India 50 Amazing Photos http://bit.ly/adCOon

# # Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database. To scale at Digg they followed a set of practices very similar to those used at eBay. No joins, no foreign key constraints (to scale writes), primary key look-ups only, limited range queries, and joins were done in memory. When implementing the comment feature a 4,000 percent increase in performance was created by sorting in PHP instead of MySQL. All this effort required to make a relational database scale basically meant you were using a non-relational database anyway. So why not just use a non-relational database from the start?

As Digg started out with a MySQL oriented architecture and has recently been moving full speed to Cassandra, his observations on some of their lessons learned and the motivation for the move are especially valuable. Here are some of the key takeaways you find useful:

RT @Sebdz: RT: @programmateur: Digg: 4000 % performance increase by sorting in PHP rather than MySQL (via @mrboo) - http://bit.ly/ckma10

♻ @n1k0: "Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database" http://n1k.li/4v (via @nsilberman)

Typically for relatively static data sets, relatively low query volumes, and relatively high latency requirements.

Key Elements to Website Design

2D and 3D Design and Engineering Software for Architecture...

Links to several OSGi articles for introduction

Bunch-O-Links to OSGI stuff

COMPUTER SOFTWARE TO REDESIGN YOUR HOME OR APARTMENT

protocol=http, lb-port=80, instance-port=80

http://leadthinking.com/42-aws-elastic-load-balancer-tutorial http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/ http://elwoodicious.com/2009/11/23/ec2-elastic-load-balancing-for-fun-and-profit/ http://af-design.com/blog/2009/07/15/3-amazon-elastic-load-balancer-tips/ http://ajohnstone.com/archives/ec2-tools-installation-ami-api-elastic-load-balancing-elb-and-cloud-watch/ http://topsy.com/tb/leadthinking.com/42-aws-elastic-load-balancer-tutorial http://lixconsulting.blogspot.com/2009/10/aws-setup-load-balancer.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/2009-05-15/DeveloperGuide/

adding elb to amazon servers

load balancing

You can load balance your Mysql cluster – however ELB is outside Amazon’s firewall and isn’t integrated with it. This means that to load balance Mysql you need to open it up to the world and rely on strong credentials to keep your data secure, rather than firewall rules.

We’ve been using the new Amazon Load Balancers (ELB) for Socialmod, and since there’s not much information out there on the subject, I thought a blog post would be in order.

Хорошая подборка в одном месте

I figure this is like porn for you.

Find out why REST interfaces are foundational for emerging architectures such as the Semantic Web. Brian Sletten takes a big-picture view of REST, now and in the future, in this final article in his series.

JavaWorld

"A standard bit of advice for people who are learning to design their code better, who want to write software with intention as opposed to coincidence, often parroted by the advisor with no attempt to explain the meaning."

o

LazyProxyFactory

DNS is a great example of a service that couldn't possibly work on paper, but performs spectacularly in practice, even with a hodge-podge of implementations all over the Internet.

DNS is a great example of a service that couldn't possibly work on paper, but performs spectacularly in practice, even with a hodge-podge of implementations all over the Internet. First, the authoritative DNS servers responds with a Time To Live (TTL) timestamp for every record (which you should keep fairly low in a virtual deployment environment), then the upstream DNS servers cache that same data, albeit usually with different policies (determined by the ISP). And finally, your router, OS, and the browser all have their own and independent DNS caches. (Firefox 2/3 caches all DNS records for a 1 minute, IE 5/6/7 for 15 minutes). Talk about a mess!

Good tips on using DNS in the cloud, and in particular using a staging environment that is switched over (via DNS) to a production environment.

Resources

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article I examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, I describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

very good summary about linux and rt

twitter DB fan out　メール

TwitterのDB構成

Create and furnish your floor plan design online with Homestyler free interior design software. Experiment with room design and decorating ideas and share home remodeling plans online with Homestyler (formerly Project Dragonfly).

Modelagem 3D comodos da casa

mt BOMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Neat abandoned stations, places, and spaces of Antarctica.

Distributed systems are not typically a place where domain driven design is applied. Distributed processing projects often start with an overall architecture vision and an idea about a processing model which basically drives the whole thing, including object design if it exists at all. Elaborate object designs are thought of as something that just gets in the way of distribution and performance, so the idea of spending time to apply DDD principles gets rejected in favour of raw throughput and processing power. However, from my experience, some more advanced DDD concepts can significantly improve performance, scalability and throughput of distributed systems when applied correctly.

One of the most important building blocks of DDD that can help in distributed systems are aggregates. Unfortunately, at least judging by the discussions that I’ve had with client teams over the last few years, aggregates seem to be one of the most underrated and underused building blocks of DDD. I’m probably as guilty as anyone else of misusing aggregates and it took me quite a while to grasp the full potential of that concept. But from this perspective I think that getting aggregates just right is key to making a distributed system work and perform as expected.

Bad IA is now the greatest cause of task failures because it's the stumbling block for getting anywhere on a site. Users try to find their way around a site, and if they're particularly motivated, they might even try again if they fail. But if users are repeatedly led in circles or dumped into no-man's land by weak search, they give up and leave for another site. That's why deficiencies in your IA are costing you a lot of money, right now.

Opening article reference for project

Architecture image

arquitectura teórica

HBase vs Cassandra: why we moved

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01355/temple-wide_1355306i.jpg

RT @guykawasaki Man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple http://adjix.com/4zut - 와우, 대단하다. 아내는 좀 불쌍하지만... [from http://twitter.com/enamu/statuses/1256213630]

A model of biblical proportions: man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple

A model of biblical proportions: man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple - Telegraph telegraph.co.uk art architecture bible history religion news fun

Man spends 30 years working on model of Herod's Temple

Steve Huffman on Lessons Learned at Reddit By Keir Whitaker

Just as you require a blueprint to build a house, you will need a database blueprint in order to implement a database successfully .

Wish could try some of this at work, not really room though.

I want a writing space like this. Free of all visual distractions. While it would be impossible for my entire office to operate like this, managing legal documents, my creative endeavors could certainly be fruitful in this environment. I love it Mr. Ferriss.

Interpolis - unconventional but damn effective. (photo: jsigharas) Through simple redesign of workspaces, Interpolis of Holland increased productivity 20%, and ...

I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

hanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.

"以下「プロトコル処理」と「メッセージ処理」を分けて扱っているが、この差が顕著に出るのは全文検索エンジンや非同期ジョブサーバーなど、小さなメッセージで重い処理をするタイプ。ストリーム指向のプロトコルの場合は「プロトコル処理」を「ストリーム処理」に置き換えるといいかもしれない。"

7 Lessons Learned While Building Reddit to 270 Million Page Views a Month

data centre as bomb shelter-come-DJ bar

Very Cool. I want this!

Underneath Stockholm, deep in the bedrock exists a data center better than any high tech lair Hollywood could probably dream up. Bahnhof, one of Sweden's largest ISP's has created a bunker of high tech goodness that is surely to astound.

these people need to start doing centers and offices in the U.S....

Salesforce - incredible efficiency! and other metrics

all of Salesforce.com runs on only about 1,000 servers. And that is mirrored, so it is really only 500

バッチ

The Fortress. The Underground Fortress is an 8th wonder of the world! It is an unbelievable feat of engineering. The Fortress goes a total of 45 feet under the house! That is below sea level! The fortress has over 1600 sq. ft. of living area, plus hundreds of more square feet of passages and secrets rooms. It was all hand dug over a 20 year period, and all the walls were constructed with a small electric hand cement mixer. There are 3 ft concrete walls, using 5-bag cement (20% denser than regular cement). Not only are the walls thick and dense, but the finishing work is amazing quality. These walls keep it a constant 60F degrees year round. It is so well insulated that even one small space heater can heat all 1600+ sqft of fortress space in a few hours. The fortress has amazingly fresh air in it with an incredible air ventilation system that pulls air outside and brings fresh air in, leaving no moldy or musty smell that you commonly smell in basements.

The Fortress goes a total of 45 feet under the house! That is below sea level! The fortress has over 1600 sq. ft. of living area, plus hundreds of more square feet of passages and secrets rooms. It was all hand dug over a 20 year period, and all the walls were constructed with a small electric hand cement mixer. There are 3 ft concrete walls, using 5-bag cement (20% denser than regular cement). Not only are the walls thick and dense, but the finishing work is amazing quality.

Everything having

"The Underground Fortress is an 8th wonder of the world! It is an unbelievable feat of engineering. The Fortress goes a total of 45 feet under the house! That is below sea level! The fortress has over 1600 sq. ft. of living area, plus hundreds of more square feet of passages and secrets rooms. It was all hand dug over a 20 year period, and all the walls were constructed with a small electric hand cement mixer." Full of survival gear, nitrogen-sealed food supplies, etc.

Here at Sun, the Fallacies of Distributed Computing have long been a much-revered lesson. Furthermore, I personally think they’re pretty much spot-on. But these days, you don’t often find them coming up in conversations about building big networked systems. The reason is, I think, that we build almost everything on Web technologies, which lets get away with believing some of them.

via rtomayko

If you’re building Web technology, you have to worry about these things. But if you’re building applications on it, mostly you don’t. ¶ Well, except for security; please don’t stop worrying about security

Building on the Lianhuanan Road in the Minxing district of Shanghai city toppled over

building falls_from silver girl @ delicious

1. First, the apartment building was constructed 2. Then the plan called for an underground garage to be dug out. 3. The excavated soil was piled up on the other side of the building. 4. Heavy rains resulted in water seeping into the ground 5. The building began to shift and the concrete pilings were snapped 6. due to the uneven lateral pressures. 7. The building began to tilt. 8. And thus came the eighth wonder of the world.

The building FELL OVER. Let me say that again. The *whole building* *fell over*.

"At around 5:30am on June 27, an unoccupied building still under construction at Lianhuanan Road in the Minhang district of Shanghai city toppled over."

ポンテシティアパート@南アフリカ、ヨハネスブルク

生存時間15秒、世界で最も荒廃した高層ビル ヨハネスブルグ＠南アフリカ

外国人が一人で生存できる時間15秒ともいわれる、ヨハネスブルグの九龍城、高層ビル

ヨハネスブルグ Ponte City Apartments。本当にこの街でワールドカップは開催できるのか。

ポンテシティアパート

やばい

ペン書きのドローイングを3Dに動かす。

hand-drawn style

奥ゆかしい奥行き。

手書きイラスト、ギャラリーはPV3D

住宅･建築設計事務所･高級注文住宅･デザイン住宅｜アーネストアーキテクツ

オープニングのムービーはよい

web applications per la progettazione di un appartamento.

DragonFly un service en ligne qui permet de modéliser des intérieurs et d’en avoir une représentation en 3D isométrique.

bookmark してなかったのか… >そう考えると、私にはCreate/Update/Deleteのリクエストに対して、クライアントを待たせながら（つまり、HTTP Requestの処理に必要なスレッド・プロセスを保持したまま）データベースに変更をかけることが根本的に間違っているように思える。 これは同感なんだが、非同期にして comet 的に処理するとしても、他のリクエストとの整合性が必要なケースは存在するので、そこを確実にする配慮が必要になる筈。

問題の分割。実装詳細は詳しいのがほかにいくらでもあると思う

Treehouse by Tham & Videgard Hansson is Almost Invisible : TreeHugger - http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/swedish-mirrored-treehouse.php

Treehouse by Tham & Videgard Hansson is Almost Invisible : TreeHugger http://ow.ly/1TxNd

It is an old architectural trick used since the invention of mirrored glass: covering buildings with the reflective material and declaring that they blend in with the surroundings. Most architects use it to convince wary citizens that it is OK

invisible treehouse

fore house plan

A discussion of the different NoSQL-style datastores in use at Twitter, including Hadoop (with Pig for analysis), HBase,

Twitters NoSQL slides

A discussion of the different NoSQL-style datastores in use at Twitter, including Hadoop (with Pig for analysis), HBase, Cassandra, and FlockDB.

cassandra,thrift, hdfs, hbase, scribe,pig,lzo, flockdb

interesting presentation on #NoSQL at #twitter by @kevinweil http://bit.ly/99h8BK [from http://twitter.com/behi_at/statuses/13587582774]

You’ve probably passed it a million times in your travels through downtown Manhattan. Anyone who has ever visited J&R Row or hit the Starbucks on the opposite corner for a post-Brooklyn-Bridge-walk bathroom break has probably noticed its twin towers, and perhaps wondered how much its wealthy tenants must pay to live behind its beautiful brick and terra-cotta facade.

5 Beekman Street doesn’t have any tenants. In fact, it’s completely empty, essentially abandoned, and has been for a decade, with much of the interior shuttered since 1940…

RT @draenews: Del Information Architecture: Enhancing the User Experience | Webdesigner Depot: http://bit.ly/afWXUZ

TED Talks As his career grew, David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall. He asks: Does the venue make the music? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock, he explores how context has pushed musical innovation.

David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve http://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve.html

moves head too rapidly

536Share Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site Posted in Main on June 18th, 2010 by Pingdom FacebookAt the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

Software Behind Facebook

By http://bit.ly/Tweets2Delicious

This transformer apartment makes me drool: http://bit.ly/d7Vvvm (tx @souris) – danah boyd (zephoria) http://twitter.com/zephoria/statuses/16414475411

photographed coffee table book of children's sofa forts?

from Build Blog.

[Pink Tentacle] Floating cities, mega-structures. space hotels - it's all here.

Site speed is one of the most critical company goals for Facebook. In 2009, we successfully made Facebook site twice as fast, which was blogged in this post. Several key innovations from our engineering team made this possible. In this blog post, I will describe one of the secret weapons we used called BigPipe that underlies this great technology achievement.

Pretty cool way of building webpages from facebook to make it super fast.

BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the dynamic web page serving system. The general idea is to decompose web pages into small chunks called pagelets, and pipeline them through several execution stages inside web servers and browsers. This is similar to the pipelining performed by most modern microprocessors: multiple instructions are pipelined through different execution units of the processor to achieve the best performance. Although BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the existing web serving process, it does not require changing existing web browsers or servers; it is implemented entirely in PHP and JavaScript.

Site speed is one of the most critical company goals for Facebook. In 2009, we successfully made Facebook site twice as fast, which was blogged in this post. Several key innovations from our engineering team made this possible. In this blog post, I will describe one of the secret weapons we used called BigPipe that underlies this great technology achievement. BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the dynamic web page serving system. The general idea is to decompose web pages into small chunks called pagelets, and pipeline them through several execution stages inside web servers and browsers. This is similar to the pipelining performed by most modern microprocessors: multiple instructions are pipelined through different execution units of the processor to achieve the best performance. Although BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the existing web serving process, it does not require changing existing web browsers or servers; it is implemented entirely in PHP and JavaScript.

twice

Fotos toll gestaleter schwedischen U-Bahnstationen

RT @petapixel: The Swedish subway system: http://j.mp/cZUzWE

RT @catarino: Swedish subway system http://bit.ly/aWR0kM :|

又拍网和大多数Web2.0站点一样，构建于大量开源软件之上，包括MySQL、PHP、nginx、Python、memcached、redis、Solr、Hadoop和RabbitMQ等等。又拍网的服务器端开发语言主要是PHP和Python，其中PHP用于编写Web逻辑（通过HTTP和用户直接打交道）， 而Python则主要用于开发内部服务和后台任务。在客户端则使用了大量的Javascript， 这里要感谢一下MooTools这个JS框架，它使得我们很享受前端开发过程。 另外，我们把图片处理过程从PHP进程里独立出来变成一个服务。这个服务基于nginx，但是是作为nginx的一个模块而开放REST API。

B上我们都建立了shard_001和shard_002两个逻辑数据库， Node-A上的shard_001和Node-B上的shard_001组成一个Shard，而同一时间只有一个逻辑数据库处于Active状态

又拍网和大多数Web2.0站点一样，构建于大量开源软件之上，包括MySQL、PHP、nginx、Python、memcached、redis、Solr、Hadoop和RabbitMQ等等。又拍网的服务器端开发语言主要是PHP和Python，其中PHP用于编写Web逻辑（通过HTTP和用户直接打交道）， 而Python则主要用于开发内部服务和后台任务。在客户端则使用了大量的Javascript， 这里要感谢一下MooTools这个JS框架，它使得我们很享受前端开发过程。 另外，我们把图片处理过程从PHP进程里独立出来变成一个服务。这个服务基于nginx，但是是作为nginx的一个模块而开放REST API。

B上我们都建立了shard_001和shard_002两个逻辑数据库， Node-A上的shard_001和Node-B上的shard_001组成一个Shard，而同一时间只有一个逻辑数据库处于Active状态

Floor planner, layout, architecture planning.

roomle is the new, super-easy online tool that enables intuitive 3D-visualization of rooms, furniture and decoration. GET THE IDEA!

I liked this video for it's story and editing. It tells it all in ~2min.

Guy who lives in a 89 sq ft house...awesome!

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ocalyptic drama of Hashima, we can very easily imagine what the lives of the residents of the famous Walled City of Kowloon were like – in fact we can ask them, as their city was torn down in 1993. The reason why the Walled City gets so frequently mentioned as a ruin is, while it was there, it was as if the people who lived in it were living their lives in the guts of some great, monstrous, maze.

Famous Walled City of Kowloon: Living Inside the Maze

New York City from Above [PHOTOS] http://bit.ly/bI7GiY via @kenverburg

Recent photos above Manhattan.

New York desde lo alto

fotos de Nueva York desde el aire

Stunning images.

13 jul 2010

New York City from Above [PHOTOS] http://bit.ly/bI7GiY via @kenverburg – Erik van Roekel (evr) http://twitter.com/evr/statuses/19316830682

New York City from Above [PHOTOS] http://bit.ly/bI7GiY via @kenverburg

13 jul 2010

New York City from Above [PHOTOS] http://bit.ly/bI7GiY via @kenverburg – Erik van Roekel (evr) http://twitter.com/evr/statuses/19316830682

Ten Recycled Shipping Container Buildings http://bit.ly/dm9MEu – Delicious Popular (twittilicious) http://twitter.com/twittilicious/statuses/19316867005

beautiful

i think its like getting better

How to process 135 million images in 9 days.

Yow. 135 million images resized.