Something More Than a Machine
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Brazil. Seductive, sensual, beautiful yet appalling, we think we know Brazil: we don't. One of the world's greatest and strangest countries. A land of staggering wealth and inequality where 2% of the population own 80% of the land. The rich of Sao Paulo commute to their gilded enclaves by private helicopter while the poor trek endlessly through some of the planet's most spectacular traffic jams. Welcome to the strange New World of BRAZYL, a novel of this colossal, thrilling nation, past, present ...and future. Set in 1732, the present day and 2032, these are three separate but intertwining stories of love, genocide, football, faith and hallucination, crime and quantum theory. Three Brazils, all linked to a split-second on the afternoon of July 16th, 1950.Count me in. Looks like it would be a good companion to River of Gods and Specimen Days.
Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies.In an effort to organize my projects at work, Trac + Subversion + Apache is saving my ass.
This is going to help the community out and make it look betterTo which was responded:
Don't worry about making it pretty, just cover it upby a teacher.
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst.
The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an “empty” state.I should not that I insist on using my desktop to handle only what I'm currently working on with the active goal of keeping it empty. I treat my GMail inbox with the same regard. This might have to be my next book, as a good follow-up to The Laws of Simplicity.
The Ride Of Silence is a free ride that asks its cyclists to ride no faster than 12 mph and remain silent during the ride. There is no brochure, no sponsors, no registration fees and no t-shirt. The ride, which is held during Bike Safety month, aims to raise the awareness of motorists, police and city officials that cyclists have a legal right to the public roadways. The ride is also a chance to show respect for those who have been killed or injured.I don't think I'll be able to make it, but I will definitely be participating in my own way.
Already this year researchers have announced the discovery of a bunch of new species: 6 types of bats, 15 soft corals, thousands of mollusks and 20 sharks and rays, to name a few.The idea that there are thousands of new species of slugs and snails out there is enough to keep me out of the tropics for life. Those pictures will keep me up at night for sure.
This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.I only just now realized Flex is open source.
Today, bottled water is just another cog in the carbon-spewing, globe-warming industrial machine. There is a growing conflict between those who want to drink clean, pure water and those who want to breathe clean, pure air....
And it seemed pretentious to believe that our overburdened palates should be forced to develop a preference for what is generally presumed to be a tasteless substance....
Over the past century, we've seen numerous examples of products that, so long as they were available only to a select few, were viewed by those elites as brilliant, life-improving developments: the automobile, coal-generated electricity, air conditioning. But once companies figured out how to make them available to the masses, the elites suddenly condemned them as dangerous and socially destructive.As a personal anecdote, I recently received a wedding gift of silverware packaged in paper, for reasons of being green. Using the special paper, they were able to use smaller packages, which meant more packages per delivery, which meant less delivery trucks, which meant less carbon emission. The fact that the product was manufactured in China (and shipped half-way around the world) was not addressed. Nor was the fact that more boxes meant more weight, which means lower gas mileage, which means more carbon emission per delivery. I'm all for being green, but it takes more than switching from plastic to paper.
day trips for people with taste, style and a sense of humor, coming soon...
We come to this conclusion with tremendous sadness and loss, as the open collaborative space we have built here has become a deeply vibrant art/tech skunkworks, continually churning out heroic creativity in the arts as well as very needed innovation in DIY, open source, alternative energy endeavors.Great coverage of the eviction of The Shipyard -- an artist collective built from shipping containers.
No longer obscured by functional program, the theater is liberated, allowing the public to look in on performances and theater goers to look out on the city.So this must be what's going in across from One Arts Plaza in Downtown Dallas.
So, there's a new Spinal Tap short.
Though, this post isn't about Spinal Tap. This post is about what it means to be cross-platform compatible. You see, if you follow the above link, you should find another link in there to watch the video, hosted by MSN. Exhibit A and Exhibit B show how the MSN video page looks in IE and Firefox, respectively.
You might notice that in Exhibit B, it looks as if firefox is playing windows media. There's Windows Media-esque player controls and a video. Non-IE browsers get a Flash-based player to play FLV versions of the video (similar in nature to Google Video and YouTube).
Why is this? Windows Media Player only really truly works in IE. That is, even though you can embed windows media player into an HTML document in most browsers/platforms (even on the mac!), you can't interact with the player through the use of Javascript in non-IE browsers. So, to ensure compatibility MSN...
The sad part in all of this? If they just broke down and admitted that their own solution isn't compatible, using the Flash-only version of stuff will handle ALL of their compatibility issues. There's no need for WMV if you're going through all of the trouble to do it in FLV for the 20% or so for whom WMV doesn't work.
In other news, because I like beating dead horses. If you check out the videos for Final Cut Studio. You might notice that the video plays across IE and Firefox with a consistent look-and-feel using Quicktime and DHTML/Javascript player controls. The same could easily be accomplished using FLV.
Bonus trivia: They also use Prototype to handle the nifty rollover effects.
OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML.Might be an interesting alternative to Flex and Silverlight.
jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
Jason Kottke uses the word asychronous to describe communication over media such as Twitter. Brilliant. "Asynchronous" captures the essence of Twitter and finally gives me a way of describing my blog.
The majority of the content at Something More is of the ReBlog variety. That is, Most of what you see are essentially bookmarks to other sites I come accross, often accompanied by a short comment by myself. There is very little need for me to have a blog. I can never be satisfied with my writing to justify a true and proper blog post. But I can pick and prune sites I come across in my regular activity to form something of a zeitgeist. Adding a ReBlog allows me to put content in context with respect to time and topic.
I like riding my bicycle to work. By the time I arrive at the office, my body is flooded with my three favorite substances: adrenaline, endorphins, and self-righteousness.Well played.
Why just have signs over the highway?Exactly!
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