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25 photos that compare past snapshots of buildings, locations, structures, and people with the present day scene, in a particularly clever way.
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"At the Olympics, the blink of an eye can be all that separates the gold medalist from the 10th-place finisher. In some events, this is obvious. But in others, with athletes racing one by one, the closeness of the race is harder to perceive. Listen to the differences here."
Great stuff. More audio interactives, please!
February at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2010 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
paulcarvill.com
Hi, I'm Paul Carvill, I'm a web developer. I'm currently working as Technical Lead at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for February, 2010
links for 2010-02-28
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Increasing memory limit for PHP in Rackspace Cloud Sites
Sunday, February 28th, 2010If you install more than a few modules in your Drupal implementation the chances are that it’ll run out of memory and you’ll start seeing blank pages and odd behaviour. The fix for this is to increase the amount of memory allocated to PHP, which you can usually do in your php.ini file. But if your hosting is Rackspace Cloud Sites you don’t have access to the php.ini file. You must instead put your PHP settings in a .htaccess file in the root directory of your hosting space.
Here’s some example settings:
php_value memory_limit 96M php_value upload_max_filesize 50M php_value post_max_size 50M
Now, here’s the important bit: once you’ve made put those lines in your .htaccess file and FTP’d it to your webspace, the changes might not appear to have taken effect. I had to delete the original .htaccess file and upload a fresh one for my changes to be picked up. Hopefully this might help somebody else in the same situation.
N.B. Rackspace’s support had next to no idea of what I was talking about. Their Livechat support service was as useful as telephoning someone in a library and waiting while they went off to find the information. They obviously don;t support individual applications hosted by them, but I’d have expected a little more help.
links for 2010-02-27
Saturday, February 27th, 2010-
Some pretty funny looking cushions.
links for 2010-02-25
Thursday, February 25th, 2010-
An interesting aside on the practical implications of trying to get things done in today's multi-communication channel, always-on environment. Includes the neat idea: "When possible, I group all calls (conference, group or otherwise), meetings and anything where I’m not actively working, back-to-back or generally very close to each other. This way, my day isn’t broken up into little chunks. I can focus and produce effectively without having to worry about a call disrupting my workflow. This is a little harder when you’re handling many things at once and clients have their own schedules, but generally I aim to have them grouped." I really hate having my day broken up into chunks. I like to get my head down and get on with things, without the lingering alarm bell on the horizon telling me that I have to be somewhere. That's how I get my best work done.
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Fascinating and almost comprehensible discussion of failures in often expensive software in the area of image scaling. "Technically speaking, the problem is that "the computations are performed as if the scale of brightnesses was linear while in fact it is an exponential scale." In mathematical terms: "a gamma of 1.0 is assumed while it is 2.2.""
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"web – peanut gallery = bliss"
links for 2010-02-24
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010-
Nice mid-level technical overview of the HTTP process.
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"The talk is dense and necessarily glosses over a lot of subtleties. I talk about the Zen of Python, monkey patching (several times), the Ruby community's reckless hastiness, the syntax of RSpec and cucumber, beauty and ugliness in languages and testing tools, the complexity of the languages' grammars, syntactic vs. semantic complexity, the relative taste of grasshoppers and tree bark, etc., etc. There's way too much here to give anything a fair treatment. I hope that you'll keep this in mind while watching, avoid interpreting the talk as a claim to absolute truth, and simply enjoy it for what it is. " He's even-handed — he does 'complaints' and 'praise'.
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They've put up a sleek, sparkly new minaret outside the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, which is great. It looks lovely and is an impressive addition to the E1 streetscape. But this latest idea — a pair of gates at each end of the Lane shaped like headscarves or hijabs, apparently — does seem a little misguided.
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Pretty smart SVG editor that runs on JavaScript in the browser. You can edit visually, or get right down into the SVG source. What's really nice is that you can embed the editor in your own webpage — it's not a hosted app.
Infovore says: “The most compelling case should be for game-ness”
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010This is a great post by Infovore on the Guardian’s — amongst others’ — misguided attempt to ‘elevate’ Bioshock 2 to the level of literature. You really have to read the Guardian review of the game, but what struck me is that it wasn’t even being compared to great literature, a cultural item whose quality stands out from the rest. It was being likened to any literature, ie. another cultural form entirely, one that the Guardian, and most other media orgs, consider superior.
I’m not a huge gamer, and I tend to go for quick, puzzle-y games rather than the prolonged, frenetic thumb-bashing which most shooters seem to entail. I can’t stand the pace. But I was certainly bewitched by the descriptions of Bioshock 2 as a new type of narrative experience, almost a new cultural event. Hmmm, I thought, maybe this erudite, psychologically sound, mature piece of sensory immersion was for me. Perhaps it will reveal depths in me, and itself, that no one knew existed. So I pissed myself laughing when I read Infovore’s paragraph:
“Bioshock 2 is a shooter – a very good shooter, sure, with some tactical elements harking back to Halo’s balance of left-hand/right-hand, direct/indirect – but it’s still a game where you spend most of your time shooting monsters in the face.”
Probably not for me after all, then. But I think I actually would have been really angry had I shelled out 40 quid for a fairly traditional game which poncey critics were trying to legitimise up the wazoo by conferring their favourite elements of other entertainment formats onto.
links for 2010-02-23
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010-
A great profile of the brooding, soulful Indian actor Irrfan Khan.
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"DreamPie is a Python shell which is designed to be reliable and fun."
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"Then I found Rana and Akash Kapur. They have an Indian version of a taco truck called CurryUpNow. When I met them, they’d been up till two in the morning cooking." It makes me hungry just reading about Indian street food…
Rana explains, "There are Kaathi rolls — whole wheat bread layered with eggs stuffed with curried chicken and cilantro chutney. And fried semolina balls filled with tamarind water and boiled potato."
links for 2010-02-22
Monday, February 22nd, 2010-
"Excavating a basement the size of 15 Olympic swimming pools and bringing in 2,000 tonnes of steel to a site just off Regent Street, while working alongside two tube lines, blowing up an in-house nuclear bunker and keeping BBC radio on air is no easy task."
links for 2010-02-20
Saturday, February 20th, 2010-
"With mining operations established in 1810, on an island less than 500 metres long, Hashima’s well known legacy includes it once being the most densely populated place on earth, housing what was Japan’s tallest building, and its first large-scale reinforced concrete apartment block. The erroneous claim of this island city being shelled by the US Navy in World War Two, ‘as it looked like a battleship’, contributes to the legend of Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, evident in the popular local nickname for Hashima."
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"Today we’re happy to make public a version of our Amazon EC2 image. It’s Ubuntu Karmic running Python 2.6, Apache2+WSGI, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, Memcached and Pgpool. The image is built on an excellent Ubuntu community image, so it supports all the same user-data goodies." YAY!
links for 2010-02-19
Friday, February 19th, 2010-
ll, despite Microsoft’s announcement this week of its Windows Mobile 7 Series software for smartphones, it looks like phone manufacturers have plateaued on the innovation front. As Ashlee Vance reported put it in The New York Times Thursday, “the tech industry’s innovation engine is in idle.”