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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
USA: Largest Wind Energy project approved
With prices of oil and natural gas skyrocketing, Texas, home to some of the largest US petroleum industry conglomerates, is already planning ahead of current boom times for a future that could turn this state into one of the World’s biggest producers of alternative energy.
Following Oil Billonaire T. Boone Pickens’ declaration of “going green” and his initial purchase of about 670 MW wind turbines from GE earlier this year, regulators have now (preliminary) approved a plan to invest about USD 5 Billion into the electrical grid infrastructure connecting new alternative / wind energy projects in the wind-rich West and the Panhandle to the urban areas of Texas.
According to the approved plan…
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Video: Bottom-up skyscraper demolition
Japanese construction company Kajima is currently in the process of constructing their new headquarters building and as part of the work it had to demolish their old high rise buildings used for that purpose before.
Unlike today’s common approaches to demolishing high rise building from top floor down or via controlled explosions, Kajima has developed a new method that allows to dismantle the building from bottom up. Besides that heavy machinery used in the demolition work does not need to be brought up to the top of the building…
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News: Disgruntled IT Admin blocks access to SF city network
From time to time there are stories passed around how a single tech employee is holding a company or agency hostage over a personal dispute or after being fired. This time its a story about an senior admin from San Francisco.
As the SF Chronicle reported yesterday he was arrested by Police this weekend and is being hold in jail on a USD 5 Million bail. He’s accused of having tampered with San Francisco’s new fiber network that provides access for officials to government documents, their emails and the administrative systems…
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A Cheatsheet for Firebug
During the current renovation of Duvet-Dayz (the next parts come online after the weekend) we have used one great tool extensively - Firebug.
Like with other debuggers or development tools there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember. But forgive us, when you’re working with many different tools - from Photoshop to Development IDE’s to debuggers, not everyone can remember 150 different keyboard shortcuts and then use the right one at the right place.
So like many others we work with cheat sheets aka help sheets - short summaries of the most important commands on one or two pages that are available for almost all tools we use. When we started using Firebug we search on the Internet but we could not find a cheat sheet for this tool.
There is of course the documentation on the “Firebug web site”, well done but quite a few pages to look through whenever you just need a quick glimpse with a help sheet.
So we created our own Firebug cheat sheet and would like to share it with everybody…
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Space: Gaja calling
f “Contact” with Jodie Foster was your kind of movie then you should have a look at the real-life version of sounds and noises recorded in space.
Watch the video for the sounds Gaja sends out into space that might be heard by other “aliens” on their planets…
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Humor: A White Noise web site
Enough said or to much noise around you - click over to Simply Noise. This web site allows you to enjoy “auditory zen” - “white noise” in configurable comfort zone(s)…
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Video: Making sense of the Semantic web
A video of the full presentation by Nova Spivack from Radar Networks given at the Next Web Conference 2008 that took place on April 3rd/4th this year in Amsterdam.
You’ll find an excellent summary of the presentation at “thenextweb.org” site and the slides are available at “Google docs”.
If you want to understand buzz words like…
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Data Visualization: Virtual Worlds
Marketing research company K Zero has published some interesting diagrams on virtual worlds. The first visualizes the virtual worlds by registered accounts and their development since 2003. It also includes some virtual worlds currently in development.
The second diagram shows the involvement of companies and their brands within these virtual worlds.
While the diagrams are very informative we are missing…
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Micro-Blogging: Tumblr documentary
If you’re looking for a different point of view on micro-blogging - here’s a “documentary” on Tumblr. Users are talking about follower, real life meetings, why they are using etc.
Mostly sarcastic but also asking the the right question: Why do you spend so much time on tools like that - or what is it you’re missing from your life…
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Data-Visualization: Tag Clouds with Wordle
There are many tools around to create word clouds from text, tag lists etc.
“Wordle” allows you to copy / paste a text fragment into their user interface or link to a del.icio.us user name to use tags from the saved bookmarks. What differentiates Wordle from other tools are the various features to format the resulting word clouds. You can arrange the text layout in different ways (Horizontal / Vertical / mixed / Free flow), select fonts from a list and apply coloring templates for the display. The results are quite impressive and cover a broad spectrum of popular layouts…
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