Wright designed the home above the waterfall: Kaufmann had expected it to be below the falls to afford a view of the cascades.
It has been said that he was initially very upset with this change.
Contrast this to Chrisopher Alexander’s advice in A Pattern Language 104, “Site Repair”
Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.
This idea is indeed very simple. But it is the exact opposite of what usually happens; and it takes enormous will power to follow it through.
Building the house directly on the waterfall makes for a stunning piece of architecture, and the house’s fame was surely enhanced because of it.
Maybe the Kaufmans came to enjoy the unexpected placement of the house.
But it’s a reason I sometimes don’t describe Christopher Alexander as an architect.
While I enjoy his buildings, what is really special about them is their relationship with their surroundings and, in a campus setting, with each other.
It was his planning, his integration not just of physical spaces but of people and systems, that made his work so valuable.
Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system.
Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.
I wonder… in what other parts of life do we rush to consume beauty, rather than appreciate and nurture it?
Monderman’s philosophy, popularly called “shared space,” as coined by the English urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie, has been implemented in cities around the world. It seems to be working. Instead of causing chaos and collisions, the “red-light-removal schemes” almost always result in improved sociability and traffic flow, and fewer accidents in some cases. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, U.K., for instance, found that people drove more safely without the markings and the number of accidents decreased by 35 percent.
One of the things I like about Bluesky is its use of an open protocol, which reduces the chances that it will follow the fate that befell Twitter. I’ve set my domain for Bluesky, so hopefully even if bad things happen to Bluesky itself, the AT protocol will live on.
During the count of votes for and against the bill, Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke stood up from her seat starting a haka directed at Seymour, which her colleagues and MPs from the Greens and Labour joined. When people in the public gallery above joined in loudly, Speaker Gerry Brownlee suspended Parliament for an hour until the gallery was cleared.
Double loading a sidewalk is when you put amenities or features on both sides of the pedestrian walkway, such as outdoor seating, street trees, kiosks, and dining sheds. This makes the walkway feel like a kind of “safe zone” drawing people in large numbers to gather and enjoy the stretches where everyone feels safe. This leads to a much more enjoyable, safer, and more relaxed experience than walking right alongside traffic. It turns the sidewalk from an afterthought of the street’s design into the main attraction.
Deus Ex (Ion Storm Austin, released June 23, 2000) is often considered one of the greatest games of all time. Its story is centered around real world conspiracy theories in the year 2052, which informs an aesthetic characterized as near future cyberpunk. The setting combines and contrasts recognizable real-world architecture and set dressing with futuristic Sci-Fi technology.
To put it very simply, the little things matter. The sandwiches that get sent to hospitals matter. Ritalin supply chains matter, lumbar support in chairs matter, and yes, stupid React widgets matter. They go out into society, and every time someone says “Ah, I just want to get paid”, we get another terrible intersection that haunts the community for five generations. I’m going to stay angry about bad software engineering.
The researchers found that honoki, a kind of magnolia tree native in Japan and traditionally used for sword sheaths, is most suited for spacecraft, after a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station. LignoSat is made of honoki, using a traditional Japanese crafts technique without screws or glue. Once deployed, LignoSat will stay in orbit for six months, with the electronic components onboard measuring how wood endures the extreme environment of space, where temperatures fluctuate from -100 to 100 degrees Celsius every 45 minutes as it orbits from darkness to sunlight.
Getting there had required relentless organizing, and fundraising, as well as reassuring skeptical rideshare drivers, who doubted that a worker-owned co-op could challenge the Uber-Lyft duopoly – which controls 98% of the U.S. rideshare market. It is also a software-engineering feat: Theirs is the first driver-owned rideshare app in the US to offer both on-demand and pre-scheduled rides. There were also legislative hurdles, such as the law that required “transportation network companies” to pay an annual permit fee of $111,250 to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
When the Future of Coding community started considering Slack alternatives earlier this year, I was reminded that Zulip exists.
They didn’t end up moving to it, but I got interested.
I am in several Slacks, for my day job and a couple of community groups.
The difference when I open Zulip is noticeable.
Zulip has a snappier and denser UI.
But it’s the way messages are grouped into topics that makes it really easy to ignore a bunch of messages that I don’t need to read.
That makes it much faster to get a broad sense of “what’s happening” and then focus on chats I actually care about.
On a personal level, I wish groups with ideological commitments would consider supporting Zulip, a small independent company funded by its customers whose owners are intimately involved in building the product.
Rather than Slack (sold to Salesforce) or Discord (raised hundreds of millions of dollars).
I really hope to see more communities and companies considering Zulip as a viable alternative to the corporate players.
I found out about Paradicms when searching for advice about working with RDF data in JavaScript.
(The name appears to be a combination of “paradigms” and “CMS”.)
The pitch is that they’re building a CMS for digital humanities projects like archives and museums in a minimal computing way.
Data is stored in non-coder-friendly systems like spreadsheets.
The final result is a static site, with no server to host or babysit.
The same data can be built into different site layouts depending on the project’s needs, and Paradicms provides several templates.
RDF comes in between the data sources (e.g. a spreadsheet) and the static site generation.
Spreadsheets in a conventional format are pulled into a linked data graph, which is then queried to create the data on each page.
Critically, this happens at build time, not at page load time.
I like:
Using RDF as an “integration” or “enrichment” layer between different data sources. It feels like all data models eventually become RDF anyway, when they are asked to accommodate enough use cases.
The focus on minimal computing, avoiding complexity for non-technical users.
We will truly never escape spreadsheets, and this approach leans into this truth and meets users where they are, rather than attempting to reinvent data management.
I worry about:
The UX of editing linked data in spreadsheets is… not good. I’m not yet convinced “real people” can work with this. A significant issue is having to pick IDs from dropdowns.
Is static site generation from RDF “simple enough” or is this where all the complexity moves to? The project provides some templated site types based on their digital collections data model, but what if I wanted to build something different?
It uses Python instead of JavaScript, the universal scripting language of the web. (Yes, this is a silly nitpick and slightly tongue-in-cheek.)
I wish RDF were more popular as a concept, with apps providing schemas/grammars for their data export.
I’d like to try out the Paradicms approach on some small projects for local groups I’m part of that aren’t technical.
I hope this could be a way to responsibly deliver a small data-backed site or app to a group that aren’t coders.
This is me upholding the web developer meme of rebuilding my personal site, and writing about rebuilding my personal site!
My main motivation was to add a micro blog with tags, so I’d be incentivised to write short posts instead of long ones.
But along the way I did achieve some secondary goals too:
Try out Eleventy, which I had heard good things about. I had previously used Jekyll and Hugo.
Simplify to a brutalist high-performance, low-maintenance design.
I spent way too long thinking about URLs.
Previously, it was just:
/
→ homepage
/blog
→ list of posts
/blog/:post-slug
→ a single post
I wanted to separate my “long reads” which are less time-oriented, from my new microblog which is more timely.
So I ended up with:
/
→ homepage
/:article-slug
→ just straight into an article
/:year
→ full content of microblog posts in year
/:year/:post-slug
→ a single post which happened in year
I like this because:
Knocking the slug off a blog post still results in a valid page
Each year page has a bounded and reasonable size, and you can read all posts without clicking in
Long reads don’t have a year in the URL, which differentiates them from the off-the-cuff posts
I also added tag pages at /topic/:tag-slug so I can share the whole story of a single topic on one page.
Hosting:
I stayed with CloudFlare Pages because of their green hosting and very snappy deployment pipeline.
Migrating content to 11ty:
Getting my existing blog content into Eleventy was pretty straightforward.
There were a few small hiccups, like configuring a different markdown processor to linkify my headings correctly.
Working with Eleventy’s content system was different to the very post-centric workflow I was used to.
It seems good though!
I’m interested to see if I can bend it to more shapes, like adding book reviews and a sketchbook, like Tom MacWright’s site.
Using my domain as my Bluesky handle (not super relevant but cool)
Add topics as Atom <category> tags
Thoughts so far:
Learning Nunjucks to create HTML templates was… let me just say, it’s been a long time since I used a templating engine that wasn’t Blade, and I much prefer it when they just let you embed the host language instead of coming up with their own expression language.
“Filters” for everything feels very 2005.
I think I’ve abused the content system frightfully to create a collection of years to generate my blog post year pages from.
That may need to be revised…
or, I could just write more blog posts and not worry about it!
After trying to write long-form content for a while back in 2019-20 and realising that a) I now don’t have the time for it, and b) it’s hard to stay motivated for the length of an entire piece, I’ve decided to revamp my website and focus on building up a short-form blog.
As I get increasingly involved in local housing groups, my church, and hopefully doing more speaking in the local PHP and JS communities, I want to start writing up my thoughts and learning publicly.
I’m really excited to go Linux full-time with a just-arrived Framework 13" running Fedora.
The experience has been fantastic so far.
DIY setup, software installation, customisation, wifi, external screens, Flathub apps, everything Just Works.
This is definitely my year of Linux On The Desktop.
I did have one assembly hiccup which felt scary.
An extra magnet had snuck in on top of one that was supposed to be there, so the input surface (keyboard+touchpad) didn’t fit on properly.
I didn’t realise what the raised component was for a while, and was getting set up to contact support, ask the community etc.
But fortunately I realised and just prised the extra magnet off then everything was perfect.
I guess that’s the kind of thing you sign up for when getting a DIY assembly version.
I’m just glad it wasn’t an actual problem as I was so keen to get started using it.
And let me tell you, after Windows’ evolution in recent years, using an open-source operating system which hasn’t been enshittified to death by megacorp product managers just feels… so clean.
Yearly Meeting is the annual gathering of all Australian Quakers.
This was my first time at an in-person Yearly Meeting, having only started to attend Quaker meetings in late 2019. And I was so glad that I decided to come!
I deeply appreciated experiencing the formal sessions and seeing how the Society conducts its business.
This, on paper, was something that had attracted me to Quakerism as I was just learning about it.
But being in a large room full of Friends patiently expressing themselves and building up in the spirit of unity really helped me understand it deeply.
Even though I was only able to attend the final Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I was overwhelmed in the best possible way.
The chance to meet Friends from other cities and states was a blessing.
Our community may be small, but its vitality and vivaciousness were evident!
I got the sense that many others were relieved to be meeting in person again after years of online Meetings.
I am very much looking forward to the next time we can do so.
There seem to be a common misconception about the meaning of the term “relational” (in the context of “relational databases”).
There are a few commonly-used phrases:
“Relational data”
“Relational database”
“Relation”
“Relationship”
One of these things is not like the others.
A classic demonstration of the misunderstanding:
Collectively, multiple tables of data are called relational data because it is the relations, not just the individual datasets, that are important. Relations are always defined between a pair of tables.
Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth.
But I wonder…
Are things which look like exponential growth always the spread of an idea between humans?
Are they always ideas whose implementation can be easily parallelized or distributed, so that as the idea spreads, the growth of its implementation is not bottlenecked?
Where the growth of an idea was not exponential, was that because its implementation couldn’t proceed in a decentralised way?
Was it because the material resources needed for its implementation weren’t already widely available, ready to be put to use?
Is the end of exponential growth (the top of the S curve) due to saturation of the idea among humans?
