PUBLIC MARKS

L’île de Choir est un écueil de terre rude, hostile, inclément, et nous, ses habitants infortunés, de toutes nos forces nous le haïssons, nous le honnissons, nous le maudissons. Tous, nous rêvons de partir. Impitoyablement, nous sommes retenus par ses sables et ses boues. Il se raconte pourtant qu’un ancêtre, Ilinuk, né avec une difformité formidable, parvint à s’en arracher pour rejoindre le ciel. Un de ses anciens compagnons vieux comme l’orage et la cendre endort nos douleurs et calme nos plaintes avec le récit de sa vie prodigieuse. Ilinuk a promis de revenir nous chercher. Nous vivons depuis pour cette seule espérance. Et nous guettons son retour, ne cessant de scruter le ciel que pour haïr, honnir et maudire le sol de Choir.

In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon, was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence. The area was a diplomatic black hole, the model of an anarchist society somehow allowed to grow organically without the aid of any government, existing somewhere outside of both British Hong Kong and China.

The buildings of "Hak Nam" folded into one other in a dense configuration of labyrinthine corridors and seedy brown shacks stacked up 10, 12 and 14 stories high. It was a solid building, 200 x 100 meters, a pulsating anomaly, one of the most densely populated places in the world at the time of its destruction. It was called "the world’s first flexible megastructure, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self determining modern city that has ever been built," "an environment as richly varied and as sensual as anything in the heart of the tropical forest."

As I found out, scratch­ing that itch was actu­ally fast: it took me ~3 or so hours, and that includes trou­bleshoot­ing and gath­er­ing bits of info from all around. With a step-by-step how-to it’ll prob­a­bly take you a lot less than that!

doing distributed version control like Git and Mercurial, Fossil also supports distributed bug tracking and distributed wiki all in a single integrated package.

Dave (Reynolds) raised the point that lists are an integral part of most APIs. This is another thing that we know we need to address in the UK linked government data project, but are unsure as yet how best to do so.

web2py by simply labeling fields and tables in the Database Abstraction Layer (DAL) with .rdf={...} and installing this plugin. The plugin exposes a web service that publishes your database as Linked Data (only tables labeled with rdf). This system works with new and with most legacy databases. It transparently supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, FireBird, Informix, DB2, Ingres, and the Google App Engine. [read more]