Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log

Boring news about Federico

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Older dates can be visited here:

You may want to look at a reading list for particularly interesting posts.

Luciana was munching on sausage slices. She grabbed the curved end of one sausage, looked carefully at it, and exclaimed, "look, a little vault!".

I guess that's what she learns in this house.

So you live in an apartment? Permaculture for renters seems like a good resource. Grow fish and strawberries and a worm bin out of table scraps, in under 2m².

"A Pattern Language", by Christopher Alexander et al, is the book that I have been preaching around with patterns for architecture and urbanism. See the full online version.

(That online version is a bit weird; you have to click on the leftmost vertical frame to access the page for each pattern. Other than that, it seems to work mostly fine.)
If you are into that sort of thing, the Emergent Urbanism blog is excellent. It takes Alexander's ideas and tries to mathematize them, while exposing a plethora of examples and insightful results.

You may want to read an introduction to that blog in its introductory essay.
And by the way, a lesson on usability based on these principles.
The New York City Department of Transportation has a very enlightened administration these days. See their new Street Design Manual for some great information about how to improve streets with gradual changes: geometry, materials, safety, bicycles, trees, pedestrians, etc.

A note about hackfests

If you are a proprietary software company and you don't employ all the world's experts in a certain domain, well, you are essentially screwed.

But if you are a free software project, you can gather most of the domain experts at a hackfest, and be totally awesome.

This dialog greeted me when I updated my GNOME version:

"You won't have it. You won't have it. You won't have it. Just kidding, here you go."

Mapping the geographies of Wikipedia content. Very interesting analysis of what regions have the most content written about them. Via the ever-excellent Global Guerrillas blog.

Go backward in time to November 2009.