The Petabyte Storage Infrastructure Project will provide

1. low-cost, petabyte-scale, generic storage via the use of replicated commodity components, tape-less (i.e., disk-to-disk) backup, and a high level of administrative automation
2. a fast cache, to support large computations with intensive local storage
3. thousands of environmental sensors to support experimenting with collecting and storing large sensor-derived environmental data sets.

A Berkeley project.

Jean-Francois explains that CGI support is disabled by default in GlassFish but can be enabled and it seems quite easily. CGI support can be enabled either for specific web application or for all web applications running on GlassFish. See his blog for details on enabling support.

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive gathered a small group of people in San Francisco to discuss whether this was possible. Could we build something so grand? We concluded that we could. We located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.

We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.

But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.

—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007

Preservation oriented group that leads architecural and neighborhood tours across Philadelphia.

Enterprise-wide single sign on: Using JA-SIG's open source Central Authentication Service (CAS), the Acegi Security can participate in an enterprise-wide single sign on environment. You no longer need every web application to have its own authentication database. Nor are you restricted to single sign on across a single web container. Advanced single sign on features like proxy support and forced refresh of logins are supported by both CAS and Acegi Security.

This is an effort to bring together some resources -- images, documents, tools, and links -- for pursuing historical information about place in the five-county Philadelphia area: Bucks, Chester, Delaware. Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties. The project has been building incrementally, as opportunities have permitted, since 1997. The overarching idea is to use new media to more effectively disseminate information about place, to enhance cross-institutional access to documentary materials of this sort, to better connect people with the history of their environment, and to thus enrich their lives here.

mentioned in peter morville's library2.0 talk at michigan.

ranganathan -> ncsu -> berkeley? 

POSTOPOLIS!
An exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC
May 29 2007 - Jun 2 2007

Featuring

BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, and Subtopia

Postopolis! is a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design. Four bloggers, from four different cities, will host a series of live discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and other presentations, and fuse the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face to face interaction.

BLDGBLOG (Los Angeles), City of Sound (London),Inhabitat (New York City), and Subtopia (San Francisco) will meet in person to orchestrate the event, inviting everyone from practicing architects, city planners, and urban theorists to military historians, game developers, and materials scientists to give their take on both the built and natural environments. For the past five years, blogging has helped to expand the bounds of architectural discussion; its influence now spreads far beyond the internet to affect museums, institutions, and even higher education. Postopolis! is an historic opportunity to look back at what architecture blogs have achieved - both to celebrate their strengths and to think about their future.

May 16, 2007
From Africa to Queens Waterfront, a Modernist Gem for Sale to the Highest Bidder
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

For anyone still looking for a house for the summer, something very exclusive is about to come up in Queens.

Tomorrow, the Maison Tropicale, a small aluminum-paneled house built in 1951 by Jean Prouvé, a French designer and the current court favorite of well-heeled contemporary art and design collectors internationally, is being opened to the public for preview in Long Island City. Christie's, the auction house, will offer it for sale on June 5. The presale estimate is $4 million to $6 million.

 

See Book: Factories of Imagination

Astana Journal
Kazakhstan’s Futuristic Capital, Complete With Pyramid
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: October 13, 2006
Other countries have built futuristic capitals in remote outposts, Brasília most famously, and other cities have experienced feverish, transformational construction, like Dubai or even the imperial capital that once ruled Kazakhstan: Moscow.  But none have sprung up quite like Astana, from the ambition to create not only a national capital but also a national identity shaped almost exclusively by a single man: the country’s president since its inception, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev.  “The chief architect is really the president himself,” Yerzhan N. Ashykbayev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at the ministry’s new building, which opened in April 2005. “Every project, every building is approved by him.”
 

MAIN SPACE ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN PROJECT SERIES:
H_edge

ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit
Design Team: Cecil Balmond, Daniel Bosia, Jenny E. Sabin,
Charles Walker, Francis Archer
Assembly Team: Jenny E. Sabin and PennDesign students
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer

Glazer compiles historical photographs of Philadelphia Theaters.  By Jake M. Chanin

Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The City He Built By JIM LEWIS
The New Urbanists thought they had just the plan for remaking the Mississippi Gulf Coast city after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA, the mayor and a councilman thought otherwise.

An Architect With Plans for a New Gulf Coast
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: May 24, 2006

MIAMI — He's the man architecture critics love to hate: Andrés Duany, charismatic prophet of the New Urbanism, with his nostalgic prescriptions for dense, walkable neighborhoods energized by stores, mass transit and traditional housing....

The Chicago Architecture Foundation

A site devoted to documenting Philadelphia neighborhoods and impending architectural changes.

" Extensive bibliography on sustainable design of buildings, with listings for dictionaries and encyclopedias, handbooks, histories, journals, and resources for codes and specifications, design, building materials, construction methods, environmental health, energy, case studies, and more. Includes links to additional research guides on solar design, daylighting (natural lighting), and other design topics. From the Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley." (via LII)

Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Casablanca's Régime: The Shifting Aesthetics of Political Technologies (1907-1943). Postmodern Culture; Jan1998, Vol. 8 Issue 2

The disparity between the cinematic representation of Casablanca and the real city show the liberties that the filmmakers took to promote the message of US involvement in World War II. While the film has small crowded streets and sets and props that do not reflect anything really found in the city, Casablanca has strong Moroccan and French architecture that was left out of the movie. The filmmakers used set design to help portray a visual style that presented a stronger argument for American audiences. The film used literal shadows to make a great contrast between the dark and light, the good and the bad. The gray areas present in real life Casablanca are conveniently left out of the film. Even though the filmmakers use documentary style footage in some of the scenes surrounding the war, it is only used to define a truth that is supportive to the American war effort.

Casablanca in itself is built as a city defined by creating an image to try and change the reality. The French used strong French architecture when they colonized Morocco to define the country as a French colony. However, where architecture is a slow process to define a region, film can almost instantaneously change the hearts and minds of viewers. The film creates a new Casablanca, one in which the American public can find a unifying idea. It doesn’t matter that the city is not an accurate portrayal, what matters is the effect that the created portrayal conveys. In the same way that architecture can be used to visually define a city, film can be used to visually create and redefine the city. Casablanca presents a stereotyped and allegorical city which was used to win over the loyalties of the American public.

Simon Dixon discusses celebrity homes to great effect in “Ambiguous Ecologies: Stardom’s Domestic Mise-en-Scène.” He makes interesting comments such as how a star’s home tends to reflect the roles he takes and how certain types of stars get certain types of homes; the most interesting of which is Clint Eastwood’s ranch in Caramel and Robert Redford’s in Utah, since both are actors turned academy award winning directors.  

After thoroughly discussing the architecture of the famous, Dixon discuss the importance of the house in one film in particular, Sunset Boulevard. He states that Norma Desmond’s house “lambastes the domestic ecology of Hollywood stardom as alienating and destructive of those it entraps.” Dixon argues that while the film takes place in the late 1940s the Desmond house looks like something out of the twenties; Norma uses her surroundings to relish in her past accomplishments. Through the juxtaposition of Gillis’s bland 40s apartment and Desmond’s lavish old-fashion house, Wilder shows just how different the Hollywood of the silent era was from that of the golden.

Dixon also contends that Sunset Boulevard “can be read as an allegory of the [male] star’s uneasy relation to domestic life.”  Gillis is first overwhelmed by the house and only explores it to the extent in which Norma allows him. Even though, Gillis moves into Desmond’s house, he ends up have no control over the residence. He is never able to adapt to domesticity having never lived in such a lavish environment. Furthermore, Dixon notes that by drowning in the pool Joe is “first figuratively and then literally drowned in the expensive spoils of star domesticity.” In other words, Gillis dies in the most opulent portion of the estate, the pool.