Links
NSW Department of Education going to Gmail »
The NSW Department of Education is migrating its email system for 1.5 million students from Exchange to Gmail.
They’re going from a $33M contract that gave users 65 megabytes of storage, to a $9.5M contract that gives at least 6 gigabytes.
Microsoft releases pre-07 Office file specs »
Microsoft has released the specifications to the file formats in the pre-2007 Office suite.
The Microsoft Office binary file formats documentation provides detailed technical specifications for the .doc, .ppt .xls, and .xlsb file formats as created by the following Microsoft Office applications:
- .doc: Microsoft Word 97, Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2007
- .ppt: Microsoft PowerPoint 97, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
- .xls: Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Excel 2000, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007
- .xlsb: Microsoft Office Excel 2007
Submarine cable map »
TeleGeography’s Submarine cable map, showing the 120+ submarine cable systems that make up the internet, voice networks, and private networks.
Available as free desktop wallpaper, or a printed map.
Shops track customers via mobile phone »
This system from Path Intelligence tracks people in a shopping mall by triangulating on their mobile phone. It can uniquely (but anonymously) identify people by the IMEI (a unique serial number) of their phone.
It would be a fascinating source of data to mine: paths through malls, shopping habits, how people behave differently on their own or when in a group; all kinds of things. But it does seem quite invasive; I think I would feel quite uncomfortable being under such close a gaze. Perhaps if they dropped the IMEI identification and only looked and aggregated trends.
Seems to be quite excitingly priced at around £20,000 a month to rent.
Truckload of concrete dumped into sewer »
This is weird: some bozo dumped 13 tonnes of concrete into the sewer that runs under the Sydney Football Stadium, the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the Hordern Pavilion, causing a blockage that runs 140 metres.
Sydney Water have installed a temporary bypass and have spent the past 10 weeks trying to unblock it, but they may have to run a new permanent line. The blockage very nearly caused the Mardi Gras party at the Hordern to be abandoned (18,000 people produce a lot of material for a sewer, one assumes).
It would have cost only $2,275 to be dumped legally.
Hordern hard rock on nose, Sydney Morning Herald
In-depth review of the Amazon Kindle »
After six months of use, Robert Mohns reviews the Amazon Kindle e-book reader in detail: what it’s like to read full novels on, its battery life, wireless and PC based syncing options, and everything else about what it’s like to live with.
In short: the device successfully “disappears” from your conscious – like a regular book — and leaves you with just the story.
I found this bit interesting (and scary):
Beyond its current consumer-centric design, we think Kindle has huge potential in education and vertical applications. School children today carry back-damaging backpacks full of heavy textbooks that would be trivial to replace with one 10.3-oz. Kindle. A 2006 BBC News article reported that half of UK school children suffer a back injury at some point due to carrying schoolbooks, and 8% have back problems that affect school attendance; other studies show school children often carry book loads approaching 60% of their body weight. The health implications are obvious.
We think the first educational publisher to get on board is going to make a killing selling Kindles to schools. Content can be updated at any time, wirelessly, making paper textbooks obsolete the day they’re printed. Reliable subscription revenue for publishers, lower costs for schools, and better student health could come together in one, small package from Amazon.
Jared Tarbell’s Gallery of Computation »
A beautiful set of digital artworks, mostly created in Processing. Source code is included.
My favourite is Substrate, which I’ve been running as my screensaver. It looks like crystals growing, or an aerial view of a city developing.
Game/Space: An interview with Daniel Dociu »
BLDBLOG interviews game world designer Daniel Dociu:
Are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu’s work? What about vice versa: could Dociu’s own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today’s architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing “real” cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments.
There’s some really beautiful concept design artwork included in the interview.
150 clocks working as one »
The starting point with this project was a personal study about form & time. I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”.
Via Long Views