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Innovation, Innovation, Innovation
Innovative Aspekte: Diese Brücke wurde wegen ihres hohen Innovationsanteils nominiert.
Innovative Aspekte: Die Brücke beeindruckt durch ihre innovative Kraft und Schönheit.
Innovative Aspekte: Innovativ ist die oben genannte fugen- und lagerlose Konstruktion.
Deutschen Brückenbaupreis 2006, aus den Nominierungsbegründungen. Die Begründungen, in denen sich solche Leersätze weitgehend gespart wurden, lesen sich gleich viel besser.
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Flare Stack
Each time I see a closeup of the Turino Cauldron on TV I can't help but think "This would make a proper flare stack for an LD steel melting shop."
File under: Mozzarella Syndrome
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TV-Tip: Rohstoffe, Brasilien
I
Reichtum unter Tage - Bodenschätze in Deutschland
Spiegel TV Special
Heute 21.50 - 23.50 Uhr, VOX
Der Kampf um Rohstoffe ist weltweit entbrannt. Im Durchschnitt verbraucht hierzulande jeder Mensch im Laufe seines Lebens rund 1000 Tonnen Rohstoffe. Je knapper die Schätze der Erde werden, desto kostbarer sind die eigenen Ressourcen. Zwar findet man in heimischen Böden keine Diamanten, dafür aber jede Menge Kohle und Salze. So steht eines der größten und modernsten Bergwerke der Welt mitten in Hessen. 21 Millionen Tonnen Rohsalz werden hier jährlich zu Tage gefördert. In Deutschlands kleinstem Bergwerk ist die Qualität und nicht die Masse entscheidend. Wie vor 250 Jahren wird Seilitz in Sachsen Kaolin per Hand abgebaut. Das Material dient der Porzellanmanufaktur in Meissen zur Herstellung ihres weltberühmten Porzellans.
Und Stein- wie Braunkohle dürfte auch vorkommen.
II
Cidade de Deus - City of God
Sonntag, 22.25 - 00:30, arte
Die Geschichte des Fotografen Buscapé und des Drogenbosses Dadinho sollte man eigentlich nur in einem Kino mit möglichst großer Leinwand sehen. Aber wohl auch im Fernsehen einfach ein großartiger Streifen. Nichts für schwache Nerven, da eine wahre Geschichte, realisitisch verfilmt.
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Nachschub für die Wörtertütchen
Vorhin blieb ich beim Überfliegen der Überschriften im Feedreader beim Wort Vodcasting hängen hängen - und dachte zuerst an etwas aus der Cocktailecke. Podcasting klingt ja schon, nun, gewöhnunsbedürftig genug, aber Vodcasting ist noch viel schlimmer. Daher hier auch 'was für das Tütchen mit den nützlichen neuen Worten: GETSful - "Any web services protocol that claims to be RESTful but only uses GET for everything. See, for example, del.icio.us and 30boxes."
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Magical Mystery Car
You know there's something wrong if your car is pulling a current of 3 amps - with no keys, no ignition, and all relays and fuses except of the main fuse removed from the fuse boxes. Nothing moving, nothing glowing, nothing flowing, nothing shaking, but 3 amps. That's an improvement over the prior situation: to go through adventures with my big old Ford, I now don't even have to drive it all. And now it also becomes clear why Ford really has bought Jaguar: Jaguar is legendary for bizarre circuitry failures, so they were a perfect match.
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Speersort 1
Vor 60 Jahren erschien erstmals Die Zeit. Mögen es mindestens nochmal so viele werden.
Zeitjubiläum: 60 Jahre Zeit →
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Nett
Quelle: SpOn
Jetzt muss sich nur noch herausstellen, wie viele Einträge aus der zweiten Zeile abzuziehen sind.
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Das Problem
Das Problem: Die Geldtransporter bringen sowohl zu den Banken als auch zum Einzelhandel das Bargeld.
SpOn. Alles klar.
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FBA 8
Click to enlarge
Nr. 8 Hot Dip Galvanizing Line (Feuerbeschichtungsanlage FBA 8) ← Westfalenhütte, Dortmund, Germany ← ThyssenKrupp Steel. Built 2000-2001, put into operation 2001. Photo taken 2005.
The 352 m long and up to 65.7 m high facility is the newest in surface finishing and extends the cold rolling mill you can see in the background. It features a "friendly colors scheme" by designer Friedrich Ernst von Garnier that is supposed to make it more friendly to look at and more pleasant to work in. You can learn more about such color schemes and see more examples in these two PDFs.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Yahoo! giving back
What's the difference between Google and Yahoo! ? Google wouldn't give back to the community it profits from [see comments]. Yahoo! does:
[via Jeremy Zawodny]
Related on the Interweb
Simon Willison: Yahoo! UI JavaScript treats
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Semantic MediaWiki Paper
Wikipedia is the world's largest collaboratively edited source of encyclopaedic knowledge. But in spite of its utility, its contents are barely machine-interpretable. Structural knowledge, e.g. about how concepts are interrelated, can neither be formally stated norautomatically processed. Also the wealth of numerical data is only available as plain text and thus can not be processed by its actual meaning. We provide an extension to be integrated in Wikipedia, that allows to type links between articles and to specify typed data inside the articles in an easy-to-use manner. Enabling even casual users to participate in the creation of an open semantic knowledge base, Wikipedia has the chance to become a hitherto unknown resource of semantic statements regarding size, scope, openness, and internationalisation.
Max Völkel, Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandecic, Heiko Haller: Semantic Wikipedia →
RELATED ON THE INTERWEB
Semantic MediaWiki website
RELATED ON THIS BLOG
2005-10-02 Semantic MediaWiki
2005-12-07 Semantic Wiki Reading List
2006-02-14 Wiki-related workshops and events 2006
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Wiki-related workshops and events 2006
Quite a number of wiki-related workshops and event will be taking place later this year. In chronological order:
SemWiki2006 - From Wiki to Semantics
June 11-14, 2006, Budva, Montenegro
"SemWiki2006 is the first workshop on Semantic Wikis. It aims to explore and collect the different ideas and motivations that have lead to the recent emergence of so-called Semantic Wiki systems." Organized by Max Völkel and Heiko Haller of Semantic MediaWiki (blog posting) and others.
Websites: Website, Wiki, Call for Papers
1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications STICA 06
June 26-28, 2006, Manchester, UK
A workshop organized by Robert Tolksdorf, Elena Paslaru Bontas and Klaus Schild of Freie Universtiät Berlin as part of the 15th International
Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises at the University of Manchester.
Websites: FU Berlin website, U Manchester website
Wikimania 2006
August 04-06, 2006, Boston, MA, USA
Websites: Wiki, Call for Participation
WikiSym 2006 - 2006 International Symposium on Wikis
August 21-23, 2006, Odense, Denmark
Websites: Website, Call for Participation, Conference wiki
Something missing? Please add to the comments.
Related
[partly via Wikimetrics]
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What's up?
I really like the the What's Up? user interface (details here).
(News items get pulled in via RSS feeds, locales seem to be hard-wired on a per-feed basis. This works fine as long as the feeds don't carry national or world news. Locating each individual news item through automated text analysis could be a next step (are there any good Open Source tools for that?). So for now, it's a very nice UI demo.)
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Beeckerwerth
Click to enlarge
Spanning the entire visible horizon: Beeckerwerth BOS/LD, casting and rolling shops, ThyssenKrupp Steel, Duisburg, Germany. In service.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Using SVN, Daversy and FlexySvn for Web Development
I am switching to the Subversion version control system at the moment, so the Using SVN for Web Development story on Sitepoint's PHP Blog comes right on time for me.
From the links in the comments:
- FlexySvn is a XUL/JS/PHP-based SVN Browser by Alan Knowles and Wez Furlong. It is powered by the svn library that provides "PHP Bindings for the Subversion Revision control system", XUL magic and some xmlhttprequest. Another XUL app, yee-hah! Details here. Let's see if and how this integrates into my setup. (XUL is a markup language for rendering custom user interfaces within Mozilla. Having said that, FlexySvn runs on Mozilla-based browser like Firefox only.)
- Daversy is a source control tool for relational databases which can "extract the database structure to an XML file (called a state) for storage in source control". It can "generate SQL statements from a state to create a fresh database" and "compare two state files and generate an upgrade script to change the database accordingly". This goes straight onto my "to try out"-list.
- Related: Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler
By the way, if you want to install your Subversion server with Apache on a Windows box: the TortoiseSVN help file has a useful "Setting up a server" section. If you follow it, omit steps 3, 4 and 5 from the procedure listed in chapter 3.1.3 (of helpfile revision 5377). In its current version, the Subversion installer sets up everything automagically. TortoiseSVN is a graphical SVN client that nicely integrates into the Windows Explorer and into my choice editor TextPad - recommended.
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Signs and Wonders
A real XUL Runner application. Out in the wild. Yee-hah!
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Turbine
Click to enlarge
One of about half a dozen turbines in the compressed air shop of Bochumer Verein für Gußstahlfabrikation ← Krupp Stahl, Bochum, Germany. While most parts of this huge steel mill right in the center of Bochum were closed down several decades ago, the compressed air shop remained in service until the mid-1990ies, serving the nearby Nirosta stainless steel works which now have such a shop right on their premises. At Bochumer Verein, steel casting has been invented. Demolished.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
I hope so
Setting up a wiki on the Web is easy, is bordering on the brink of truly fashionable and will soon become positively commonplace.
Sean McGrath
(Not sure about the "fashionable" part, though. But about the "positively commonplace".)
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Delicious Reading Lists
Reading Lists are an idea so dead simple one wonders why it hasn't been there ever since: instead of just downloading someone's OMPL list of feed subscriptions and feeding it into an aggregator once, like it normally get's done, you subscribe to the subscriptions list. Most aggregators don't support this yet, though.
Danny Ayers has a simple XSL file to transform del.icio.us feeds into basic OPML and uses the W3C XSLT Service to process them - voila, dynamic OPML that gets updated each time an item with the right set of tags (e.g. "readinglist" + "readinglistname") is added to one's del.icio.us account.
Of course you can use such OPML files for more than just feeding aggregators: OPod and Taskable render OPML files in Apple Finder or Windows Start Menu styles, Sjoerd Visscher and yabfog.com have PHP scripts for OPML rendering.
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Resolution dependent layouts
Resolution dependent layout as introduced last year and updated recently by Cameron Adams is an interesting cross of the liquid layout and the fixed width layout techniques: through different style sheets, arrange and style a web page's elements differently depending on the viewport width. Demo here, resize window. Liquid layouts are great, but have their limits once you have larger elements with a big minimum width (such as photos) and a wider variety of screen resolutions to support. Resolution dependent layouts could address this issue. Clagnut.com has a list of similar techniques. They all use JavaScript to sniff the current window width and to switch stylesheets. Leftlane.org shows that something similar can be done with pure CSS.
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These lists are so silly
This Four-Things-I-did list thing is still sweeping through blogworld and even affects people who normally consider themself immune to list things - and all this while ever since High Fidelity we know that just Top Five lists are valid lists. So here's a Top Five list which I'm (jokingly) maintaining for quite a while now:
My Top Five List of public persons I'd like to have a conversation with
- Lakshmi Narayan Mittal (India/England) - Spirited steel tycoon with the ability to see potentials where others just see ruins. Currently pulling a trick on Arcelor. Has the same idea of a pleasant weekend as I do (strolling through a steel mill).
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somalia/Netherlands) - Personalized counterdraft to the current European policy of looking away. A liberal in the best sense of the word. The fact that this person does not get more endorsement speaks volumes.
- György Konrad (Hungary) - Dissident, banned writer and, as former German president Roman Herzog put it, "uncompromising defender of humanism". Shares this rank with actor Otto Sander (Germany).
- Helmut Schmidt (Germany) - On this list since I first thought of it, along with Richard von Weizsäcker.
- Edward Burtynsky (Canada) - Takes photos.
So who is on your Top Five?
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1a Werbeplatz für Bildblog
Charlotte Roche gerade bei Harald Schmidt mit "BILDblog.de"-Schriftzug auf dem Oberteil. (Update: Und 'ne Show mit Zahn gibt's noch dazu.)
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Comments available again
The comments function is back. It still needs some finishing, but works fine already. So: let's restart the conversation :-)
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Ladle cleaning
Click to enlarge
A steel worker uses a oxygen torch to clean the inside of a foundry ladle and its slide gate. The ladle is mounted horizontally onto a gas fired heater (Pfannenfeuer) that keeps the ladle warm for its next casting.
RELATED
This slide show has demonstration photos of larger heaters.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Decazeville, eine Stadt wird entsorgt
TV-Tip II - morgen um 20:40 Uhr auf arte
Die Region um den Bergbau- und Stahlindustriestandort Decazeville im Südwesten Frankreichs ist in den letzten 40 Jahren zu einem sozialen Brennpunkt mit hoher Arbeitslosigkeit geworden. Im Mittelpunkt der Dokumentation stehen Porträts und Aussagen von Männern und Frauen, die vergebliche Umstrukturierungsversuche erlebt haben und die versuchen, die fatale Lage konstruktiv anzugehen und wieder aufzubauen, was zerstört wurde.
Die Dokumentation veranschaulicht überzeugend die Warnung des französischen Politikers Mendès-France, die er nach seiner Rückkehr aus Decazeville während des großen Streiks im Winter 1961/62 aussprach: "Man kann den Menschen nicht wie ein Werkzeug behandeln, das man ergreift, hier und dort benutzt und schließlich weglegt."
Sendetermine:
07.02.2006 20:40 Uhr und 08.02.2006 14:40 Uhr
arte tv: Decazeville, eine Stadt wird entsorgt →
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Jede Menge Kohle
TV-Tip I - heute um 22:30 Uhr im WDR Fernsehen
Im Ruhrgebiet geschieht Außergewöhnliches: Während der Chor der Politikerstimmen noch den Stopp der Kohlesubventionen fordert, macht sich ein tot geglaubter Industriezweig daran, viel Geld zu verdienen. Kohleförderung ist angesagt im Ruhrgebiet, und das, weil sie profitabel ist. Das jedenfalls behaupten nicht nur die RAG (ehem. Ruhrkohle AG). Ein internationales Bankenkonsortium unter Leitung der Deutschen Bank vermittelt der RAG Milliardenkredite. Was vor kurzem noch undenkbar war: Neue Zechen sollen gebaut werden.
Die Kohle an Rhein und Ruhr reicht für 400 Jahre. Da scheint der Abriss der modernsten Kokerei Deutschlands 2004 die größte Fehlentscheidung der Ruhrgebietsmanager gewesen zu sein. Aber war es auch die letzte? Noch befindet sich das Ruhrgebiet im Dornröschenschlaf, und kaum einer ahnt, dass die Kohle der Stoff für die Zukunft ist.
Sendetermine:
06.02.2006 22:30 Uhr und 08.02.2006 10:00 Uhr, WDR Fernsehen
WDR Die Story: Jede Menge Kohle - Im Ruhrgebiet kommt der Bergbau zurück →
Die erwähnte "größte Fehlentscheidung" wurde hier ja schon im Bild vorgestellt →
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Flare
Click to enlarge
It's pretty cold outside, so let's make some heat :-)
Proportions might be a bit difficult to guess here - such flames can reach heights of 30 meters or more
LD steelmaking offgas flare ← LD/BOS shop ← Saarstahl, Völklingen, Germany
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Quite frankly
I love these rare moments when, through all the corporate newspeak normally employed, the real motives of a company, person or project shine through. Sometimes, they even get addressed forthrightly in public (which, by the way, still is one of the best ways to make people not believe what you're saying) - just like this gem from MSFT. The news isn't the unsurprising announcement that the company wants to restrict the clientele that will be allowed to buy licenses for the Microsoft DRM system. It's the reason why they will be charging for such licenses:
According to Amir [Majidimehr, Corporate VP of the Windows Digital Media Division], the fee is not intended to recoup the expenses Microsoft incurred in developing their DRM, or to turn a profit. The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out "hobbyists" and other entities that Microsoft doesn't want to have to trouble itself with.
Like the open source world, for example. Who would have expected to hear it in such clarity.
[via Cory Doctorow]
UPDATE
"Hobbyists", a term with long standing tradition at MSFT (via Danny Ayers)
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