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Weingartenstraße
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The face of Dietmar Bär, a Dortmund local and an actor popular nationwide, is showing on this Weingartenstraße billboard. Formerly situated in closest possible proximity to Hoesch Steel's BOS shop (Oxygenstahlwerk), Weingartenstraße used to be the dirtiest street in town. The pipeline in the background is part of the city's gas transportation network, connecting the various Hoesch Steel sites, air fractionation plants, and coking plants across town. Once much larger, the part shown still is transporting nitrogen. Dortmund, Germany.
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Posted in category Endangered Machinery
Ruhrpiefigkeit
Ruhrpiefigkeit. Dieses schöne Wort sollte ich eigentlich viel öfter verwenden, ist es doch das Aufeinanderprallen von Weltstadtanspruch und Dörflichkeitshabitus, das die Ruhrstadt so prägt. Fallbeispiel, Zitat vom gestrigen WAZ-Titelblatt:
Auf den 50 Meter hohen Turm der Zeche Nordstern in Gelsenkirchen will die [Treuhandstelle der Bergmannswohnstätten] [als Symbolprojekt der Europäischen Kulturhauptstadt 2010] vier Etagen aus Glas bauen lassen, durch die das Wahrzeichen auf 78 Meter wächst. Als Clou soll oben eine Monumentalplastik thronen: Ein 18 Meter hoher Herkules, "als Zeichen für Kraft und Mut".
Der Clou.
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Google Application Engine
Google Application Engine: "Write applications in Python using a WSGI compatible application framework, then host them on Google’s highly scalable infrastructure. The most exciting part is probably the Datastore API, which provides external developers with access to Bigtable for the first time" (Simon Willison). Four other parts. Some data points:
- Krzysztof Kowalczyk: GAE is the first Internet operating system.
- GAE means you have to trust Google both with your data and your code.
- Case in point: Kowalyczk says "other companies that should be afraid, very afraid of GAE are hosters of specific applications that don’t have network effects" - like 37 Signals. A Google-built GAE demo app was HuddleChat - "a feature-for-feature clone of 37signals’s Campfire" (Gruber 1). Google pulled it, but still it either means they had no clue, did not care or had "the greenlight for a product launch knowing many in the developer community would likely view Google App Engine as a Xerox machine for copycat product developers" - So "why should small indie web developers trust Google when the first example app is a Google rip-off of a small indie web app?" (Gruber 2).
- This could be huge anyway.
- Runs Django, too.
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