Here’s the top of the open-air market I wrote about a few pictures ago. Incidentally, a continuous concrete bench lines the perimeter — Gaudí was obsessed with making chairs that conformed to the human physiology… and these things are a testament to his skill at that. They’re incredibly comfortable! If only all benches were this comfortable.
This style of ceramic work was pioneered by Gaudí: ceramic pieces and glass bottles (trash) were gathered from the streets of early 1900’s Barcelona, then broken. The pieces were fit back together and set in to mortar, producing vivid colors and a unique decorative effect.
Hi, mySQL. Thanks for being great. But seriously. COULD YOU WARN ME NEXT TIME YOU HAVE AN ARBITRARY LIMIT ON ONE OF YOUR VARIABLE TYPES?
Curious? Ok. The max value for the TIME type in mySQL is 838:59:59. I’m sure you have some justification for picking 838 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds… but holy crap mySQL, could you warn me for functions like TIMEDIFF()?!
Ok. Thanks. Bye.
Check out Team USA softball pitcher Jennie Finch fire her pitches past major league players. I like the quote from the one player: “That’s unhittable.” (Via Peggy @ Buzzfeed).
I jotted down some of my recollections of the art and architecture of Barcelona when I posted more European pictures today. You may find my pictures and captions of some of the incredible innovations of Antoni Gaudí to be interesting.
Daily pictures have resumed starting today!
Great story about this fountain: it isn’t electrically powered. I’ll explain.
Behind the fountain, set into a hill, is a large open-air hypostyle hall. The sheltered area formed by this hall, and the gravel roof atop it were meant to be used as a marketplace for Park Güell. Here’s the innovation: the gravel roof drains through the center of the columns of the hypostyle hall into a subterranean cistern. When this cistern overflows, the extra water gushes out and runs this fountain. Brilliant.
Seeing eye cats are like seeing eye dogs, except they are the eyes for the dogs and the dogs are the disabled ones:
Cashew, a 14 year old Labrador Retriever owned by Terry Burns in Middleburg, Pennsylvania, is blind and deaf. Her best friend is a red tabby cat named Libby. Libby has become Cashew’s seeing-eye cat. She guides Cashew around obstacles, leads her to the food dish and even sleeps next to her every night.
The picture of the intrepid cat leading the dog along is great. (Via Jezebel).
Slashdot linked to a presentation called “How Facebook Stores Billions of Photos” — fun facts:
Facebook efficiently stores ~6.5 billion images, in 4 or 5 sizes each, totaling ~30 billion files, and a total of 540 TB and serving 475,000 images per second at peak…
I remember when Facebook released their pictures application, and I thought “this is silly.” And then everyone I’ve ever known started adding pictures and I realized that my desire to “keep it simple, stupid” was, itself, stupid.
Now, here we are, with 6.5 BILLION IMAGES on Facebook. The truly amazing thing is that last number: almost a HALF MILLION IMAGES PER SECOND. Some people in the internet industry might say that serving that many requests per second isn’t that difficult… but I think these Facebook engineers deserve some serious, serious respect… this is tough stuff they are doing.
↓ More