‘Local character’ is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.
Patrik Geddes, a pioneer in town planning
Although, the meaning of the phrase ‘thinking globally, acting locally’ has changed over the years, the fact is that acting locally is more important that trying to act globally. The local environment and changes in it form and shape people and their well-being compared to high or global politic decisions. Of course, the change in taxation or other laws affect your well-being, too, but they don’t directly affect your environment. Your actions however can strongly contribute to the improvement of the local conditions and possibly have an effect on larger communities as well.
As the quote says – the treatment of the whole environment – is important. Therefore, this should be the basic rule for the city and other local bureaucrats – to consult people affected in the places or communities (I have always envied those posted official notices on local changes in environment in the UK). Traffic decisions, gardening decisions and other local improvements (or degradations) could have a grave impact on the overall well-being of a community and so they should be treated as such1.
The question is if there are enough processes in question available to consult public on the changes before or during the planning stage? There is Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), but this comes too late – usually after the planning is already done – and only has a status of a recommendation, therefore often ignored by the traffic planners or developers.
February 6, 2012 at 13:04 :: Filed under Musings, Politics :: [*] :: No Comments ::
Strike - music by Alloy Orchestra
Found in this wonderful guide to 420 free movies that you can watch online, Strike is a early communist propaganda movie by the director Sergei Eisenstein. His another well-known propaganda movie is The Battleship Potemkin and is also now in public domain. Both of them are silent movies and many bands has composed soundtrack later. He employed unique movie editing techniques that can be still seen in the movies nowadays.
One of the soundtracks available for the Strike movie was composed by Alloy Orchestra. Unfortunately, it is not available anywhere online and Alloy Orchestra sells it only as full DVD including the movie.
I have downloaded the movie Strike from Internet Archive and separated the audio track as a MP3 in 128 kbps quality. You can download it here: Alloy Orchestra – Strike.
I hope Alloy Orchestra will soon publish the full quality music (FLAC or MP3 320 kbps) of theirs on Bandcamp (or Amazon at least), so we can buy it online without requiring their fans to buy a DVD you will never watch.
October 4, 2011 at 20:42 :: Filed under Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::
A Slovak branch of Strabag, a construction company, has sued the website www.znasichdani.sk (translates as From our taxes, run by Fair-play Alliance, won 1st Prize App prestigious prize of Open Data Challenge) that connects information available in the Slovak Trade registry with the awarded public sector contracts.
A slovak district court issued a preliminary ban (preliminary injunction) on displaying some information available on the website, which is an absurd case of judicial and corporate abuse as the information provided is already available on multiple public sector websites including information on Strabag and its managing director, Jarmila Povazanova.
STRABAG is committed to social responsibility and takes measures…
…measures to abuse its corporate powers and censor websites that try to defy corruption and display information on awarded public contracts. Well done, Strabag. Joining Deutsche Telekom in corruption?
June 27, 2011 at 15:51 :: Filed under Uncategorized :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::
I received a message from my friends in Vienna about a German couple that is on their way around the world… on bike. They asked me, if I would be able to host them in Bratislava. Am I able to host somebody cycling around the world? That’s a courage I like, so definitely: yes!
Andreas and Johanna came yesterday with their heavy duty bikes (really, weight of their luggage on bikes is around 60 kgs).
They liked Bratislava and today in the morning moved further on to the south of Slovakia by Danube river, unsure about where they are going to end. But sometimes, path is the goal, and in their case, traveling around, seeing new villages, cities, regions, countries or even continents, meeting new people seems to be way they like it. And yes, they will finally come back to Hamburg in two or three years, where their trip has begun.
So, good luck, guys and enjoy your great adventure!
March 31, 2011 at 23:40 :: Filed under Musings :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::
My friend teased me to retrofit a headlight on my old bicycle, so I accepted the challenge. After spending few bucks on small soldering iron, custom switch and a new ultrabright LED flashlight, I started to work on it. First, dismantling the whole thing, picking out a bulb and other small items included in the former dynamo light.
Then I took a battery holder from a small flashlight, combining it, gluing a custom switch to the opening where the dynamo wires were running through and a bit of soldering, putting it all together with a LED light circuit board. Trying to fit it all inside and all set, new bicycle headlight ready. Ultrabright front bike light retrofitted to the former dynamo front light.
Strong light - retrofitted bike light
Strong light - retrofitted bicycle light
Retrofitted LED bicycle light
Retrofitted LED bike light with a custom switch
Inspiration also from the Bicycle Safari blog.
March 1, 2011 at 20:48 :: Filed under Musings :: [*] :: 4 Comments ::
After spending some time creating a closed online community based solely around Google services, I have few recommendations for smaller groups on what online tools to use.
Gmail – although well-known, it still helps to have a common email environment, when collaborating using Google tools. Not only because it integrates well with other Google services, but it also offers a Jabber-based chat called gTalk. Google Docs – allow for easy document sharing, can be used by multiple users at once (yes, editing one document (!) and seeing changes done by different people real-time). Goodle Docs integrate well with Gmail offering instant previews etc. Google Groups – as mailing lists are one of the oldest services on the internet, Google jumped in to the game with Google Groups. Interface could have some more time spent on over the years though, but it is still useful to have one mailing list that includes all collaborators. Google Groups feature the setting to have the every email forwarded or to receive a digest once a day (or even no email sent and reading done through the web). Google Forms – an extension to the Google Docs that offers user-friendly way to set up a reservation form, email subscription, contact form or even a survey. Google Maps – made famous by later introduction of extended Google Earth and the street view, Google Maps serve well for quick and dirty marking of city areas, addresses or other points of interest. Very useful for people not familiar with the area and possibly a good guide when the custom map feature is used.
I could have added Picasa or YouTube as well, but I am sure people will find the other useful Google services when needed.
January 25, 2011 at 19:55 :: Filed under Internet, Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::
I’ve been using KDE since my final migration to Linux operating system in 2005. It used to be useful, although ugly looking environment in its first versions.
KDE version 3 set the standard and KDE version 4 has improved over it. But including inclusion of the Plasma desktop instead of experimental SuperKaramba used previously has demonstrated itself as two-edged sword. Although nice and potentially likely highly useful, Plasma has been plagued by many problems. Crashes used to be frequent in the first versions of KDE 4 and rarely they still happen. Overall feeling from KDE is that it is not integrated well enough. Every program uses its own notifications, there are many different ways how a user is informed about an event etc. KDE also feels sometimes rather unresponsive or heavy.
I have r
ecently tried using XFCE on a new desktop computer and it immediately felt lighter, faster and moreover, much better integrated. Everything seems to be well integrated in XFCE, icons, tooltips, pop-ups, notifications. Everything feels smooth and seamless.
KDE is now a giant slowly falling down under its own weight. I am really expecting what will the new version of KDE (number 5) bring.
Why I don’t mention Gnome? Because it’s way outdated, that’s why. And no, based on what I have seen, the Unity is not the right path to take either.
December 15, 2010 at 23:58 :: Filed under Musings :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::
The irony of how we use computers.
When the processor time was expensive, there was only one heavy computer with lots of terminals connected for access. Then the personal computers came and suddenly, everyone had to have one bragging about their hardware, processor type, memory size etc.
Then came the internet and with the broadband connections becoming ubiquitous and using more and more web applications our computers are becoming only end points. All (or most of the) data are stored in the server clouds and although available as a separate machine, we are using our computers as terminals without actual need for strong processor or large memory.
I guess it would be even cheaper to have an actual terminal and using miniSD card or USB flash key for those private data we don’t want Google (Microsoft, etc.) to have access to.
Terminal services paradigm seems to win in the end.
November 23, 2010 at 23:07 :: Filed under Internet, Musings :: [*] :: 3 Comments ::
New York City, Fall 2008
Folklore. That of New York consist of honking cars speeding in the streets. Red light or traffic jam? So what?! To honk here means to get done with your morning hygiene.
Saturday’s night belongs to fours. The fours of young girls walking on the streets, hailing taxis or getting out of them. Better living in quartet. Men should do the same thing, then, I guess.
November 20, 2010 at 03:21 :: Filed under Musings :: [*] :: No Comments ::
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Facebook Comments Box Indexable and Crawlable by the Search Engines
SEOMoz community member Roy Peleg writes about how to make the Facebook comments (part of the Facebook comments box iframe) indexable and crawlable by the search engines including Google.
He links to a PHP script that basically pulls out comments from the API: http://www.rayhe.net/fb/comments.phps and inserts them into a page.
He writes:
So basically you can now use Facebook Comments Box on your site and serve GoogleBot (or any other crawler/browser agent) with the comments to have them crawled & indexed. Obviously this won’t be considered as cloaking as you’re serving Google exactly what the users see (just like creating an HTML version for a Flash website).
However, trying to cloak (although having noble intentions) is just wrong in any case. Specially, when current methods and possibilities allow us to provide content visible only to the search engines. Instead of using the easiest way, Roy Peleg recommends one of the Google banned techniques.
What is the easiest way I am talking about?
Using the plain old
<noscript>element that is well suited for this purpose (search engines do not use Javascript, so they will “see” alternate content provided on the page):The NOSCRIPT element allows authors to provide alternate content when a script is not executed. The content of a NOSCRIPT element should only be rendered by a script-aware user agent in the following cases:
User agents that do not support client-side scripts must render this element’s contents.
Easy, peasy and accessible, dear Roy Peleg.
June 16, 2011 at 11:37 :: Filed under Internet, Musings :: [*] :: 1 Comment ::