Rally against mr. Putin 24 Dec in St. Petersburg

Rally 24-th of December 2011 in St. Petersburg

The rally in St. Petersburg was far not as big as in Moscow unfortunately. There were about 3,000 of people but they came and leave constantly, so the actual number of participants might be 6,000 or so.

The problem is that there is no leader amongst the opposition and actually the only thing that they have in common is a wish to get rid of Putin and his gang. Also the opposition (al least that was presented in St. Petersburg) have no stomach. The shouted: "Put Churov on trial!" and only "Putin to resighn!" when it is obvious that Churov is a Putin's puppet! So Putin is the main criminal and he must be jailed! But I deed shouted: "Put Putin on trial!". I really hope that some day he will pay for all his crimes against Russian people.

Pulseaudio: 6 channels issue solved

I hate Pulseaudio! This piece of crap never worked ever out of the box as it should. Usually I just disable it or remove completely. But in openSUSE 12.1 disabling or removing pulseaudio didn't work.

The issue: my 5.1 system sounds crappy (and subwoofer doesn't work) when I use Amarok (or flash audio from the web) and pulseaudio is enabled; but VLC and other videoplayers are able to play nice 5.1 sound. If I disable pulseaudio Amarok sounds great (and subwoofer works), but videoplayers are unable to play 5.1 - only stereo (VLC claims that audio device is busy and no workaround form web were unable to fix it).

So I decided to stick with pulseaudio, and had to make all 6 channels to work for stereo files. I've made following changes in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf:

enable-lfe-remixing = yes
default-channel-map = front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,front-center,lfe

Vladimir Putin: a stolen speech

Vladimir Putin stole the text of speech from Argentine politician.

Interactive Round Table on Separate Waste Collection in St. Petersburg, Russia

The other day I took part in a very interesting event - an interactive round table on a separate waste collection in the city (En), that was organized by Musora.Bolshe.Net (Waste.No.More) NGO. There were representatives of the St. Petersburg city administration, waste treatment companies, hotel business, cleaning companies, NGOs, mass media and science (a humble me).

It was great that there were no presentations from the experts, etc. The main point was the direct and open discussions (of course it was moderated) about the existing issues and challenges in the field of separate waste collection and recycling and the ways to solve them.

The second part of event was a development of waste related projects in small groups. Every one took part in development 3 projects and the group members were different each time. Of course the plans itself are quite useless: what kind of plan can be developed in 15 minuets? But the shearing of knowledge and opinions with others and development of the common view at the issue helps to get new ideas. 

I was lucky to work in the same teams with representatives of the city committees. Unfortunately they are not open-minded enough and I think they do not fully understand the main economical and legislation obstacles that prevents separate waste collection or not motivated enough to overcome it. But seems that they are not hopeless.

It was very interesting to discover that many people are interested in (speaking professional language) GIS-portal dedicated to shearing information about locations of relatively small amount of recyclables, that will let waste producers and recyclers find each other for the common benefit. So if you were looking for ideas for a start-up or expanding of your GIS-business - here you are ;-) Seems that I should develop my web-GIS skills...