Beauty

Terje Sorgjerd sacrificed his sleep for a week to create this: 

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Night and fog

Yesterday I've send a great time with friends of mine in Solnechnoe (Eng). There were as always a disguise party and a "Shit Was Gushing" filming, but that's another story imprinted with a lot of cameras.

Even I had my DSC-W310 (which has one of the best price to quality ratio) they've brought me back from a 1,5 month trip across the India. In the night on the way back to the electric train station the covered the landscape. I had to take some pictures despite I had no tripod, which would provide a great help in such conditions.

For this picture I've used a parapet to replace a tripod. 

Spring night's fog

Unfortunately it was imposiible to replace tripod with something for other pictures. Nevertheless the fog's drops in the flash-light looks mysterious.

Waste and culture

Yesterday I saw something awful. I was finalising my paper for DigitalGlobe 8-Dand Chahallenge on a subject of illegal dumpind detection when behind the window a yard cleaner who was collecting waste accumulated in the snow (citizens find it acceptable to through waste on the ground) suddenly started to dig the ground. He was a guest worker from an Asian part of the former Soviet Union like the most of the yard cleaners in St. Petersburg nowadays, so I was extremely suspicious of his actions. 

I'm not a xenophobe, but these foreign guys without education and a language knowledge are a patterns of the criminal activities of any sort initiated both by and against them. I would ban unqualified labour migration. There are plenty of hoi polloi in Russia already. And now the infrastructure of the whole city depends on them, cause it's being built and repaired by their unqualified hands!

Back to the guest worker. The worst nightmare for the ecologist and the one who is involved in researches related to the waste management come true: a person who is responsible to treat waste properly was burying the waste into the ground!!! Immediately I took the camera and shoot him... O-o-o... I wish I could shoot him!

Son of a bitch is burying collected waste into the ground!

The next moment I've opened the window and shouted at him to stop this, collect the waste and put it to the trash bin. This fucking bustard just nodded to me. I doubt he was even able to understand what I was talking about. I was furious!

The first phone call was to this bastard's employer. No response. I called to the company for 2 hours but there were no answer. The second call was to the public prosecutor's office for environmental issues. They respond, but the girl told me that they care only about industry (I highly doubt that they do officially have such limitations) and advised to call to the public prosecutor's office of my district. I did so, but my third call didn't succeed either: no one answered. By the way, you can appeal to the prosecutor via internet... e-e-h... it's a bullshit... "Sorry, your appeal wasn't submitted". Guess I have to appeal in person.

In the evening my wife told me that her co-workers were the witnesses of such actions in other parts of the city. So it seems that guest workers were not the only one who is responsible for these crimes. Obviously their employers ordered them to do so. They are trying to save money on waste disposal regardless we (the citizens) pay for it! Remember what I wrote about guest workers as the patterns of the criminal activities - they can't resist criminal orders coming from their owners. But anyway there are no excuses: even if he was ordered to commit the crime, he was the one who actually did it. 

Both the guest worker and his greedy employer must be punished. Hope I will be able to bring them to justice.

P.S. The culture was mentioned in the title of this post. If you are not aware, St. Peterssburg has the title of the "cultural capital of the Russia". Yes, it is... Amen.

It was too good to be true...

http://news.opensuse.org/2011/04/01/the-canterbury-distribution/ Almost believed them)))

About communities

There is an interesting post (google-English) about organisation of the community for the Open Source project. To my mind these thoughts are useful for every volunteer based project / community - not only to those dedicated to the software development.

The main ideas (some are in my interpretation):

• The most of the community participants are passive.
• The most active participants have to be rewarded by increasing their control over the project.
• Community have to be organised and organisation have to be transparent.
• At the beginning community needs a "magnanimous dictator" to unite the community and make project attractive for participants, but for the community and project survival in the long term it is necessary to develop democracy and try to reach the state of anarchy.
• Project become more attractive when those, who are capable and willing, receive more important tasks.
• In the beginning it is hard but essential to organise a proper feedback.
• When community and project are grown and mature it is necessary to prevent its division (fork for the software) because splitting exsanguinates community and the project.
• Community have to survive its founder so it is necessary to develop the democracy and move towards to anarchy and make decisions via consensus.
• At the first stage of the democracy the "silent consensus" will prevail, and the silence will mean the agreement. Vote system have to be developed.
• With the procedures became more complicated the need in providing newbies with the rules of participation will rise.
• "Formalisation of the agreements helps to ensure that the community lives its own life and does not depend on anyone individually".
  
• "The community can survive and flourish for as long as there is demand for the product produced."

Rosatom maps: you dont need tsunami to waste a nuclear power plant ;-)

 ROSATOM has a web-site with the map of its objects (nuclear power plants) and the background radiation around them. I decided to check the nuclear power plant situated in the Leningrad region. Looks like the dump to me :-)

Local dump marked as the nuclear power plant)))

openSUSE 11.4 - now I have it!

I've updated my openSUSE 11.3 to 11.4 version! It's awesome!!!

The last time I've tried to update 11.2 to 11.3 I failed and had to perform a clean installation, but this time it was Ok. Maybe because this time I've added new repos for additional software before updating, not just basic official repos. This update saved a great deal of time - I don't need to set up the environment and install needed software.

openSUSE 11.3 was more stable than 11.2 so I accepted it's performances issues (it worked little bit slower than Window7, which I have in dual boot, and some programs stuck from time to time). I don't know what was the reason for these minor issues. Now with 11.4 these issues are gone!

Of course there are some minor problems after update. PulseAudio is a default audio driver and as always it's a crap -  I can't stand so terrible sound. Disabling it didn't help so I deleted PulseAudio completely. Sound is Ok now. The second problem is broken VLC-player. I've reinstalled it several times but still every time I'm trying to open something it crashes with the segmentation fault and telling something about my locale (which I decided to change from RU to US before updating). This is not a tragedy, because M-Player works just fine. G-mail plasmoid started to work properly only after it was deleted and reinstalled. Amarok's play-lists were broken. Other issues aren't noticed so far.

One of the most delicious change in 11.4 version for me was clouds [updated everyday] added to the desktop map. [as a geographer] I've tuned one of the desktops (in KDE) which is used to work with GIS to show the world map with the night shadow, which shows where is night at this moment. It is interesting, that globe as desktop backgroundin KDE environment wasn't available for Fedora and Kubuntu when I used them last year. 

One of the my desktops with the night shadow moving across the world map.

Settings for the image above

Also the world map is available as interactive globe, Open Street Map, and if you're tired of Mother Earth just chose Moon instead.