New Urbanism for Greener Cities

New Urbanism has promised better neighborhoods, reduced pollution, less traffic, and less sprawl.  source  Is this working?  So far, there have been a very slow movement to adopt new urbanism principles.  A lot has to happen to make it work in one place.  There have been a few developments in Florida that adhere to the ideas of a livable and walkable neighborhood, and at least one seems to be functioning as envisioned.

Abacoa in Jupiter Florida was built without a major employment source (as is typical of Florida), but a functioning Main Street area and a desirable location has kept it growing.  The construction of the Scripps Florida campus on site has ensured a major employer is within walking distance of much of the downtown area. This may be enough to ensure the concept of a central community will be achieved in Abacoa.

Other developments, such as Tradition in St. Lucie County, Florida, have been marketed more as retirement communities and marketed more to snowbirds that year round residents.  It also suffers from the inclusion of large Big Box strip malls adjacent to the town center.  These type of developments discourage pedestrian movements. The addition of Torrey Pines to the development may change the resident mix of that community, and give it the financial boost it needs at present.

New Urbanism can be adopted in existing urban areas with some success.  West Palm Beach is attempting to incorporate many of these ideas with some success. City Place, Clematis Street, a reconstructed Dixie Highway, and the new City Government complex successfully use New Urbanism ideas.  The location of the conference center south of Okeechobee with little linkage to the center is less than ideal, however.

Rainbarrels Are a Great Way to Go Green

Rainbarrels conserve water, reduce runoff pollution, and help even out the irrigation of your yard.  You can even use the barrel as a great source of soft water for washing. The Miami-Dade County Cooperative Extension Service is offering a series of Rain Barrel Workshops. These workshops give the residents of Miami-Dade County an opportunity to learn about important water conservation issues and the workshop fee includes a rainbarrel of your own! - source

If you live in a home that is served by untreated Florida Aquifer water, you know how bad hard water can be on washing your car.  Even your hair can be impacted by washing in hard water.  Rainwater is about as soft as you can get.  The rainbarrels that Miami-Dade is using are the bright blue plastic ones, which are mostly sealed tight, and corrosion free, so should last many years.

Water Quality Impacts of Global Warming

The US EPA estimates that changes due to global warming will cause higher water temperatures in our lakes and streams, along with increases in storms AND droughts in the Southeast?  These changes will mean increased pollution and decreased oxygen levels in our waterways. Some of these issues can be addressed with improved management practices. - source

Water quality impacts will occur due to increased runoff after longer dry periods - increasing pollutant loading of the runoff.  Sites should be designed with significant areas of pervious landscape, and allowing rainwater to percolate naturally into the ground.  In addition, there are structural approaches to remove sediment loading and consequently remove trace contaminants from runoff.  These measures can take very little land area, which is important on urban sites.  The downside is that there is a regular maintenance schedule that must be followed to ensure that the management practice put into place actually functions year to year.

no JMF support

I decided after installing the JMF library that it is really not worth the bother.  The framework has not been supported by Sun for years, the .jar files are dated from 2003.  The installation method is broken, it all has to be done by hand using the Linux Terminal, and the library needs to then be installed into Netbeans, and still the diagnostic tool on the Oracle site does not recognize the installation.

Sun and Oracle came out with JavaFX in 2008, which is  supported on the Linux platform. It is more a scripting language, although it does support full Java.  IT also runs on mobile platforms.  JavaFX sounds like the way to go at present.

Java Media

I found today that Java has a Media Extension with all kinds of sound and video goodies built in.  I went to the Oracle site to install the extension, and they had two packages to install on my Linux machine.  One was a .bin file, so it has to be installed with a shell script.  The other was a zip file.  Also, there are environment variables to set so that the Java compiler can know the files are present.  Well, pretty straightforward, until you run then shell script.

Then bash reports errors in the shell script! Missing end parenthesis and some unknown other symbols that apparently are a result of something exploding in the file downloaded from the Oracle site. So it's a no-go on the install.  There is no way to read the .bin file to see what is wrong.  Back to square one.  See if the files can be manually installed tomorrow.

Google Earth on Linux

You would think that Google of all people would make an application that would be dead easy to install and run on Linux.  Well, it runs, but there have been issues for me with Ubuntu 10.04.  Seems to me it was much better under Linux Mint x64 when I was using that last year.

Kind of crazy that it installs and runs with a shell script.  And does not turn up in the Ubuntu Gnome menu, I had to track down the starting script in the Opt folder.  Ran from the Mint menu before now.  Also, has crashed on me twice clicking Panorama pics. 

I had to switch to Ubuntu 32 bit to write programs with Netbeans, which gave me all kinds of problems in the 64 bit OS.   At least the flash viewer is supported in 32 bit, as the 64 bit one seems to dropped off the Adobe site.

Why Java?

I chose Java for one main reason - it is compatible with all major platforms, without having to write separate code for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.  At home, we use multiple platforms, and I imagine a lot of other people do the same thing.  In addition, the basic Java core is even used on the Android operating system.

To me, the Android looks like a lot of fun to program on.  It reminds me of the fun I used to have with my HP-41C way back when.  I was able to write things like integrals, and time step solutions for detention systems on this little calculator.  We pretty much ran our engineering office with a few of those machines running survey calcs on one and drainage calcs on another.  Now an Android phone is much more powerful, and can be used for many other things as well, and my head spins with the applications that would be so cool to run on those things.

Learning how to program in Java

I have spent the last few months teaching myself Java programming.  I found that a lot has changed in the programming world in the last 15 years.  The structure of Java and other object oriented languages has really improved the art of programming.  Although there is still the huge amount of effort going into developing a user interface that is pleasing to the eye and functional for the user, the use of Java Swing components at least takes a lot of the burden off the programmer to develop a cohesive user interface.  The function of the interface can also be easily separated from the actual computational work and the data that is used, making for a lot cleaner programming style.