About six weeks ago, I joined a small group of people who are fellow students at IUPUI and concerned by Indianapolis, Indiana’s stark lack of transportation planning and public transit availability. The group is called Hoosier Progress. Just this evening, we were discussing the differences between Indianapolis and Madison, Wisconsin when it came to commuting options. Madison is laden with bicycles and crisscrossed with a network of bike and foot paths that would make any city in the nation envious.
The likely root cause of this situation is geography. The heart of Madison is situated on a narrow isthmus between two lakes, Monona and Mendota. This is likely what encouraged higher population density, which in turn led to tighter city blocks on the isthmus and smaller residential properties. Madison was founded in 1836. Needless to say, there were few cars on the road and public transportation had not yet taken off. Therefore, there was a greater need to move about the city on foot.
Indianapolis is built on flat, open land, with only a river and a smattering of man-made lakes on the edge of town to determine how things are laid out. There are no natural barriers to determine the size of house lots or the shape of neighborhoods. It also means cheaper land for newer, more land-intensive housing tracts in the suburbs. Like Madison, the older parts of the city have smaller blocks, but this is a relic from a time when few people owned cars and the population was much smaller.
As a consequence of these two different city development paths, Madison has about 50 percent greater population density. The greater Madison area also has about a third the population of Indianapolis, this makes it easier to get from place to place within Madison. Madison also benefits from a comprehensive network of bicycle paths.
When considering Indianapolis’ abysmal public transportation and bicycle infrastructure, there are things to be learned from citys like Madison. Encouraging increased population density when creating or rebuilding neighborhoods can make it easier for residents to go about their day without a car.
Increasing population density would also make it easier to determine where bike paths should be laid. Currently, they are restricted to abandoned rail lines and along major waterways. A comprehensive trail network should connect neighborhood centers, residential areas, and major attractions like museums, parks, and airports.
Indianapolis still has a long way to go when it comes to building out non-automotive traffic infrastructure. However, we do not have to reinvent the wheel (so to speak.) We can look at the ways it is been successfully implemented in other places and try to apply those lessons here.
Google has begun a practice of flagging Google accounts that are being accessed from unusually parts of the world. Typically, you access your Google account from a relatively small geographic area. Home, work, and areas around your city are areas where you are most likely to log in. In response to an attack on Google’s Gmail servers in January, presumably by the Chinese government, the search company has started flagging users’ accounts if they are being accessed from abnormal parts of the world for that user.
This practice is nothing new. If your credit card information has been stolen and big-ticket items are being purchased rapidly, the credit card company will put a hold on that card and contact you. This is no different.
This is a generally positive development and should help to discourage at least a few attacks on Google’s mail servers. However, according to the Ars Technica article linked to earlier in this post, there is still a backdoor into Google’s systems via ActiveSync. Citing a blog post from Gabriel Landau at Independent Security Evaluators, it is possible to circumvent the Gmail access logs, which is how Gmail knows where it is being accessed from. One only needs proper credentials for the account in question to read and send emails with that account and no one can stop it because ActiveSync cannot be disabled like IMAP or POP can.
Assuming Google patches that gaping hole in its fence soon, I think that it is doing better to protect the security of its users from unauthorized access than it was before the Chinese attack. Call me a Google fanboy, but I was happy to see Google take action after the attack and work to make its users safer.
I am taking a break from my normal programming fare with this message about WordPress supporting the 1 for all movement. I think that we do take familiar things like the First Amendment for granted and that most people do not understand the US Constitution as well as they should. If you have not read the US Constitution lately, head on over to USConstitution.net and read up. It may a bit dry in parts, but it is the founding document of our nation and deserves a good read.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Born and raised on the Texas Gulf Coast, I’ve spent the past few months trying to wrap my head around the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent massive oil spill that is no … Read More
via WordPress.com News
It turns out then, when trying to bootstrap a Ruby on Rails application after pulling it down from a repository, it is really important to set up a database for the application before you try to start it. Yes, like a pony and pony food, any web application needs a database to function properly. Before you start, run
rake db:create
and
rake db:migrate
The create command will create a new MySQL database on your local machine, unless you specify otherwise. The migrate command will configure the database with all the tables and relationships that are needed for it to work properly. The configuration instructions are in the applications model and migration files.
That way, everybody is happy and you don’t look like a complete noob in front of half the development team for two weeks. Not that, uh, that has ever happened to me.
Patrick Proctor was here 