The Blog of G

Drunk Driving, that’s so easy to eliminate it baffles me as to why some of the car manufacturers haven’t already implemented it.

A while back I saw a post on the giz about this device and giggled to myself a little, it did seem like a step in the right direction though as most folks who drive and want to play there tunes from there ipod will want an FM transmitter so coupling it with a breathalyser means you don’t have an excuse for not checking before putting that key in the ignition and heading home cause you’ve got an early Dail session in the morning

But seriously folks, here’s another area where technology could really help. If one of these breathalyser devices was linked to the ignition of your car and you were forced to blow into it before you could start your car, of course if your over the limit your car is immobilised until someone who returns a sufficiently low result takes the test, then at least you’d have to get some sober person to conspire along with your own drunken insanity, and how many people are going to do that for someone?

Maybe these idea’s are a little extreme but they’re both fairer than the current penalty points system, maybe they could be used in conjunction with each other, say you get 6 points for speeding then you have to have the GPS tracker thingy on your car until your points expire, and this is noted on your license so if your stopped at a random checkpoint the garda is notified that you should have this device and can check etc. etc.

Similarly, all convicted drunk drivers would be forced to have the breathalyser ignition system fitted and similar note on there license, in this case I would say permanently. there would still be a need for random checkpoints but it’s gotta be better value for money than having Gardai sitting in hedges?

What with my recent nowhere-near-fatal-accident and “that” pile up not so long ago, it’s fair to say that road safety has taken a more prominant place in my thoughts. I have a 110+ mile commute to and from the office so I drive a bit, it’s fair to say and the standard of driving I encounter on a regular basis is appalling. I’m not talking about speeding either.

Let’s start with the basics, Mirrors, they let you see whats coming behind you. It’s handy to check before you switch lanes or pullout in to traffic. Next up, indicators, they give other road users an “indication” of when we are about to change direction, you know like when your about to turn at a junction, switch lanes or even when your pulling out of a parking space.

I mean, the only thing’s that you ever hear of causing accidents in the news is speeding and drunk driving and if there really was a will to sort it out it could be quite simple and without resorting to draconian measures that grandad proposes, funny and all as they are. Although there is some sense in the drivers license that starts the car idea.

A more cost-effective solution would be to require all road vehicles to carry a GPS tracking chip, heck you can have these fitted to your car so it can be found easily if it’s stolen, simply use the technology to record only the times that a driver is exceeding the speed limit. The costs could be easily offset with the savings in paying the Gardai to sit in the hedgerows with there hairdryers. The government would still have the cash cow for speeding tickets, cause lets face it there will always be people who speed.

I remember hearing about an insurance company on the radio who offer discounted premiums to younger drivers once they have just the type of system I propose installed. The digital maps with the relevant speed zones indicated already exist so why can’t this be implemented? All it would need would be some politician to pick up on the idea, hell we can Eliminate smoking in public buildings why can’t we do this?

So, that’s speeding taken care of, simple as that, maybe an extra few quid on the price of your car but so what in the name of eliminating all those crashes caused by speeding.

So what about drunk drivers? How do we rid the roads of them… I think I might have an idea…

Last weekend, I woke early on Sunday morning a bit like a Kid on Christmas day, excited full of anticipation for what the day would bring. As we know at this point It wasn’t the best day for Ferrari in Suzuka. Michael’s championship hopes all but gone, he even said him self he didn’t want to win it like that, meaning Alonso not finishing in the last race. The constructors championship doesn’t look good for them either 9 point’s adrift but as we head into the last race of the season, the last race of an era even, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a memorable climax of a phenomenal championship and career.

Anyway back to Suzuka, The pre-race coverage on ITV contained something very rare. They managed to grab an interview on race day, no less, with one of the most formidable men in F1, the evil genius behind the Ferrari conspiracy, Mr. Jean Todt. You can read it here.

I thought this was particularly interesting in reference to Felippe Masa. I can’t remember the last time I heard any team principle be so up front about there “second driver” and my hat goes off to him for not only standing up for his driver but also the way he slapped down the implied Ferrari conspiracy that Ted Kravitz was looking for confirmation on.

Congratulations Jean, I hope Felippe always has this much support from you

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, what’s new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spell-check as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with reasonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completely taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.