taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Web: Donncha notes that Mozilla Firebird has been renamed ‘Firefox’. Retro cruddy 80’s Cold War movie reference? check!

I like it. In fact, I’m looking forward to Linux kernel 2.6.2 ‘Red Dawn’.

BTW, my current favourite Firebird^H^H^H^Hfox extension: Session Saver. Load and save the current list of open tabs, and have them automatically saved when you quit the browser. Given that I often have a few tabs on stuff I’m researching, leaving them until I’m a bit less busy (which can take days!), this fits perfectly with my modus operandi.

Funny: This is GREAT!

And if that’s too much product placement for you, there’s Students for an Orwellian Society: ‘Because 2004 is 20 years too late.’

Tags: cold, cruddy, donncha, firebird, firefox, movie, mozilla, reference, retro, war, web

Culture: Five killed in separate road crashes. Donncha notes ‘There were 2 terrible road accidents this morning. One of them was just outside Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. I drove past there dozens of times in the past and I was shocked to hear the news.’

It’s interesting to note this cultural difference. In Ireland, a road crash with multiple fatalities is national news, on the 6 o’clock news; in California, as far as I can see, it’s pretty much an everyday fact of life – unless there was a juicy ‘road rage’ story attached, it won’t get reported.

Are there more deaths in the US than Ireland? It seems not. The US department, NHTSA, notes that California had 3,956 fatalities in 2001, which works out at 11.47 per 100K population. The Irish dept, NRA (heh – that’s National Road Authority) notes a 2001 rate of 10.7 per 100K population. (However, Ireland’s rate has dropped since then, due to an increased emphasis on road safety; the 2003 rate is reported to be the lowest since the 1960’s. Not sure what it is now, though.)

So, interestingly, the death rate is comparable — so where’s the difference? I reckon it must be simply a PR issue; Ireland’s road safety authorities have made it a PR priority, so that public awareness of road safety is heightened. As a result, road crashes are headline news.

Tags: cahir, crash, culture, difference, donncha, morning, news, population, rate, road, safety

ah, Donncha reminisces about the Commodore 64 demo scene.

I was involved too, around 1987, coding demos as ‘Mantis’ for XS — a pretty little known group. I wrote 2 really great demos, Rhaphanadosis, and another name I can’t quite remember ;), but they don’t seemed to have survived, which is a shame…

Tags: commodore, demo, donncha, group, mantis, name, rhaphanadosis, scene, shame