slow down, dammit

Interesting. A few months back, a member of the Gardaí said in a radio interview that one of the more visible results of the introduction of penalty points for speeding was that drivers were adhering more to the "open road" limits - the 50, 60 and 70MPH zones. However, he pointed out that 25% of traffic-related fatalities happened in 30 and 40MPH zones and these were the areas that needed more attention. This morning, one of our Senators suggested in a radio interview that the Gardaí were "taking the soft option" by penalising people in 30 and 40MPH zones when the "real danger" was in the higher-speed areas. Apparently the National Safety Council disagrees with him. The funny part is that in the radio interview (RealMedia link) he actually asks if figures are available to support his statement, after he's made the statement. Duh. A classic example of common wisdom not actually correlating to reality, which happens distressingly often in the political theatre in this country.

konq, redux

What's bothering me right now, since I just ran up Konq after Mozilla fell over on doonesbury.com (it's the flash, you see):

• fonts: I've set it to Sans 12, which seems reasonable but turns out to be a lot bigger than I expect. Setting it to Sans 10 makes no visible difference, which is WRONG.
• the nav bar: I run mozilla with bookmarks open in the left-hand sidebar. The best I can manage in Konq is to have the nav bar open; it's got a bunch of icons that I can place on the left or right of the nav bar, but can't hide; and it doesn't remember the state of the bookmarks, i.e. if I expand a bookmark folder, then quit konq and restart, that folder is closed.
• page nav menu bar: it doesn't have one. turns out i actually use this a fair amount, and only miss it when it's gone
• Ctrl-T starts a terminal instead of opening a new tab.

Mostly I've beaten it into the shape I want, and it does a lot of things right, such as automatically running flash player under arts to avoid the very thing that I think is at the root of the mozilla hang. (pointers to fixing the above gripes - not explanations as to why they're the right thing, pointers to fixes - appreciated)

mozilla, flash, hang

Well, for what it's worth, it appears to be a Macromedia bug somehow. That said, I feel that Mozilla could be doing more to isolate plugin bugs and stop them from hanging up the entire browser (it's threaded; what's the excuse?)( cuidados! hay stacktrace! )