Traffic Officers

A few years ago I started spotting an increasing number of sparkly new 4x4 vehicles in bright, luminous livery cruising around the UK's motorways. Looking at first like police vehicles you of course slow right down when passing one, but then you notice that the colours aren't quite right, and it doesn't say 'POLICE' on the side, but 'TRAFFIC OFFICER' in the Window.

So why am I blogging about Traffic Officers? Quite simply because they're getting on my nerves and they're a complete waste of time. Fulfilling their role as a 'New Labour money wasting scheme', 'Traffic Officers' can regularly be seen slowing down traffic flow on most busy UK motorways. Yessiree - pulling up behind motorists stranded on the hard shoulder and turning on flashing lights so that everyone can have a good stare is a real great idea. Indeed lets kill two birds with one stone, - making everyone think there is an incident, and in doing so, increase the risk that there will be one!

Am I missing the point? - Or is the sheer pointlessness of these people apparent to me alone? I just don't get it. It's like Police 'Community Support' officers, only on the roads, and with less power than even those muppets. Maybe they have some special role which I'm missing, but I only ever see 'Traffic Officers' do one of two things:

1. Cruise up (or down) the motorway network.
2. Pull up behind a car in the hard shoulder and put their lights on (and have a chinwag with the unlucky motorist).

Seeing as cars stranded in the hard shoulder aren't impeding the flow of traffic in any way, I don't quite see what point it serves pulling up behind them. Let's say the poor soul doesn't have a mobile phone on them - even then there are emergency phones connecting directly to the police control room all along the motorway - installed and operated at great expense I might add. Now I'm guessing that after all that driving around the Traffic Officers are that bored, the primary point of the exercise is to have a bit of company, but is this really worth the money?

So the Highways Agency website has the following to say about Traffic Officers:

'The Highways Agency Traffic Officer Service staff are trained to a high standard in everything from safety to dealing with customers, traffic management and the use of technology.'

'We also keep the public informed through our electronic message signs and by supplying information for local travel reports.'

'We patrol the motorways in vehicles marked as traffic officers with high visibility markings.'

Well what can I say.. they are trained how to use a TomTom... they keep us informed with flashing message signs and help update the travel reports.. Thats money well spent folks. I guess we're putting in those multimillion pound CCTV systems, overhead displays and active traffic management systems for fun. The traffic officers have it all in hand.

Can they really not think up anything better to waste our taxes on? Meh..

OS Nirvana

Anyone who knows me knows I change operating systems weekly... from Solaris to Vista, FreeBSD to Ubuntu.. you name it, I've tried it.. and I usually get a bit bored after a while. The reasons are many and varied, but I usually tire of the interface, or some little annoyance gets to me and I feel like a change.. But now, after all these years I really have found something I finally feel comfortable with, and where there isn't even one annoyance.. in otherwords, I have found my computing nirvana. Ladies, and gentlemen... allow me to introduce... E-Live

What is it? It's a Linux distribution based on Debian, as many are (Ubuntu etc). E-live uses Enlightenment as its default desktop environment, so it is unbelievably snappy whilst looking far nicer than other, heavier environments and window managers. I guess it comes down to pure coding skills, but in Enlightenment and the libraries that it uses, the creators have brought forth a wonder.. It is beautiful, but fast, and seems light years ahead of traditional Linux environments.

As the name suggests, E-Live is actually a live CD, so you can boot off the disc and use it straight away. You'll get most benefit in actually installing it though, so it runs off your disk at full speed. Its fairly good looking by default, but careful application of some downloaded wallpapers, themes and login manager screens has transformed even this beauty into something amazing to behold..

Whilst E-Live is beautiful, fast and thus far extremely stable (even on the 'unstable' version), where I have consistently been impressed is in software installation. Whether I use 'apt-get' to install programs from the default repositories, or download a self-extracting Google Earth, everything seems to just work, and installs itself nicely..even inserting entries into the Enlightenment menus..

The default graphical file manager used by E-Live is 'Thunar', and what a breath of fresh air! I'm sick to death of Nautilus and the new KDE file manager 'Dolphin' I couldn't stand.. Like the rest of E-Live, Thunar is fast, clean and simple. In other words - it 'just works'. Perfect.

A few painless installs of such yummy things as SongBird, Google Earth, VirtualBox etc.. and my computing Nirvana is complete.. If I do need to, Vista pops up in a few seconds courtesy of VirtualBox, but other than that its all plain sailing...

I can't recommend E-Live enough. Bear in mind you may need to tinker a teeny bit to make it just perfect.. but for me, it was worth it.. Computing is fun again, and I have ZERO desire to change my OS for the forseeable future...

Suck it and see anyway - download the live cd at http://www.elivecd.org

From darkness to light...

From the darkest depths of the sea of dead blogs, the good ship Sugarat rises, and sets sail once more.. I don't know what shores we shall reach, but for now it is 'Engine room - full steam ahead!' - My faithful - I have returned!

Much has changed in my life and times.. but the blog itch needs to be scratched. Of 100% certainty is that I'll be covering the juicy world of IT and operating systems, stopping now and again to rant and bitch about anything that hacks me off, and throwing in the odd random news-related article or two. Who can tell? Whatever it is though, I hope you find my musings of worth.

But for now... let us begin....