Daily Archives:February 16th, 2003

Congestion charging

[Original Link] London’s contraversial ‘congestion charging’ scheme begins tomorrow. Drivers entering central London will have to pay £5 per day, with the revenues going to fund public transport.

I can understand its unpopularity with most people who go into the capital more frequently than I do, and I don’t like Ken Livingston, the mayor, who’s introducing it. But I have to give him credit for having the courage to do something bold. It was clear that something had to be done, and that half-measures weren’t going to work. It’s also a sad indictment of the current government that they would never have the vision to do something so radical.

A couple of aspects interested me. Firstly that ‘alternative fuel vehicles’ are exempt. A very good idea, and I wonder if people will start returning to horseback? That’s the way I want to go into London.

Secondly, another exempt group are “Disabled people, or institutions for disabled people, who hold a Blue Badge (formerly known as Orange Badge)”. It’s good to see that colour-blindness is finally being taken seriously.

Editing GNOME2 Menus in Red Hat Linux 8.0

[Original Link] RedHat 8 is a nice version of Linux. It’s good to have antialiased fonts, OpenOffice & Evolution installed as standard, and it even detected the graphics card and monitor correctly on one of the two machines I installed it on. 50% is a better hit rate than I’ve had in the past.

I even quite like the way they’ve tried to merge Gnome and KDE so you hardly know which one you’re using. But it does mean there’s a lot of confusion about how to configure certain aspects of the User Interface. Should I be using KDE tools, Gnome tools, or some RedHat special thing which tries to configure both?

What seems to be lacking, unless I’ve missed it somewhere, is any way to add and remove items from the main system menu. This is a major failing, but Michael Knepher tells you how to do it with a text editor. A useful article, which shows there’s quite a sophisticated system underneath now. And what’s wrong with emacs? We wouldn’t want to let ordinary users customize their own desktops, would we…?

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser