After the recent change in legislation, I thought I’d compile a quick primer on driving in France aimed mainly at the uninitiated British.

First of all, the French drive on the other side of the road. You will discover this when you get off the Ferry/tunnel and the French start blaring their horns and shouting abuse at you. Driving on the right will alleviate you of this problem. A good mantra to remember is ‘bum to the kerb’ ie: Keep your right cheek closest to the kerb all the time and you should be safe.

Junctions & Roundabouts When you pull up at a junction, think. That’s right, engage human-brain Mk1. You’ve got to do it all the other way so if you’re turning left, you need to look for traffic from the left first and head for the offside kerb. Turning right, you stay with the kerb all the way round. Get this wrong and at best you will look foolish, at worst you will cause an accident.

You have to do roundabouts the other way too! Just do it all the other way, in the UK, you would go clockwise, here in France you’re going to do it all anti-clockwise. Look left and give way to traffic on the island. But there’s more (you’re going to love this), they also have a system known as ‘priorite-a-driot’ which means ‘priority-right’. This means that in certain marked locations, those joining the junction or roundabout have priority over those emerging from the right or on the roundabout. Great eh? The Priorite a Droit sign (shown right) applies to traffic interaction at the next junction. In many towns, priorite a droit applies. This is a measure to calm traffic without using speed bumps as you have to always expect traffic to be emerging from the right and give way. It also keeps French body-shops in business.

Motorways (Autoroutes) These are quite often, but not always toll roads. Tolls can seem quite high but you do get to drive on a generally clear road with an exceptional standard of construction. Payment can usually be made at the toll booths (always aim for a manned booth) using Mastercard or Visa cards or cash. They say, Dollars, Euros or Swiss Francs can be used but I’d strongly recommend against trying anything but Euros. I’ve heard anecdotally that some rural, unmanned toll exit booths do not accept cash but I have never been able to verify this.

The Autoroute service has it’s own website [In English!] which allows you to plan your routes, calculate toll prices, see traffic conditions and generally learn about the Autoroute system.

When driving on the autoroutes, stay in the right lane. If you intend to overtake, indicate left, maintain your left indicator as you pass and then move back in. It is illegal to cruise in the overtaking lane in France. If a French motorcyclist then passes you waggling their foot, do not be alarmed; they are thanking you for pulling in. If, instead, they make an obscene gesture or shake their fist, they are upset with your driving. Try to drive more French.

All speed limit signs in France are denoted in KM/h

Autoroute Speed Limits

• Under normal conditions - 130 km/h (80 mph)
• In rain or wet road conditions - 110 km/h (70 mph)
• In heavy fog, snow or icy conditions - 50 km/h (30 mph)

Normal Road Speed Limits

• Dual Carriageway - 110km/h (70mph)
• Dual Carriageway, Wet conditions or rain - 100km/h (60mph)
• Open Road - 90km/h - (55mph)
• Open Road, Wet conditions or rain - 80km/h (50mph)
• Towns 50km/h (30mph)

Speeds in general

Stick to the speed limit, the French tear around like lunatics but you should let them, they are only trying to prove their prowess before you. Aside from that, the Gendarmes are rather inclined to pull speeding Brits at the roadside and alleviate them of some of their holiday currency. You can be fined on the spot, in cash. If you do not have the cash, you can be driven to a cash point or your car impounded. Always get a receipt

If a Frenchman flashes his headlights at you when passing the other way, don’t worry, your silly-looking roof-box isn’t coming away from the car, rather they are warning you of a police speed trap ahead. Giving warnings like this is, of course, illegal but the French must be overly partial to watching ‘Smokey and the Bandit’.

There are usually no speed limit signs for towns. You enter the 50km/h limit as you pass the town boundary sign (name of town on signpost) and remain in the town speed limit until you pass the same type of sign with a line through it.

Speed camera/trap detectors are illegal in France. Get caught with one by the Gendarmes and you will be fined, even if it’s switched off in your boot. The device will be confiscated. Even worse, if the device is integrated with your car, they will confiscate the entire vehicle! Basically, leave your radar/laser detector in the UK. GPS-only camera alert devices are legal as far as I know.

If you exceed the limit by 30km/h, you will be fined and banned from driving in France (this may be reflected on your UK licence under new agreements so watch out!) If you exceed the limit by 40km/h, you could be facing imprisonment. Once again, don’t speed.

Traffic lights They’re a lot like the ones we have in the UK, red at the top, amber in the middle and green at the bottom (Stop, Caution, Go). They also sometimes have a small displaced copy of the main lamp head placed part way down the pole facing the first car in the queue, a frankly brilliant idea which the British should have thought of and implemented by now! There is, of course, a gotcha: While the change-to-red pattern is the same as you’d expect, the change to green pattern doesn’t exist! It just goes Red>Green. This is a specially designed system to make British people look stupid. After the first couple of irate Frenchmen blow their horns at you for sitting on a green, you will learn.

Some traffic lights switch to flashing amber overnight. This basically means ‘take your life in your hands’ and cross with caution. As you pull out, there will likely be a Frenchman crossing the other way at warp-speed so watch out!

Vehicle Lights Never drive on sidelights only. Sidelights are considered more as parking lights and you should use dipped beam in low visibility, heavey rain or at night. You must adapt you headlights so the beam pattern does not blind oncoming drivers to your left. To do this on older cars, you need beam blockers which are usually adhesive panels that you stick to the front of the lens. These are designed for specific vehicles so you need to go to your local car accessories dealer and buy the right ones! If you have a slightly more modern car with projector headlamps, you can sometimes adjust the lamps temporarily to change the beam pattern. This should be discussed in your owner’s handbook. Some variants of new HID lamps are the worst offenders for blinding the oncoming traffic and they can also be a right mare to adjust. Possibly refer to a specialist before you go to set your HIDs as while you may get away with blinding a regular French motorist, you wont be so lucky if you blind the Gendarmes. The will issue you with an on-the-spot fine. Remember, unlike the UK, the French Police and Gendarmes still have a big presence out on the roads.

Child Seats No child under the age of 10 years is allowed to travel in the front seat of the vehicle. Children traveling in the rear must be properly restraining which in most cases means a proper child seat correctly attached to the vehicle. Children above 15kg in weight can use a regular seatbelt in the back when combined with a booster seat.

Equipment for Driving in France

Mandatory:

• GB Sticker affixed to rear left of car or GB EU plates front and rear
• Hazard Warning Triangle. Carry at least one to be placed way behind the car if you break down
• High Visibility Vest for every occupant of the vehicle to be worn in the event of breakdown, especially on the autoroutes

Recommended:

• Fire extinguisher
• First Aid Kit
• Complete spare set of bulbs for the car
• Spare wheel, jack and tools

Driving in Paris: Good luck! (You’ll need it)

Useful links:

Autoroute service

The AA Driving in France [PDF]

All the above constitutes nothing more than anecdotal advice and should not be relied to heavily upon. It is the responsibility of *you*, the driver to *know* what you are doing before you go

Tags: autoroutes, driving in france, driving on the right, equipment, french driving, safety, tolls

Here we have a video of Volkswagen’s conceptual ‘Park Assist Vision’ which not only parks your car for you but also uparks it meaning you can be incredibly lazy and put the vallet guy out of business at the same time

It’s not immediately clear from the video whether this also provides parallel parking assistance.

Tags: automatic parking, park assist, volkswagen, vw park assist vision

I ran across Five3D earlier, a work of Mathieu Badimon demonstrating browser-based 3D effects written in Actionscript 3.0.

From the moment you hit the site and your mouse cursor starts ‘painting’ the browser window, you know you’re on to a winner. Then there’s the demos which briefly show an ‘earth cube’ which you can size and rotate, ‘elements menu’ which is just a cool menu, ‘famous quote’ which renders a quote in 3D text with drop-shadow, ‘fake equaliser’ which renders a 3D rotating ‘EQ’ and finally ‘Video Player’ [pictured] which draws a manipulable 3D sqauare and renders a real-time Youtube-style video on it’s surface.

The video rendering is absolutely seemless on a recent C2D based system and I presume this doesn’t use hardware acceleration as, as far as I know, Flash has no access to hardware 3D acceleration (or am I wrong on this?)

The real bonus is that the whole framework for implementing these demos is available from Mathieu with a full-permissive open-source licence.

The downside is, I can’t think off hand of a use for this sort of thing on a website at the moment. Of course, that’s just my own lack of imagination, I’m sure we will see some really creative uses of this technology in due course.

Note: You will probably need the latest version of flash to view the site.

Tags: 3d, actionscript, five3d, flash, hardware acceleration, macromedia, mathieu badimon, video

Some MEPs have tabled amendments to the EU Telecom Package (draft EU communications framework bill) which would see the previously voted-against ‘3 strike rule’ brought into law.

The ‘3 strike rule’ would see corporations (in some cases non-EU corporations) being given power of judge and jury over private EU citizens under the auspices of the corporations defending their ‘intellectual property’ rights. The EU Commission would effectively be able to mandate the installation of spyware at the ISP level so that 3rd party corporations would be able to directly spy on EU citizens data usage.

The legislation could also see EU ISPs having to bar access to Peer to Peer (P2P) networks such as bittorrent in an arbitrary manner. I’m sure that will go down really well with Linux users who can’t get their distros and World of Warcraft players who can no-longer download their game updates. The problem is that while the likes of the music industry may not like peer-to-peer software, it has so many legitimate uses that it’s as hard to justify blocking as HTTP Port 80.

I’ve written to my MEP opposing this stupidity. If you are an EU citizen, you can write to yours too. Click here for a searchable map to find your MEP. MEPs will vote on the amendments next Monday (7th July) so get cracking and get your MEP informed today!

I also suggets visiting EDRI and La Quadrature Du Net for further information. You can also read La Quadrature Du Net’s arguments against the amendments.

Tags: 3 strike rule, censorship, corporations, eu, european comission, european parliament, music industry, p2p, stupidity, surveillance

In the last couple of days, I’ve been looking over a new discovery of mine: Open Flash Charts.

Open Flash Charts is a project which seems to have been going since last year producing, as the name implies, [free] open-source flash chart software. OFC allows you to visualise your data on your website or in your web-oriented applications with fancy mouse-over effects, interactivity and animations. It caters for many types of chart including variations of bar, line and pie charts.

As the project creater like to point out, closed-source software for the same purpose typically costs thousands so the ‘free’ part is a real bonus here.

Below I’ve visualised the Halifax and Nationwide house price data to date as an example:

This really is the simplest stock setup of a chart, apart from having two lines, it is essentially running the out-of-the-box settings. The chart is called from a ‘flat’ data file in this case but the php-driven design allows for data to be pulled directly from a database to generate a chart which updates in real time.

Tags: bar charts, data, line charts, open flash charts, php charts, pie charts, visualisation

Like many people, I like to go out for ‘one or two’ beers at the weekend. Only this is Britain, 2008, so ‘one or two’ beers quickly becomes ‘a few more’ beers and quite often turns into ’so many beers you can’t remember how many’ by the end of the night.

…how did I get home again?

Yes, Britain definitely seems to have a drinking problem, we do it too often, too much and often inappropriately. I’m thankful that I seem to retain the self restraint that keeps me away from the vomiting and violence seen on the old-media news but I’m still none too proud of being part of a such a stigmatised culture.

But I digress, what I really meant to say is that I’ve come to have the opinion that drinking (as the British drink) seriously impacts on productivity. Just using my blog writing as a non empirical metric, I can see that I become almost incable of getting a decent article off no just the following day but possibly for several days after ‘binge drinking’*.

I’m pretty much a wimp now when it comes to dealing with the morning-after hangovers so I do tend to stop drinking long before my friends and associates who seem to drink like there will be no tomorrow, consuming herculean ammounts, mixing their drinks and generally doing all the things your mother told you not to. With my own follow-on alcohol come-down / general malaise post binge, I can’t fathom how some of my own friends can complete a days work the following day. I’d cringe at the thought of my employees turning up to work in such a mental state, imagining all the business disasters that could befall a company staffed by people who are not firing on all cylinders.

So how would I stop this culture? Well, step one would be to avoid the methods the government employs as they clearly don’t work. The extra taxation only serves to make the population resentful. You could tax the British more and more and they’d probably just spend a larger proportion of their income on booze. You also can’t get anywhere stigmatising the general culture as the people seem to have lost their self-esteem. Britain hardly appears ‘Great’ these days on the world stage, everything that made the nation proud seems to have been taken from us.

I think the solution is, in fact, lying with the self esteem issue. Britain needs to be doing something worthwhile. The ’sevice economy’ is clearly a bad idea, in fact it appears to be going down the pan as we speak. We need some serious industry; major stuff. Right now, for example, there is a manufacturer in Germany about to start producing cars that will travel 150 miles on a gallon of fuel. We should be making a car that will go 200 miles on a gallon and cornering the world market!

I’d hope that seeing such results from British ingenuity and labor would get the British into an upward spiral of drinking less and doing more. In effect, just giving the British something really worthwile to live for. I can but dream.

*In the UK, ‘Binge Drinking’ is generally defined as drinking half of the weekly recommended allowance in one sitting ie: 11+ units for men or 9+ units for women on one occasion

Tags: alcohol, binge drinking, britain, business, culture, drinking, great britain, industry, productivity, service economy, uk