As a Ferrari fan I can admit to feeling a bit ashamed at today’s result at the German Grand Prix.  My team was heading for a one-two finish and for a while I was extremely pleased.  Then came the blatant breaking of the rules which then left a sour taste in almost everyone’s mouth. All except a certain Spanish Ferrari driver.

On reflection one can understand the reasons behind their actions. As a team Ferrari want to win both the Drivers and the Constructors Championships.  We are currently over half way through the season and thy are languishing in third position in the constructors and fourth (at best) in the drivers championship.  They need to maximise results and they need to do that as soon as possible.  The ideal result today was for Fernando to win ahead of Felipe as Fernando had more points .  As we all know, team orders that affect the outcome of race results are banned in F1 and have been since the start of the 2003 season, thanks to Ferrari’s unpopular team orders in Austria 2002.

One can also understand the uproar caused in the media.  As people who are passionate about our sport we like to believe that when drivers are on the track they are battling as hard as possible to pass the guy in front.  If they don’t get past first time they try again.  It is not considered sporting to have ‘orders from above’ to move over and simply allow your team mate past.   If it is a situation where your team mate can win the championship and you can’t, then the decision must always be yours to move over and let him past, as Massa did with Kimi Räikkönen in Brazil 2007.

Almost every team will have discussed this issue and will have coded words for such orders.  How many times have these codes been issued in the past and we as a viewing public been none the wiser to their effects? The facts are that Rob Smedley wasn’t entirely happy with what he was expected to do and so chose to make his dissatisfaction known with his instructions to Felipe. If he’d have said “Felipe baby, Fernando is faster than us and we can’t do much about it” in his usual calm manner, and then Felipe moved over, there wouldn’t have been this uproar.

In my opinion, the Stewards  at Hockenheim have done the right thing by punishing Ferrari and it is now up to the World Motorsport Council to review the rules.

Mind you, as once driver has remarked:

“$100,000? is that all? Thats nothing if they win the Championship. It will make it all worthwhile.”

The new crop of web browsers such as Safari, Chrome(ium) and Firefox 4 allow the user to resize textareas by using a handle at the bottom right.   It is possible to restrict the size that the user can resize the textarea to using css min/max width/heights.

textarea {
   width: 250px;
   height: 100px;
   min-width: 150px;
   min-height: 50px;
   max-width: 500px;
   max-height: 500px;
}

When I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) I also upgraded my PHP version to 5.3. Apart from a few warnings with some deprecated functions (the main cuplrit being the ereg functions) all went well.

When using the Zend Tool command from the command line I started getting warnings about xdebug:

andrew@andrew: ~$ zf show version
PHP Warning:  Xdebug MUST be loaded as a Zend extension in Unknown on line 0
Zend Framework Version: 1.10.2

To fix this you need to change your extension loader in /etc/php5/cond.d/xdebug.ini to use zend_extension_ts:

;extension=xdebug.so
;zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so
 
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp

If you have a lot of files open in Netbeans and they don’t all fit in the tab area you can scroll them left/right when using your mouse wheel when you move the mouse over the tabs.