* Posts by batfastad

894 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2009

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UK MPs tell Google: Get back here and bring your auditors with you

batfastad

Why?

Why do Google's accountants have anything to explain? A private company and as such it's in their interest to pay as little tax as is allowable by law. Just as it's in my interest to pay the legal minimum amount of tax. Just as it's in the interests of every single MP on the committee to pay just the legal minimum. I doubt any of them have voluntarily paid more tax than they have to.

Oh dear... a rant is brewing!

And calling it morally repugnant? Please. Since when is it the job of politicians to cast moral judgements? The fact that any politician can believe they are morally superior to anyone or anything is exasperating, by definition that is impossible.

It's morally repugnant to constantly whinge about companies that haven't apparently broken any rules, when they continually fail to change the rules that they themselves are responsible for. It should be MPs in front of a committee.

How smart does your desk phone need to be?

batfastad

Presence

The phone itself doesn't need to be anything special. Though on a previous project at a small biz I went ahead and got Snom 821s which are pretty great and the larger than normal display meant I could retrieve information from their intranet DB when a call came in and show it on the screen (company name, account status etc). They came in at about £160 which wasn't that much more than many dumber IP phones.

But really the intelligence should be on the server-side and it's how you integrate it into the company. For example at this same site I made a natty little addon for Zimbra (zimlet) to display the output from a web service which took XMPP presence, merged with SIP extension status from Asterisk, allowing users to get a realtime view of who was online or busy. Great for users to use their XMPP presence almost as internal tweets (eg: "boarding the plane, back online at 2:30") and you could filter and scroll through that info from within the e-mail client and on the intranet. Overkill for this particular client but very cool nonetheless.

That's the sort of thing that I'd like to see more of in larger companies but they tend to just buy expensive unified comms sytems from big vendors. You don't need clever phones but clever integration. That's where the big vendors make their money as integrating and aggregating data from open source communications software is still fairly painful.

Review: BlackBerry Q10

batfastad

Qwerty

Call me old fashioned but I actually hate typing on a full touchscreen and find myself doing less and less messaging on my phone these days, instead primarily using it just for web browsing. I doubt I can even hit half of the typing speed I used get when using my old SE P1i.

Even simple things like trying to move a text cursor around an input field I find is horrible with a touchscreen, especially since so many touchscreens go right to the edge of the handset. Then simple things like needing to use it in the rain with wet fingers (happens more often than not in this country), the touchscreen sensor goes mental. A scrollball or jog wheel for text navigation and confirm/cancel would be a big improvement. But anyone who decides to make a decent Android with a qwerty keyboard that's not a nightmare to root and install CM would probably get my money in the future.

Full touchscreens on devices as small as phones just don't make sense to me. Tablet, probably. But phone, no, not in my experience of 3 different Android devices. Just give me some effing buttons! Though maybe I'm just a grumpy old 20 something.

UK.gov's love affair with ID cards: Curse or farce?

batfastad

Re: "I wish passports didn't have your address printed on it"

Ha, turns out I'm a d***. There's no address on mine after all. It's an old visa stuck on the opposite page with my address. So ignore me, ignore everything I say!

batfastad

Ah mine does (I believe) but it's from 2005. Not one of these biomagic ones.

batfastad
FAIL

Problem

My problem with ID cards is that I already have 3 of them! Driving license, passport, NI number. I don't want to be forced to pay for a 4th! I could at least conceptually (but not ideologically) agree with an ID card if it was to merge all of those services into a single card. But creating an additional card and forcing people to pay over the odds for it is pure fockery.

Whilst I'm on the subject, I wish passports didn't have your address printed on it. Where you live is such a transient thing these days so if our elected idiots want accurate residence information they need to make it free and easy to update, not asking people to pay for a revised driving license/passport. As I, like most people, never bother to update it.

I would never trust civil servants or members of parliament with the money that is be required to actually implement something like a merged services ID card so it's in everyones' best interests that they don't bother and just stick to having G&Ts on the terraces at Parliament. MPs are safer and cheaper for the tax payer that way.

How about we take care of the essentials first? Like making sure we can guarantee that future generations will be healthy and well-educated. Or maybe I'm just living in the wrong country (I already know the answer to that)!

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted"

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

ISPs: Get ready to slurp streams from Murdoch's fat pipe

batfastad

Re: BE

The reason I don't want to go near PussNet is I had a business ADSL line back in 2004-2006 or something (before moving it to Be). When it was set up it cost £50 per month. 18 months or so in I decided to take a look at their product range and noticed that package was no longer offered but I was still on the same tariff even though the equivalent package was now £25 per month cheaper. However my parents' connection, they were on the basic package which was deprecated and their monthly charges were increased to the new cheapest package. So they're prepared to change your tariff up automatically without notice but not make it cheaper.

With Be on the other hand, I'm still paying the same rate I was 5 years ago, despite the equivalent package now being £4 per month more expensive.

Memo to PussNet... Manners cost nothing.

batfastad

BE

Been with Be for several years now and they have to be the most reliable provider I've ever used, of any utility/service. I had noticed a drop in sync speeds after the takeover by O2 though, down from 18Mb/2Mb to 12Mb/1Mb for no real reason so I ended up dropping to a lower package since I was no longer able to take advantage of the Annex M or whatever it was.

To be honest even when my exchange is FTTC enabled (Southbank estimated Nov 2013) I'm not really sure I would leave Be in its present form. Though it sounds like they're merging their network with Sky around about then so I might jump at that point.

The main thing that concerns me is I've not seen any mention of what will happen to the static IP service once the network merges with Sky. My guess is that Sky are hoping anyone who actually wants power-user features like that will actually jump, leaving only the people who used Be's basic broadband. I would have thought it would be inconvenient offering static IP services to a small percentage of their customers.

So it would probably be either Zen or AAISP if I move to FTTC. I'm afraid you'd have to pay me to go anywhere near BT or PussNet. The way their network basically closed during the early evening was a complete nightmare.

I'm not particularly bothered about the higher speeds of FTTC at the moment. I want no usage limits and a high level of service availability/no throttling. A consistent but lower base speed is more useful to me, especially when I tend to let P2P run overnight anyway.

Internet freedom groups urge W3C to keep DRM out of HTML

batfastad

Re: Not sure why EME is necessary

Easy. To try and stop legit subscribers being able to record the stream and then redistribute the content. Something Silverlight is annoyingly good at.

Yeah I disagree with that too, if you've paid for it then you should be permitted to record it if you want. IMO locked streaming services need to be significantly cheaper than non-streaming to justify the usage restrictions... but that's not going to happen.

batfastad

Re: Needs DRM

I agree with your disagreements. I'm slightly astonished though... would you rather continue with Silverlight/Flash/whatever for possibly several more years in the hope that content providers will all eventually decide to just offer their content for free capture by everyone?

My point was that the media cartels have their heads so far up their ar$eholes that I'll welcome any efforts made to scrap proprietary plugins ASAP!

The development of a formalised cross-plaltform DRM spec can surely only be a good thing. Whether content providers use it or not, I don't really care, I'd love them to. But at the moment without any sort of open spec then there's even less of a chance that Silverlight and Flash will die.

batfastad
Alert

Needs DRM

The open web needs DRM, as horrible as that sounds. Expecting the media cartels to give away their media in a freely redistributable format is just not going to happen.

I realise music's gone DRM-free in the most part but I just can't see it happening with video. I'd love it to, don't get me wrong. Ideally I'd like to be able to go to an online store and download a film, documentary, TV series or something, in a decent container/codec, to playback on any device I own, would be amazing. I'd probably pay almost the same amount for that as I would for physical media, maybe more! I just can't be bothered with physical media any more. I have so little spare time and so little storage space that I want to be able to watch my media anywhere, without internet connection, on any device, whenever I want.

But while streaming services are around and you have to be tied to the internet, I'd happily take an open and cross platform DRM system over Silverlight any day of the week.

There needs to be a DRM system that's authored and discussed sensibly in an open environment, by adults, with a technical background, ending up with me being able to play back media on any device/platform I choose. Otherwise you just know all the media cartels will continue to pump horrible proprietary browser plugins everywhere.

BitTorrent offers file sync tool for PCs and NAS

batfastad

Re: Decent

No that's correct. I was just rambling about a system I thought about a few years back. That's why I asked how much storage you actually get access to with this new BitTorrent Sync.

batfastad
Thumb Up

Decent

This is something I was thinking about a few years back, a distributed zero-knowledge P2P storage network. I was figuring that you would specify how much of other peoples encrypted data to be stored by the service on your machine and in return you get access to that same amount of storage in the mesh. Obviously the maths to my plan doesn't really work out though, as you really want to be storing mulltiple copies of all the data so you need many people to dedicate more space to the service than they're willing to use themselves.

How much space do you get access to with this?

The client for this looks ok as well, not too dumbed down and actually provides you with half-decent information on what's going on and how quickly it's happening. I quite liked the look of SpiderOak for a while but the client was a bit of a mess and I want to be able to specify the exact directories to sync rather than forced into using a pre-set directory.

Insight Enterprises EMEA president Fenton quits

batfastad
Coat

Fenton? Fenton!

Oh Jesus Christ.

Bad Microsoft patch trapped you in a boot loop? Here's your fix

batfastad

Re: A completely useless utility then.

Yeah but if you're implementing/buying a new system now or in the last 3 years, I doubt you'd choose 16bit/DOS.

Logitech launches MEGA-PRICEY 15-in-1 remote

batfastad

Wii

One project I've been meaning to look into for a while is rigging up a Wiimote to control the mouse pointer on a computer. For the past few years I've had various HTPC machines plugged into my TV and the remote has been the one thing I've wanted to get sorted. At the moment I have Keysonic RF keyboard/trackpad device which works ok. But really for moving a mouse pointer around and simulating left/right clicks, up/down/left/right enter and escape keyboard buttons the Wiimote could be perfect. I'm a bit fed up of battling with flaky joystick/HID support in programs or trying to use HID re-mapping software which stopped development in 2001.

So if someone can make or find me a wiimote-like device with proper drivers and utils for mapping and works cross platform then that would be super.

Firefox 'death sentence' threat to TeliaSonera over gov spy claims

batfastad
Black Helicopters

CAs

I've always been concerned about all CAs. Frankly the only person I really trust is myself but it's a shame browsers are so heavily prejudiced against self-signed certificates. And it's a total pain rolling out your own root CA in an environment with a mixture of devices and locations.

I've always thought that there must be a better way of verifying certificates by using DNS. Could you distribute a self-signed root cert or the serial in a DNS TXT record for that host? That way you could be confident that the cert belongs domain/subdomain owner (as confident as someone having access to an e-mail address at the domain which is what most CAs use for verification). This becomes even tighter with DNSSEC.

Anyway, I don't have the answers. But there has to be a better way than putting all your trust in a bunch of anonymous private CAs.

Smart metering will disrupt weather forecasts, warns Met Office

batfastad
Black Helicopters

Since when

Since when does any government do anything to save consumers money? There must be something else to this.

Brit cops blow £14m on software - then just flush it down the bogs

batfastad

Pay it back

So presumably the force will have to pay it back to the tax payer by having a budget reduction for the equivalent amount put in place? No? Then there's no incentive to stop public agencies doing this sort of thing time and time again.

SSH an ill-managed mess says SSH author Tatu Ylonen

batfastad

Re: So he wants a Perl script?

Yup apparently.

We store user keys in a repo with a start/expiry timestamp and class/range of machines to protect. Then each server to be protected by SSH makes a request to our repo over HTTPS which builds an authorized_keys file, downloaded and shoved into its ~/.ssh directory every 60 minutes. You have key expiry and server class/range management all from one central repo. A simple shell script requesting from a simple web service. This works ok for 200+ VMs and physical servers with 50 odd simultaneous SSH users.

Getting into large deployments though of thousands of users/servers then yeah, nightmare. I'd be looking to auth against PAM/LDAP.

P2P badboys The Pirate Bay kicked out of Greenland: Took under 48 hours

batfastad

Re: why is it illegal?

So does google when you punch in the hash of a torrent. So does ebay, encouraging people to buy/sell second hand media (technically piracy). So do manufacturers of MP3 players with software that allows you to copy CDs etc.

Inuit all along: Pirate Bay flees Sweden for Greenland

batfastad
Pirate

Industry

Every industry throughout history has its time and I'm afraid those peddling physical media at a nice fat mark-up have had it. People might download a few rubbish films or albums for free but I really believe only a tiny percentage of those would ever actually pay money for it in the first place. I'd bet that it's not illegal downloads that harms the media cartels' profits but another form of piracy... buying/selling second hand.

The internet is the world's biggest marketplace, allowing people to sell their old tat at a fair price truly determined by the market, with no money heading to the cartels. I'm a big buyer and seller of second media so hope the right to re-sale is never repealed. In fact I generally buy a boxset, watch it, sell it and buy another. All for the net spend of a single boxset. Thankfully DRM hasn't been installed in human brains yet but I suppose that's only a matter of time.

But I think it's bizarre why flea-bay etc (and manufacturers of hardware devices that strongly encourage the downloading of media) aren't persecuted in the same way and for exactly the same reasons as so many torrent websites. Well it's easier to go after the little guy rather than thousands of shareholders isn't it.

batfastad

Re: Every single time

Tor is such an important network for enabling free speech, I don't think it's a good idea to pump downloads of some generic American TV boxset through it. Please just rent yourself a VPN connection.

Mali to give away .ML domains for free

batfastad

Tokelau

Similar thing with .tk domains a few years back where you could register them for free. Just checked and you still can. They just ended up being filled with junk, spam, virus and phishing sites. I see no reason why .ml would be any different.

In general I would think that operators of restricted/unpopular ccTLDs must be wanting to grab some of the cash before the whole raft of .whatevers dilutes the market for country-related domains.

CloudSigma spins-up all-SSD storage cloud

batfastad
Headmaster

"The infrastructure provider is moving all of its customers off of disak and onto SSD hardware provided by data center startup SolidFire."

Presumably you mean disk? Or dhansak?

Sorry, I can't help it.

Wealthy London NIMBYs grit teeth, welcome 'ugly' fibre cabinets

batfastad
Headmaster

Re: Abusing the legislation

70MB/sec? Wowzers!

I have nothing better to do, sorry.

GCHQ attempts to downplay amazing plaintext password blunder

batfastad
Stop

The ones to worry about

The sites to worry about are those that enforce a low max length (<20 chars) and disallow special characters. If it's being hashed/crypted properly then the maximum length and any special characters are irrelevant.

Rather than that stupid cookie law crap how about a law requiring sites to display their password storage procedures with big fines for not telling the truth (proper big fines, not the stuff the ICO hand out at the moment for data breaches). It won't prevent idiots being in control of a computer and developing rubbish software though unfortunately.

Do we know what careers software this is and who the developers are?

batfastad
Facepalm

Amateurs?

Amateurs? Or an amazing honeypot?

It's probably not an in-house package but there must be some bods at GCHQ who do the security auditing of code, right?

Curiosity out of safe mode, doing science again

batfastad

Re: Wot no checksums?

I'd say the price of bandwidth is cheap compared to a potentially bricked Mars rover costing billions!

The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures

batfastad

Re: Next Prime Minister

Ray Barone? PM? Really?

Oi, Microsoft, where's my effin' toolbar gone?

batfastad
Stop

Tinkering

I hate all this endless UI tinkering, not just by M$ but everyone. I just find the ribbon so inconsistent, giving priority to functions I don't want to be a priority.

I still use Office XP (2002) at home and it loads as fast as notepad. That alongside LibreOffice is a winning combination though I tend to find I'm using Libre more and more these days as a result of me finally switching to Linux on my laptop full-time.

Is UK web speech regulated? No.10: Er. We’ll get back to you

batfastad
Stop

Laws

Would it not be better to actually enforce laws that already exist? I thought there were already laws that give the ability for victims to be able to claim compensation for libel and laws to cover unauthorised access to private information?

You couldn't make this stuff up... Though apparently civil servants are!

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ten ten-inch tablets

batfastad
Meh

10 inch Ainol Hero (snigger)

I've got a 7" Ainol Fire (snigger) and it's the perfect size. Fits in the inside pocket and bridges the gap between my Huawei G300 and 13" laptop. It's cheap and Chinese but actually solid build, decent battery life and reliability. Great screen res as well. It was this or a Nexus 7 but the Nexus 7 didn't have an SD slot.

There's also the 10" Ainol Hero (snigger) which you might want to check out.

Someone in Ainol's marketing department is either a genius or an idiot (slogan, top right)... http://www.ainol.com/

Amazon slashes DynamoDB prices

batfastad

Wins

I don't use this particular service but for me AWS generally wins. It's got rough edges but they've got everything covered. If I wanted to run a highly scalable web application then I could easily host parts of it with other providers but I would probably still end up using a particular AWS service somewhere in the pipeline. And if I need one AWS service then I may as well use six. It turns out their pricing is highly competitive and the service I've experienced is well within the tolerances I would expect for the money. You literally pay for what you get. For smaller stuff it's still probably cheaper to colo or host it yourself but for projects where you need the potential to scale every aspect, then AWS is great.

I don't really understand what VMWare are complaining about. What are VMWare's object storage rates or DNS failover charges? They're offering a product which allows a provider to theoretically offer similar services to AWS. Amazon pumps it right into the end developer's face with a standard API. Wish the official docs were better though.

UK injects £88m into Euro bid to build Hubble-thrashing 'scope

batfastad

Human advancement

Oh no... must not... can't... resist...

For the advancement of the human race as a whole, that's why. Worried about waste of money? £88m seems like good value for the potential benefits, compared to an Olympics at £15bn (lucky lucky London), HS2 for £30bn (to cut a journey time by 20 minutes), or data snooping for the rozzers at £3bn.

If a company makes people redundant it's often because the people are rubbish or the company as a whole is not making enough money. If a private company is not making enough money then its not the gov's fault or responsibility to subsidise the company (which it seems you are suggesting they do). The government should do its best to look after people who have no jobs, to keep the population healthy and well-educated (with projects like this). All of which it does to varying (although gradually decreasing) degrees.

I hate politicians and public sector inefficiency as much as anyone but £88m is nothing compared to the amounts that are normally thrown to the wind.

Virgin Mobile coughs to choking its customers

batfastad

Re: 2Mb/sec should be enough for a video stream

I agree on laptop resolutions, it's pathetic. Trying to find anything with a half-decent res that isn't the size of a bus is impossible. I'm trying to replace my Asus Z71VP 1680x1050 with something in the £400-£500 range, it turns out there's nothing with a better screen than my 7 year old beast. I don't think I'm being unreasonable in my expectations, I don't even care about clock speed, an i3 is fine for editing text files, just let me buy a laptop with a resolution that isn't rubbish!

Rant over.

Ubuntu 13.04 beta touts search privacy - before it hooks in eBay, IMDb etc

batfastad
Stop

Shouldn't be needed

These privacy options shouldn't even be needed, because such features shouldn't be present in an operating system.

BTW: Been running Mint+Cinnamon now for a few weeks and it's working great so far. Much better than the last time I tried a Linux as a desktop OS when Bluetooth wouldn't work, the laptop wouldn't come out of suspend mode and the screen would jump 50px to the right every so often (though that was 3 years ago). Cinnamon just feels right, very impressive. It's got some of the good bits of the new Gnome without many of the bonkers bits... i.e. actually lets you use that huge expanse of desktop for something.

The great thing these days though is most distros offer a live version so you really can check it out first. Who knows I might even bother to check out Ubuntu, but probably won't.

Browser makers open local storage hole in HTML5

batfastad

Just the beginning

Everyone already freaks out about cookies but this API opens a whole new kettle of fish. Well, a much larger old kettle of fish.

You ain't seen nothing yet! This will be the primary attack vector on peoples' machines, 10MB is more than enough data to do damage with.

Review: HP Spectre XT TouchSmart

batfastad
Stop

Screen res

I'd like to find a small/light notebook with a decent screen res for less than £600. 1366x768 is everywhere and it sucks. I had an Asus Z71VP beast 8 years ago with 1680x1050 resolution.

Surely a manufacturer somewhere can stick a screen with a similar resolution, i5 processor and 4GB of memory into some sort of ultrabook battery life/size/weight bracket. And sell it for £500-600.

I am the only person looking for an average/budget laptop spec but a higher-res screen?

LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks

batfastad

Re: I always assumed...

Woah! I'm not demanding that GIMP immediately adds CMYK support. When it arrives I will be overjoyed but I have been using GIMP for long enough to know that it's not as simple as me just developing a module like I have attempted for ProFTPd and Apache.

I was merely pointing out that GIMP has pretty much feature parity with Photoshop for me, as a medium to heavy user of both. If someone wants to setup a dev fund for CMYK support then I will happily contribute financially. Hell I thought about setting that very thing up a while ago or nominating for a GSoC project.

The GIMP developers continue to make steady progress in converting the underlying engine to GEGL, which I understand would make supporting additional colour spaces alot easier.

I'm not bitching that an open source project was missing a feature that I really want, I was trying to say that I'm so amazed by the fact that an open source project can get to 95% of feature parity of such an expensive commercial product.

batfastad
Facepalm

Re: Slowly closing the gap with Microsoft Office?

Oh go on then, I'll bite.

So everyone should just give up and buy MS or Adobe products? Please.

I use GIMP and Photoshop extensively, predominantly GIMP. And the only thing I really need Photoshop for is CMYK image support. If GIMP had that then my entire design workflow could be completed with GIMP/Inkscape.

When it comes to LibreOffice, I've seen more improvement in LO in the last 12 months than I had in OO over 3 years. It's almost equal to Office XP, which I still run because it's insanely fast on hardware from the last 5 years. The only things where LO wasn't so good: pivot charts were a bit crashy, boggy graph performance, lack of a presenter view for multi-monitor/projector setups in presentations. Other than that LibreOffice has had 95% of all users covered in the last few years.

I'll leave you to your ribbon interface and horrible bloatware but don't ruin it for people who actually use this software and appreciate the hard work of others. I'll be giving this new version a go tonight.

The problem is that people just think Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Why would anyone buying a computer from PC World be aware of any alternatives.

3 Brits banged up for £300k VAT scam

batfastad
Megaphone

Re: We're all in it together

Eh? They paid their legal tax entitlement.

I have not met anyone who has voluntarily paid any more tax than they are legally obliged to. Have you?

It's disgusting how politicians could dare to call that morally repugnant. Firstly politicians are not employed to judge the morals of the citizens that they serve. The mere fact that any of them think that they are just shows how out of touch they are. Secondly, I would like to see them tackle the problem instead of blaming and guilt-tripping others. Thirdly, how can any politician claim moral superiority over any other human being?

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

UK web snoop charter: Just how much extra info do spooks need?

batfastad
Stop

Money

Call me crazy but I'd prefer my money was spent on trying to ensuring that future generations are healthier and better educated. It's a disgrace to think that any human thinks spending money on data snooping is more important than that. Let alone a whole government full of them.

£3bn? Can I haz reefund?

"Politicians are not born, they are excreted"

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

batfastad

Translate?

Couldn't you just have a translation stage before a compiler which maps keywords in different languages to English equivalents to if, for, echo etc? Variables and class names you could just leave in the native script/language. So long as they're consistent throughout the program it shouldn't matter. Needs the programming language to allow multibyte characters in variable/class names, but that could be one solution if this is really causing problems.

VCDX: The elite certification just 105 people hold

batfastad
Headmaster

“Being a VCDX means I've not had means there has not been any downtime even during the recession,” Webster, who blogs here, told The Register.

Webster should have skipped the VCDX and gone for GCSEs instead.

Londoners can bonk their way to work without Oyster cards TODAY

batfastad
Go

Cost?

Are you charged the same as an Oyster journey?

Or is it equivalent to the (extortionate) cash fare?

I don't mind this. Pay bonking with cards is actually alright, so long as it's as fast as Oyster. But pay bonking on your phone, that's just daft. Having my bank account accessible through my phone as well as through the cards in my wallet? No thanks, that would double the potential theft/fraud targets.

The rival platforms of Visa PayWave and Mastercard PayPass is horribly predictable though. Come on, it's almost 2013, do companies still need to be bothering to build rival platforms? This technology has probably been around for at least 10 years, you'd think it would have outgrown the playground bullying.

Mozilla's Social add-on MERGES Facebook with Firefox

batfastad

Re: Why isn't this an add-on??

I agree! It seems that more and more features are being built in to FF rather than being addons. Weave/sync is another example. For me the Firefox UI was pretty much perfect by v3. Any UI tweaks since then have not been necessary IMO. The speed improvements since then are much appreciated though!

What history addon do you use? An addon project I've been wanting to start for years is to be able to restrict history searches by day/date range.

batfastad

API?

I assume this will be a Firefox only API?

I've not seen anything on the W3C site about it. So it's probably nothing to worry about and will be gone soon enough, probably by Firefox 36 due to be released early next year.

Another thing, Thunderbird's just updated to v17 and the Windows title bar has disappeared, giving me 20 extra pixels of screen back. Only to be replaced by massive tabs with rounded corners.

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