Everything, Everything

I don't know why, but I had the music to Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds stuck in my head earlier tonight. It'll be stuck in yours too now. Hehe.

Yes, there you go, I said it. I've heard people at work talking about the virtues of Firefox's tabs compared to IE6, I've had people debate on forums over which extension for Firefox is best for adding addtional functionality to its tabs. Well I've been using IE7 for ages now, it has tabs, and for some reason they just don't do it for me.

For tabs (this is based on IE7, although a default Firefox install appears to be similar):
Less clutter on the taskbar
Quicker to flick between tabs
Opening something in a new tab will not automatically bring it into focus like Open in New Window will

Against tabs:
You can already group similar taskbar buttons to avoid some of the clutter
The title of the current tab is shown, if you have multiple browser windows and multiple tabs it can get confusing to work out where you want to look, and can take time to flick between browser windows
Sometimes I'll close the browser when I really should have closed a tab, so I'll end up losing all the pages I was going to look at next, and having to use the history to bring them all back up
Reduces the amount of space on the screen

So there you have it. I think the main reason people talk about tabs is because it's one of the few obvious differences between Mozilla/Opera and IE. Once IE7 brings them in (bear in mind that the MSN Search Toolbar lets you do them now, and NetCaptor was first to bring in tabs - and is based on your installed IE engine), and its really good printing support, the only thing Mozilla fans can push is the extra functionality that you can have with tabs (or whatever else you want to fiddle with) thanks to 3rd party extensions - complete with their potential security risks and occasionally "best endeavours" support. I'd take better printing over better tabs anyday!

It's only been 3 weeks, but already they've gone from BitTorrent 4.1.7 to 4.2.0. I guess I'll have to add my modifications to the 4.2.0 source, might do that on Saturday. I worked out there's an incredibly easy way to add one bit of extra functionality, and the other bit is really easy to add back in as I just copy and paste a chunk of code. All the other bits should be pretty easy to add, assuming the 4.2.0 code is pretty similar to 4.1.7. I was thinking I might make my client available, but most people seem to be using Azureus, which seems to have loads of additional features already. I quite like playing with Python though.

I want one of these.

Well who wouldn't want that much storage space and power?

The president of Napster spoke to the BBC, and said Apple boss Steve Jobs has "tricked people into buying a hardware trap" as iTunes songs can only be taken away and played on an iPod.

Not entirely correct, as you can burn them to CD (although I think there are restrictions on what you can and can't, and how many times). And why does it matter that you can only play them on an iPod and not on your flash based MP3 player too? Why would you want to carry or buy a second device to carry around, if you already have your iPod? He's right that it's more restrictive than some of the other DRM offerings, but it's not as bad as he makes out. I still prefer to buy CDs, they're better quality audio and you can play them in anything with a CD player/drive.

What is the world coming to? First there was the girl that tried to stop a boy being bullied and ended up with her face being slashed repeatedly, and now another girl has been stabbed at school. Teachers can't punish them, parents can't seem to teach them discipline, so we let them run wild instead. Personally, I think we should stop treating kids as minors. If they break the law they should be treated like an adult. If they're young it'll probably be their first offence and they can be given lenient sentences if necessary. We can't just give them slaps on the wrist for GBH.

According to a recent article by the BBC, once we close down our nuclear plants we won't be able to provide enough energy for all our needs.

I'm not surprised by that. Three years ago, I wrote a website as part of a web design project that looked into energy sources, and I came up with the conclusion (these dynamic pages were used to create static html pages, so the links don't work) that:

Nuclear is a very effective short-medium term solution until we have enough capacity from solar power or other renewable sources. Solar power can provide 10,000 times more energy than the world currently uses, but only once we install them. House values go up by approx 10% when the house has decent solar panels, and the money saved on bills over a 10 year period is huge. While government grants can help subsidise the cost (currently a 50% grant), people will not switch to it quickly enough, and (aside from the slight increase in non-renewable sources) the only action the government is currently taking is closing nuclear plants which will result in excessive pollution in the short term, resulting in the UK failing to meet the Kyoto targets. As we cannot purely use solar power in the short term, we should continue to use nuclear power, reduce our dependency on gas and coal, introduce greater subsidies for solar power, and continue the work on building wind farms.

Aaah, Basement Jaxx, your music perks me up.

I don't need no TV
I don't need no news
All I need is a bumpin beat to bump away my blues

If you type "Failure" (without the quotes) into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" it'll currently take you to here. I'm sure they'll fix it quickly.

What a strange film, but thoroughly entertaining.

She really should watch watch she says, although I guess the kids shouldn't understand why us adults find it so funny.

"I'm going to do a lot of things that feel more personal with the kids. I'll keep them updated with what's going on in my life, touring, music, movies and filming. I might even do something with my dog. You can do anything you want now with the internet"

Er, yes Ms Duff, you can; that doesn't mean you should! Stick to looking cute in Lizze McGuire or (some of) your movies, and concentrate on looking sexy in your music videos.

There seems to be a lot of emails going around (I'm getting about 2 a day) pushing this drug as a way to attack obesity. I'm not a violent man, but sometimes I wish I could stab the people that are behind all this spam. Or force them to use their own product until they die. Thankfully I have a decent spam filter.

I emailed the BitTorrent bugs mailing list about this problem, which has been in several beta versions of the official BitTorrent client, ages ago (August 26th), but it never even appeared on the FAQ as a known error. But now it's suddenly appeared as a change in the new release (4.1.7)!

Right at the top of that page is:
2005-11-01: 4.1.7 released on all platforms
Changes in this release:
Maximum upload rate slider works again

I feel quite good now :)

Guess who just ordered eight hard disks. I have Chris trying to sort me out with a pair of Xeon processors and a motherboard too. Can't wait to build this server, should be fun.

So childish, but funny.