I've obviously been reading and writing far too much code recently. I find myself mentally adding markup to my normal conversations. When I say something like "Despite having a sore back, I managed to vacuum the flat.", I mentally wrap an href round "Despite having a sore back", linking it to a previous conversation (usually with someone completely different) so that the interested listener can open that conversation in a background tab and check it out later...

As long as I don't start carrying around a small yellow sign saying 'Digg this', I'll probably recover...

Because I've been doing lots of development work lately, I've had to spend more time than I'd like in various techie forums trying to find answers to various programming issues. I tend not to hang around forums when I don't need to because I largely find them depressingly full of people like me.

Even though these are technical forums for technically-minded people, there are still too many demonstrations of fuzzy thinking, lots of "Does anyone know how to package xulrunner for OS X", "Has anyone managed to install VLC on an iPhone", "Can anyone make the whatsit do the thing?". Keeping with the free and open sharing of ideas and nurturing of curiosity that The Internet is supposed to encourage, I've created two handy pages with the answer to all these questions.

For all those times someone asks a question like "Does anyone know how to...":

• The Answer


• The Other Answer

To be used in the same frame of mind as this handy tool.

No real surprises there, I just needed to point out that it's now five past one and I started installing IE7 just under 3 hours ago. Three. Hours.

I needed to test some layouts on IE7, I don't trust IE7 enough to not mess up my parallels install so I decided to put it on my development machine in the office in edinburgh via VNC, ran windows update... wait... security updates... wait... restart... windows update... IE7. Yes, install, please. Installing... wait... restart... run IE7.

"Do you want to run the Phishing filter?"
No.

"Welcome to IE7. Do you want to run the Phishing Filter?"
No.

"Ah, you've opened a new tab. Do you want to run the Phishing Filter?"
No.

I go to the site I wanted to test. True enough, it's gebroken.

Click "Developer toolbar".

Crash... wait... restart... run IE7.

Re-download the Developer Toolbar.

"Do you want to run this?"
Yes.

"Finished downloading. Do you want to run this?"
Yes.

"This program may be unsafe. Do you want run this?"
Dear god, if this computer wasn't in a different hemisphere, I'd lamp it one right now.

Run the installer, fail.

Shut down IE7, run the installer again.

Run IE7.

Go to the site again.

"This site may be unsafe, do you want to run the Phishing Filter?"

Log out of VNC. Step away from the computer, spend 10 minutes ranting to nobody in particular. Feel somewhat better.