I was wondering how long it would take before a portable version of Firefox 3 would show up on PortableApps. The answer is about 24 hours. If you’ve never heard of PortableApps, you should check out their site. They host a multitude of useful standalone applications that can be run off a USB drive or the like. It’s a handy way for web coders like me to have both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 installed on the same machine and not have them interfere with one another.
L337 h4×0rz have produced stand alone versions of Internet Explorer, also for web coders to test their sites on, but Microsoft doesn’t support them, instead recommending coders test their sites using Virtual PC disk images with different browsers installed on them. The disk images have an expiration date, so you have to re-download them every few months. Not exactly the most efficient solution.
I’m sure this has been around for a while, but I just discovered Wikiquote. And today they had a link on their main page to some of Douglas Adam’s more interesting quotes. Here one that stuck out, from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:
“What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?”
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.
I think this applies to user interface design as well. By the time you take pretty much any process and break down into actions and steps for an end user, you’ve learned a lot about a lot.
