So YouTube now supports video downloading, but only if you're browsing in the United States. A bit of a bugger, since I want to get some of the Google I/O 2009 talks onto my iPhone.

But all is not lost. I ran into this problem last year when NBC wouldn't send the latest episodes of Heroes over to Blighty. Here, in brief is the recipe:

You will need

1 cup SSH.
1 US-based server/mixing bowl.
1 Firefox.

Instructions

$ ssh -D 9999 me@myusaserver

Firefox Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings
* Manual proxy configuration
* SOCKS Host: localhost Port: 9999

Now the world will think you're browsing from the US.

Other recipes you may like to try

Getting through to iPlayer from outside the UK, using a UK-based server.

I've been trying to use Flash components in a GWT project running under Ubuntu, and I've been having a devil of a time getting flash to work. Flash works fine in my Firefox install, but not in the GWT hosted-mode browser. I've just found a fix, so here it is for Google & the world to find:

The trick is simply to copy¹ the flash plugin that Firefox is (successfully) using to the right directory, so that GWT can find it.

  # Find the plugin
  $ locate libflashplayer.so
  /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

  # Find the Mozilla directory.
  $ find $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins -type d -name 'mozilla*'
  /home/kris/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.linux_1.6.4.v200904062334/gwt-linux-1.6.4/mozilla-1.7.12/

  # Copy the plugin to the mozilla-1.7.12/plugins directory.
  cp /usr/lib... /home/../mozilla-1.7.12/plugins/

Restart the GWT hosted mode task, and Bob should be your uncle.

¹ Or symlink, or a bit of mucking about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH would probably do it too, but I'm just going for a straight copy here.

Woman ‘bit off’ partner’s tongue

...however, this quote from the victim, revealing his culinary sophistication is:

“I can’t distinguish between certain foods, like the difference between cheese and toast, and just toast.”

As you may know, I hate ABBA. Well, hate’s a tad strong. Let’s say I’m sick to death of them. Nevertheless, here’s a Wednesday afternoon game: If ABBA songs were countries, which countries would they be? Results from the office so far, starting with the easy ones:

• Mamma Mia – Italy, obviously.
• Waterloo – England, again a given.
• Fernando – Spain.
• Knowing Me, Knowing You – East Germany, where everyone was spying on everyone else.
• Dancing Queen – Brazil, home of the carnival.
• Take A Chance On Me – Las Vegas, though that’s stretching the rules a bit.

Anymore for any more?

...that if I put a blog entry in here, it’ll bounce through to twitter, and then to facebook. Is that good? Of course it is, it’s tech.

“Customers who bought this also bought: Davina’s Superbody Workout”

...well, those customers are weirdos. Kindly keep them away from me.

Gordon has become my new role model of change-driven design. Or design-driven change. Or something. Here's his latest brilliant statement:

"If there is a change to be made in the system and the system has failed, we will change the system."

Let's just see that again in code:

if (
  calculateAllPossibleChanges( system ).getSize() > 0
  &&
  system.getErrors().getSize() > 0
) {
  change( system )
}

protected void change( MutableSystem system ) {
  // TODO
}

The Earl of Sandwich’s sandwiches were sandwiched between the Earls of Sandwich’s portraits.

Woo-hoo – my first app is now up on iTunes. The imaginatively-named “Gold Price” app lets you track the price of gold bullion live:

If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod touch you can download it now for free.

At least, that's the plan[1].

fn1. The queen of evil Evian made me post it.

I’ve just been taking a look at the list of Olympic events. Weird, weird, weird.

Softball, water polo and BMX biking are in there, but not rounders.

Judo, two flavours of gymnastics and Taekwondo make the list, but no Tai Chi.

Wrestling, boxing and fencing, but no fisticuffs.

And worst of all, running and jumping, but no climbing trees.
Or “putting on make-up while you’re there”[1].

I’m all for the Olympics, especially when someone else is paying for it, but they really ought to have consulted an expert (like me) when assembling the event list.

And I couldn’t find a single mention of Sir Daley Thompson anywhere…

¹ Thank you, Mr Izzard.

Everyone knows that Coca-cola got its name from the fact that it used to made with cocaine, right?

Well, it occurs to me that if history had gone a little differently and they’d made it with heroine instead, we’d all be drinking “Jack Daniels & Hero”...

Idea for a TV show: Britain’s Got Torrent! – In which ordinary people up & down the country download something more interesting than a variety show.

“The University of Nottingham is delighted to invite you and fellow alumni to an evening with Sir Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest all round cricketers in the history of the game.”

Oh, good-oh. Terrific. Tell you what – you let me know when there’s an evening with the inventor of the BBC Model B microcomputer, and I’ll buy some tickets.

There are eight people in our office, so yesterday I played this game: “If everyone in the office was one of the incarnations of The Doctor, which one would they be?”

Now you don’t know the people in my office, so there’s no point me telling you the results, except to say that if we want to complete the set, the next two people we hire have to be either Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton.

Supplemental bonus game you can play at home: Which assistant is my partner?