Diamonds are a girl's best friend.

• UK Number 10 petition for marriage equality. Please sign and forward.

• The revenge of Cat Le-Huy.

• Not that this is me or anything.

• Searching with Bing will actually cost you money.

• NotN: Turnbull still stuck with Liberal leadership; "Going Rogue" sells 500,000 copies, some read; Jordan eats kangaroo's anus; Boris Johnson to become Sheriff of London.

This week I got a NEW CAMERA, had lunch with nyecamden (and got a video of the Russell Square fountain for Wikipedia — a picture of a fountain is nothing to watching it actually burbling away) and was very tired. And played with Freda a lot and got stuff done at work.

After spending some time earlier in the week hand-reconciling three VirtualHost httpd.conf files that were different not only to the checked-in version but to each other (for our biggest-earning site, so rather important to get right), I asked on Twitter/Facebook about how to do macro expansion in Apache httpd.conf. The answer is, of course, mod_macro. The catch is that there are no binaries readily available for anything but Leengux, so they have to be hand-compiled for Solaris. This is fine when your Apache was compiled with gcc, less so when your live servers (12 CPU/96 thread T5140 Niagara beast machines) are running Web Stack, a Solaris-optimised AMP compiled with Sun CC. The answer is to get out there and shave that yak: download a 493MB .tar.bz2 of the entirety of Sun Studio 12.1 (which I wasn't aware is now freeware), spend ten minutes uncompressing it to 530MB (why isn't pbzip2 used by everyone?), spend twenty installing it then compile the single 30KB mod_macro.c file. And it Just Works. *exhale*

(I thought gcc-compiled .so were meant to be able to link to Sun CC programs, at least in C if not C++. httpd appears to feel otherwise, however.)

TRANSLATION FOR NON-GEEKS: I have done (obscure technical trick) that required (going ridiculously out of my way to do what should have been a simple thing) but which worked brilliantly, and will save me having to do (ridiculous effort from a few days ago) and will save us (a twisty maze of configuration files, all different when they should all be the same). Computer roadieing, man. Everything is gaffer tape.

Today we are going shopping, then I am rebuilding the front room and bleaching my hair and going to Vagabonds with the NEW CAMERA and capturing your soul. Just as soon as I have yet more caffeine.