If you didn't live through Operating Systems of the 70s, 80s, and 90s (or caught the lecture at university), then you might want to read this ArsTechnica article on the history of the more mainstream filesystems so you can fake your way authoritatively when the topic comes up.

(It doesn't cover less mainstream or specific-purpose filesystems or cover more interesting work done on some of the filesystems it does mention - particularly on the BSD side of things.  You'll have to do your own research on those.  Try FreeBSD 7.0, maybe?)

My laptop is in for repairs.  I hope (since I suspect it may never be coming back).  Which has left me without a machine running a Unix-like operating system at home for the first time in over ten years.  So, for the first time in about the same amount of time, I'm using Windows with intent as something other than a games boot loader.

Okay, not intent.  I got tired of trying to make it remotely similar enough to my usual environment to do my productive work.  But web browsing, OpenOffice.org, and SSH.

I noticed earlier that there was this new-fangled Internet Explorer 7 in the updates.  I was somewhat intrigued, since generally you don't get new versions of software through updates - at least if you're following best practice.

Like others have, I generally recoiled at how poorly they made a tabbed interface (and besides the UI, Firefox at least learnt to tell me what URL I'm trying to go to in my address bar), and how unintuitive some of their new UI stuff is (for example, you can easily end up with a reload button instead of a "go" button).

And then, today, I wanted to check a page in IE.  And I couldn't go there.  Or to Google.  Or to any number of other places I decided to check.  It just didn't react to putting addresses in the address bar - no error messages, no change to the page, no dialogs hidden behind any windows, and me with no idea where to look for logs.  And no difference after restarting IE.

Except, for some reason, I could load up freshmeat.net - once, and never again.  No, I couldn't go to Microsoft sites either.  Except, say, if the site loaded up as my home page, and I clicked on links.  But type the address of the exact same page in manually in the address bar in another tab, and nothing...

Oh, and "Open" on the "File" menu works.

Oh, and did you know that if you type "asdf" into the address bar of IE, and press "control-enter", it'll change it to "http://www.asdf.com/"?  I despair at what lesson that teaches...

And, according to a knowledge base article, they've had this sort of problem before.  Great to see that they've improved things to provide more feedback when things go wrong...