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David mentioned that my main feed (the one linked by the RSS 1.0 button in the sidebar) was only showing the main part of the entry, and not the continuation that you see if you click the “More…” link at the bottom of some entries. It really wasn’t supposed to be like that, and for ages, I’d been convinced that it showed everything but the comments. Anyway, I’ve put that right now, and the feed shows the entire post. Next time I’ll remember to actually subscribe to my feed myself so that I can see if it’s working…

This prompted me to fix another annoyance with the site. I’ve now allowed HTML and Textile in the comments, which I’m sure many people will heave a sigh of relief over. I was getting irritated myself by not being able to construct decent links in the comments. A side effect is that you can’t just leave a blank line to start a new paragraph. The easiest thing to do is to use the Textile markup of ‘p. ’ (without the quotes) before your new paragraph.

I did also try to see if I could get the search box in the sidebar to search comments as well as entries, but I couldn’t find a solution—does anyone know how to do this?

I’ve just come across some great resources for learning Perl. I’ve now worked through Learning Perl and I’m steeling myself to tackle Programming Perl, so I don’t think I need another beginners book. However, if you’re thinking about learning Perl, the full text of Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens is available online for free. It looks like a clear and helpful book that sets out all the basics.

I’m reluctant to perpetuate National stereotypes, but sometimes the empirical data goes works against me. I was watching Grand Designs the other day, and became fascinated by an older couple who were replacing their old self-built house (which was on the verge of falling down) with a Huf Haus.

The Huf Haus is an innovative design produced by architect Peter Huf in Germany. The post-and-beam house is completely pre-fabricated in an immense warehouse in Germany, then shipped and assembled on site like some vast Ikea cupboard from hell. The whole house is up and watertight within seven days, which seems an incredible feat until you see the German Huf team working.

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Mr. Bsag generally has a rather troubled and tempestuous relationship with computers—he doesn’t get on well with them, and they don’t like him much in return. However, he does like spotting guest appearances by Macintoshes on TV programmes and films (it’s amazing what several years of intensive brain-washing by a spouse can do). We were watching something on TV, and he thought he spotted one:

Him: “Look! It’s an iBook!”

Me: “It’s a white fabric place mat, you loon!”

The iMat™. It will be the next big thing, you mark my words.

Like many people, I’ve been deluged by virus-laden and bounced emails (with my address spoofed as the sender) as a result of the MyDoom virus. I’ve also had the usual quantity of spam, through which I have to dredge to find my genuine email. But among the usual crop of ‘hot chicks/viagra/Atkins diet’ tempting offers, one spam stood out—metallic yarn on special offer.

And my metallic yarn needs have gone unfulfilled for so long.

The snow has suddenly started coming down, and has covered everything within a couple of minutes. It is hitting our bedroom window horizontally and coming in, despite the fact that the window is closed. There’s something to be said for UPVC double glazing.

I woke up to a loud scrabbling sound this morning. “Gotcha!”, I thought. Reel back a couple of weeks, and Mr. Bsag is showing me a cherry tomato which has a ragged hole in it. He thought that it had burst, but it had a suspiciously nibbled quality to my eyes. Sure enough, when I got a torch out and looked down the little gaps by the side of the kitchen cabinets, I found the tell-tale signs of a mouse. I’m extremely sceptical about the concept of a singular mouse, so let’s say mice.

How could this have happened? We keep a clean house, and we don’t leave food lying around (the tomatoes were in a vegetable basket, and were the only items of food not in a box or container). Still, the biologist in me knows that the little critters can get in anywhere and take advantage of whatever they find, and when winter starts biting, even field mice sometimes take shelter in houses. I cleaned even more obsessively, and vowed to “Get those meeces!”

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I suppose that many of us have wondered at one time or another what our lives would have been like if we had made a different decision at some crucial point; where would that fork in the road have taken us? This tangle of alternative paths and branches amounts to a set of parallel histories in which our life—and perhaps the whole world—would have been different. This idea has been a very fruitful one for literature and films (Fatherland by Robert Harris and One by Richard Bach immediately spring to mind), but in reality, it is almost impossible to predict what would have happened if an alternative path had been taken. You can reconstruct events easily enough when you know the actual end-point, but in a complex, interconnected system, there are so many potential alternatives ahead that you can’t predict the outcome given the events with any kind of certainty.

My mind took this uncharacteristically philosophical turn because we finally got around to watching our recording of Britain’s Real Monarch, in which Tony Robinson reports findings by Michael K Jones suggesting that Edward IV was illegitimate, thus changing the whole line of succession to the British throne. The evidence seems quite strong: either Edward was conceived at a time when his father Richard, Duke of York was in France, or he had a gestation of 11 months. So either his mother was a horse, or his father had fantastically heroic sperm. Oh, and his mother Cecily Neville was prepared to testify that he was a bastard.

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I’ve been a long time user of Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire Lite, so I’m a little surprised that I haven’t cottoned on to Big Cat Scripts Plugin before now. I’ve been reading up a bit on Applescript, and saw Big Cat mentioned as an alternative way to launch scripts in a contextual menu. This seems to have a couple of advantages over Apple’s Script Menu which appear on the Menu Bar:

• The menu pops up under the pointer, so you don’t have move over to the other side of a screen and navigate a long list
• You can select files in the Finder or text for it to act on—this seems much more straightforward than the Script Menu method (though it’s perfectly possible that I have just misunderstood the latter)

All you need to do is to write Applescripts (or shell scripts) and put them into either the ‘Files’ folder or the ‘Text’ folder in “~/Library/Application Support/Big Cat Scripts/”. The mention of shell scripts intrigued me. It didn’t mention Perl specifically, but I guessed that it should work with any of the scripting languages natively supported by MacOS X, so I decided to give it a try. The other shell script examples seemed to pass the selected files/text as command line arguments, so I knocked up the following little script in Perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach (@ARGV) {
    exec `chmod +x $_`;
}

I was so chuffed when it worked. It takes each of the selected files and makes them executable. Yes, I know that I could do that in the terminal. Yes, I know that most of this Perl script isn’t Perl. Yes, I know it will fail horribly in all sorts of circumstances. But it’s all mine. It’s quick and dirty, and much easier than navigating to the paths of my Perl scripts and making them executable by hand. I’ve got big plans for a lot more of these little snippets, as well as brushing up the MakeExec example above to test whether it’s operating on a text file and other niceties. I know what I’m going to be doing for the rest of the weekend…

Update: I’m such an idiot that I forgot I had read all about Big Cat less than two months ago on Pete’s weblog—this is a sign of senility, for sure. So there should have been a [via Pete’s weblog] at the bottom of this entry. Though he is currently at a Typepad blog here. OK, I’ll shut up now.

The ingenuity of some people really astounds me. I’ve been watching “Crafty Tricks of War”, a programme on BBC2 in which Dick Strawbridge (irrepressible former Army Colonel, Scrapheap Challenge team leader and luxuriantly moustachioed man¹) and his friend Diarmud attempt to recreate some ingenious–and frequently downright whacky–engineering solutions developed during the war². One of the best ideas featured this week was the Skyhook.

The problem the Skyhook was designed to solve was this: it’s relatively easy to drop military personnel behind enemy lines by parachute from a plane, but how do you get them back out again without being shot down or detected? Large aircraft would be unable to land in most areas, but a landing by any size of aircraft would attract unwelcome attention. In the 1950s, American inventor Robert Edison Fulton Jr. developed and perfected a system originally used to pick up mail bags in the 1920s, and piloted in the Korean War to extract CIA agents from behind enemy lines.

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If anyone else has received an email with the subject line “The Garden of Eden” which appears to originate from my rousette.org.uk email address, I hope that I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t send it. I’ve received one email from a perplexed recipient already, but I’m reluctant to reply directly to the sender in case it’s an even more byzantine spamming attempt.

The email is most likely from a sender who is unknowingly infected with the Klez virus. This virus can spoof the “From:” address using an entry in the address book of an infected user. So if any of you have my email address in your address book (and you are devil-may-care enough to use MS LookOut Outlook), perhaps you might think about giving your hard drive a quick once-over with an anti-virus application.

This has been a Bsag Computer Safety Announcement. “Charlie says ‘Don’t play with viruses’.”¹

¹ Google has failed me. I made a valiant attempt to provide an explanatory link for those who weren’t watching UK television in the 1970s, and were therefore not exposed to Charlie the Cat’s unintelligible pronouncements about the utter foolishness of playing on railway lines. A Bsag Brownie Point goes to the first person providing a link…

We were watching a documentary we had recorded about religion and celibacy. Well, when I say ‘we were watching’, what I actually mean is that Mr. Bsag was watching while I surfed blogs and half listened but mostly didn’t watch.

Suddenly Mr. Bsag says, “Look at those big knobs”. Since the last image I glimpsed was of Hindu Sadhus doing very painful-looking things to their penises with long sticks, this immediately got my full attention. “Oh, you mean those kinds of knobs”. It was footage of a lab in the 1960s with some heavy duty recording equipment with—yes—big knobs. That’ll teach me not to try to parallel process.

I am something of a black sheep in my family in one respect; I am mostly bored by aeroplanes. If I’m not in one being taken somewhere nice, I don’t really want to know, but I come from a family of plane enthusiasts. My Dad is an aeronautical engineer, who has spent his working life around planes and was a plane nut even before he started work¹. My Mum loves planes too, and used to cry when she saw Concorde flying—not because she wished she was on it going somewhere exotic while sipping champagne, but because she thought it was so graceful. My brother is also an engineer—automotive rather than aeronautical—but he enjoys planes too. On top of that, I married a plane nut (special interest: float planes and US World War II aircraft). So I spent a good deal of my childhood getting bored at Farnborough Airshow, or freezing my nose off at Duxford, gloomily looking for birds through my binoculars on wind-swept, rain-lashed airfields.

I do, though, have a soft spot for one particular aircraft: the Supermarine Spitfire.

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We went to see Lost in Translation a couple of days ago. I really like Bill Murray (I can’t recall having seen him give a bad performance, even in a bad film), and Scarlett Johansson is also a fantastic, low key actress (she was superb in Ghost World—one of my favourite films of the past few years).

Sofia Coppola did a great job with this film; it’s very funny, tender, beautifully shot and rather moving in places. But I have seen some reviews which question her reliance on some rather dodgy stereotypes of Japan and Japanese people for the humour. It’s true that the film gets close to being insulting in places, but I think that her intention was to play up the characters’ feelings of culture shock and general bewilderment with what was going on, and in this sense, it worked very well. I’m not as well-travelled as some people, but I instantly recognised that feeling of being completely at sea in a different culture, and deeply lonely as a result.

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I was reading the latest MacUser magazine over breakfast this morning, and my attention was caught by a review for a new Pentax digital SLR. It’s a lovely looking camera, and was given a rave review in Digital Camera Magazine, but the thing that struck me first was the name. It’s called the *ist D. Yes, that is an asterisk.

I was so convinced that ‘*ist D’ was the catastrophic outcome of some freak spell checker accident that I checked Pentax’s own site, but it turned out to be the real name. What marketing department was responsible for that one, I wonder? I have this idea that they put the asterisk in as some kind of glob place holder for the first part of the name: “photoist, pictureist, digist, camist? Oh, forget it, let’s go to the pub. Leave it as *ist, no-one will care. *ist D. For digital. Sorted.”

What I’d like to know (and what isn’t even discussed in any of the reviews I’ve seen) is how the blithering heck you’re supposed to pronounce it.