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I watched a fascinating documentary a couple of days ago about the so called ‘black propaganda’ units operating in the Second World War. These used dirty tactics to try to demoralise the German troops, including dropping pornographic leaflets and spreading rumours about soap being rendered from all the amputated limbs in Austrian hospitals. Some of the stories were very funny, while others were rather horrifying. One of the funniest moments was an interview with a woman (now in her late 60s) who—as an innocent young girl of 22—was asked to doctor a photograph of Hitler to show him holding his penis, underneath which would be the legend ‘What we have we hold’ in German. As she put it, she would “laugh like a drain” about it now, but at the time it was deeply shocking. Hilariously, the instructions she received were to make the penis realistic, “but not too large”. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that quite a number of the pornographic propaganda leaflets have survived to this day; soldiers tended to throw away the usual kind, but hung on to the porn.

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The announcements of the new features in the next version of MacOS X (‘Tiger’) turned out to be a lot more exciting than I was anticipating. Many other people have commented on things, so I’ll just mention the two features that grabbed my attention the most.

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What is it about planning a barbecue in Britain? It seems to be an almost foolproof way to manipulate the weather. Let’s say that you plan a barbecue to celebrate someone’s birthday on Saturday night. Friday will inevitably be gloriously sunny, balmy and generally perfect weather for cooking and consuming food outdoors. Likewise, Sunday will also be warm and sunny, with a pleasant gentle breeze. On Saturday—more specifically Saturday evening—it will start to pour with rain just after you have set everything up, wrestled with the almost waterproof gazebo, and lit the barbecue.

There will be some ‘stiff-upper-lip’ types of debates about the possibility of wearing waterproof coats while eating (“It isn’t raining that hard…”) before the participants concede defeat. The chef cooks outside with the aid of a large umbrella, and everyone eats without their coats on indoors. Despite the best efforts of the British climate, a good time was had by all.

Our new office has a sort of micro-balcony, on which it is possible to stand (not sit) in the sun and eat a sandwich. While the weather has been nice I’ve been taking advantage of it and catching a few rays and some fresh air at lunch time. One of the side-effects is that I get to hear the commentary from the open-topped tour buses that go by. These advertise a live¹ guide, and this poor guy has to run through the same old spiel about 25 times a day, day-in, day-out. The boredom in his voice is palpable.

The story that he invariably tells when he reaches earshot of the balcony is an old apocryphal tale about a patch of land beside the Cherwell River known as ‘Parson’s Pleasure’. The dons were tacitly allowed to bathe and sunbathe naked in this area, and it was partially screened from surrounding areas. The story goes that one day, the disporting dons were disturbed by a puntful of ladies passing by. While most of the men scrambled to cover their—let’s say loins—with books or towels, one serenely placed his book over his face. When his companions asked him what on earth he thought he was doing, he replied, “I don’t know about you, but I expect people to recognise me by my face.”

¹ Because a dead guide would be so much less informative and entertaining.

I’ve been trying out mutt, for no good reason other than the joy of tinkering. Yes, I know what I said, but sometimes the lure of the dotfile is too strong. I’ve used Mailsmith for quite a while, and I like it a lot. However, given my current infatuation with vim, I couldn’t resist trying an email client that allow you to use vim to compose emails, and furthermore has a lot of vim-like keystrokes for moving around your mailboxes and issuing commands.

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Bugger. Last week, we went to look at some properties to rent in the area we’ll be moving to. One house was OK, but nothing really endeared us to it, one was appalling (and on a very run-down council estate, complete with boarded-up houses and burnt-out cars), but the last one—with apologies to Goldilocks—was absolutely perfect.

We told the estate agents that we were very interested in the place, and wanted to arrange a moving date toward the end of July. After a lot of phone calls, we’ve just heard that the landlords have decided to take it off the books and let it privately. Back to square one…

I’ve been reading a really interesting article by Neal Stephenson called In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It was published in 1999, so some of the conclusions are a little dated, but it is certainly worth a read. Neal longs for an OS with a nice GUI, multi-threading, and a terminal window to interact with Unix command line applications—like BeOS, but not doomed to obscurity. I think that MacOSX has filled that role fairly well, but many of the other points he makes about interacting and tinkering with the innards of the system are well made.

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Fans of Terry Pratchett, pay attention—Radio 4 is serialising his novel, Mort. The first episode was on last week, but if you’re quick you can still catch it on listen again. If you’re not a fan of Terry Pratchett, consider what a fantastic character his Death is. In Mort, Death goes to a hiring fair to find an apprentice. In the stillness of the midnight streets, we hear his majestic horse galloping along, and as Death dismounts, we hear a skidding sound. Then the echoing voice of Death¹ says, “Oh, Bugger. They should put something down, those cobbles are a death trap.”

Later, Death takes Mort on a ‘job’ to usher the soul of a King into the next world. While they are waiting at the bar for the appropriate time to arrive, we get more of an insight into what makes Death tick. It’s not exactly what you would expect. First he has a long and bitter rant about the pointlessness of vol-au-vents, then—after a brief silence—asks Mort if he would like his gherkin. Oh, and his magnificent white steed is called Binky.

¹ In the books he speaks in CAPITALS.

As we’ve all heard, iTunes Music Store is now available in Britain, France and Germany. I ranted a bit about how unfair the whole thing was a year ago, but now I’m beginning to see the wisdom of that old saying, “Be careful what you wish for—it might come true.” Crikey. It’s like crack. The really lethal thing is the low price per track. You think, “Well, I’ll just get this track—it’s only 79p¹, after all.” But all those 79 pences soon add up.

My first purchase was a nostalgic one. I’ve got a load of really worn out cassettes of The Smiths from the late 80’s which I can’t play any more as I don’t have a tape player. So I got one of the three Smiths tracks available, What Difference Does It Make?, from the first album. I put the headphones on, turned up the volume, and from the first jangly, bouncy bars of Johnny Marr’s thrilling guitar riffs, I travelled back in time. I was back in a youth center hall in the early 1980’s, whirling around with my first proper boyfriend, arms windmilling crazily and drunk on the joy and freedom of it. That’s not bad for 79p.

Seriously though, I don’t think iTMS will replace buying CDs for me. The quality isn’t quite up to listening on a proper hifi, and—at least at the moment—they don’t feature the kind of artists I tend to like.

¹ I won’t go on about the fact that 79p is eqivalent to $1.44 at today’s exchange rates—significantly more than 99¢—we Europeans always end up paying through the nose.

Despite all the buzz about Gmail, there are other email search engines. Two years ago at the London MacExpo, I went to a presentation by Creo on their email search engine, Six Degrees. At that time, Six Degrees was a stand-alone application, which could only import email from Microsoft’s Entourage. I didn’t use Entourage, but even so, I was excited by the possibilities of the software. Now Creo have launched Six Degrees 2.0, and there are some major changes. It runs as a local server (Jakarta Tomcat, to be precise) which you connect to using your web browser, and sift through the database using an HTML front-end. Better still, you can now import mail from a variety of different email clients, and also Unix mbox files, which should make importing possible from any application. It can also check POP and IMAP servers directly and sync with IMAP folders, so that once you have imported your old email, it will update its database automatically as new messages are delivered and sent.

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I generally use Keynote for presentations these days, but I have flirted with various LaTeX-based methods of generating presentations in the past. I’ve just come across a really smooth one called LaTeX beamer. It generates great PDF files with live navigation links, and is very easy to use. Of course, it doesn’t generate anything quite as fancy looking as Keynote slides, but some might consider that a benefit.

LaTeX slide packages can be a bit awkward to handle for complex images and so on (and you obviously have to draw figures in another package), but you can’t beat them for tiny file sizes, portability¹, and the fact that your source files are just plain text so you’ll never be unable to open an old presentation again. It also makes it fairly easy to convert your presentation into a suitable format to distribute as printed handouts, or on the web. If you have some experience with LaTeX, and do any public speaking, LaTeX beamer is well worth a look.

¹ The PDF files can be displayed by almost any PDF viewer application. I’ve found that they work just as well on Apple’s Preview as on Adobe Acrobat Reader.

I think it’s about time that someone told Intel that their codename for their new Pentium 4 processors is not going to play well in the UK. They obviously don’t know the John ‘Two Jags’ Prescott that we all admire so much, or they wouldn’t be burdening their technologically advanced, ground-breaking new chips with the name of someone who eats his with brown sauce and a pie.

Actually, you can tell a lot about a company by the codenames it chooses. When I think of Apple, I think of Jaguar, Panther and Tiger: sleek, fast, efficient creatures. And then there’s Microsoft’s Longhorn: a breed of cattle.

I rest my case.

Maciej is a wonderful writer, and never more so than when he writes about his travels. I’m a complete sucker for writing about Britain by non-residents, and this passage had me rolling around with recognition:

Great Britain is a deceptively small country; it’s very easy to get distracted and find that you’ve overshot it altogether, which is how I found myself standing near a petrochemical plant in Calais just a few hours after boarding a train in Sheffield, a city that I thought was safely removed from the southern coast.

Given the state of our railway system, I’m quite impressed that he managed to get out of Sheffield on a train, let alone make it to Dover to catch a ferry. There’s probably some kind of award available on receipt of proof of such a feat of derring-do. I gather that Visit Britain have had a concerted campaign to encourage more tourists, so apropos of Maciej’s comment, how about this as a marketing slogan: “Britain—blink and you’ll miss it.”

I’ve been meaning to set up a favicon for this site for ages. For the uninitiated, that’s the little image some sites load in the address bar in place of the generic globe, lightning flash or whatever your favourite browser uses. However, every time I tried to make a decent 16 x 16 image, it ended up—not to put too fine a point on it—like a muddy blob. Or a bloody mob. Not attractive, anyway.

Then I came across a link to Chami.com on del.icio.us, and decided to give it a go. You just choose an image on your computer, hit the ‘Generate favicon.ico’ button, and it’s done. I used the same fruitbat image as in my header, and was amazed how well it turned out.

Safari took a bit of persuading to show the icon at first, so if you use Safari, you might need to quit and re-launch it before you see it.

I’ve been trying out another bookmark storage service, which is currently in beta: Hyperlinkomatic. It has a great, slick interface, and a fast and flexible search engine to find what you want, which avoids that tricky problem of deciding what folder/category you’re going to put a bookmark in. It even has an option for specifying a date range for the creation of the bookmark when you search, which is brilliant for those of us who can’t remember anything salient about a bookmark, except that we stored it within the last week.

As with any online bookmark manager, there are big advantages to not having your precious links tied to any one browser or computer, and having them accessible from anywhere. At the moment, you can publish your links to a special page on their domain, but not on your own site. I’ve put in a feature request for an RSS feed of selected links, which would probably be the most flexible way to publish. There’s also a built-in method of sharing bookmarks with your friends (if you have any using the service), which is very neat. It would be difficult for people to abuse as they need to know your username to share with you. You can also block other users if they send you piles of dross.

All in all, it’s a pretty neat service, and seems to scale fairly well. I imported all my Safari bookmarks, and with 545 bookmarks, searches are still nearly instantaneous (well, as near as fairly slow broadband allows). Oh, and it’s also made in the UK. Which is nice.