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Björk is one of those artists whose work you either love or hate; it’s unusual to be indifferent to her. And she’s never predictable. I happen to love much of her work, and I think she’s a stunning jewel among the interchangeably bland voices that make up the majority of mainstream music. Medúlla is an unusual album—even by her standards—as it’s almost entirely composed of voices (there is some percussion and a tiny amount of synthesised material). If that has just brought horrible memories of The Flying Pickets into your mind, you needn’t worry—it’s nothing like that.

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Ever since I got hooked on the idea of virtual desktops with Linux, I’ve used some kind of virtual desktop manager on the Mac. I don’t know how people do without them—particularly on a relatively small laptop screen. I find that it really helps to organise my workspaces into related activities, such as web, email, editing and so forth.

I started off using Codetek Virtual Desktop, and while I happily paid for a licence and thought the product was great, I started using the Open Source Desktop Manager instead. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of the Codetek product, but this was a good thing in many ways, and made it simpler and easier to use.

However, like Jarkko Laine, one thing always bothered me about Desktop Manager, and that was the fact that it didn’t switch to the correct desktop if you made an application active. I’ve spent frustrating minutes going to each desktop in turn to try and track down an application that I’ve misplaced. Virtue fixes that bug, and has some elegant improvements like a semi-transparent bezel pager display. It also displays mini-icons for your applications on the pager, so you know what’s where. Particularly if you have a laptop, I’d really recommend giving it a try.

I got my first ever library fine today: a whopping 40p. I’m like some kind of outlaw. I expect there will be posters up in Police stations around the country offering a 30p reward for information about my whereabouts.

TextMate has got seriously sophisticated with recent versions. The latest beta features the ability to format the output from a command as HTML and present it in a window. As Alan shows, you can combine this with the Schubert PDF browser plugin and little magic with commands to turn TextMate into a fully-fledged LaTeX editor. You just hit a command to compile the *.tex file, and an HTML window opens showing the output from pdflatex. If there are errors, you can click the error in the HTML file, and be taken to that line in your source file within TextMate. If everything compiles, it automatically opens the resulting PDF with the Schubert plug-in. It’s deeply cool, and very timely since I’m in the middle of writing a lot of lectures using beamer.

I’ve already got a load of snippets set up in TextMate , so that entering all the structure for frames and builds is really trivial; it makes writing lectures almost effortless. Well, not quite. I still harbour a vague hope that it might be possible to construct a complex snippet that would—when I typed explbiol[TAB]—automatically expand into a lucid, detailed and scholarly lecture series, explaining a particular area of biology. I’m not quite there yet.

The new file searching feature is wonderful too. You just hit command+T to open a floating window with a search box. If you type a few letters of the file you’re looking for in your currently open project, it filters the list and you can open it by hitting enter. It’s like Quicksilver for text files, and is a huge timesaver with big projects. TextMate has got to the point now where I use it for all text files, and even use the TextMate Service to edit text from other applications.