Keys Corner

Ruth and I like listening to Ben and Marina’s Spanish podcasts in Notes from Spain, so I decided to buy the book he published last year about how he came to live in Spain. It seems to have become a collecter’s item – we looked on Amazon.co.uk:

It’s listed on the German site at 89 Euro. Not bad for a book which costs around 10 Euro at the list price!
Fortunately, it is in stock for 10 Euro at Lulu.com, so buy several copies and sell the surplus ones on Amazon:

(Spotted on Lenguas Entrelazadas, Carlos Ferrero Martín’s dual-language blog from Salamanca)

The BBC plans to launch an on-demand TV service which uses software that will only be available to Windows users. If you’re a British resident or a British citizen, you might consider adding your name to the online petition to Tony Blair.

I noticed a link to this article in Handelsblatt (I think, today I can’t find it again) the day before yesterday. The article is very detailed with lots of photos and I’m sure that if you are good with a very small screwdriver, you can indeed save the 260 Euro that you pay to have a professional fix dirt in the focusing mechanism. But I was still pretty gobsmacked at the statement with the original link, that using this article you would have the camera fixed in a matter of minutes – some people must be a lot better with their fingers than I am.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America’s version of the colony is the military base; and by following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever more all-encompassing imperial “footprint” and the militarism that grows with it…

...Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005—mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets—almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty…

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I do not like buying music with DRM (digital rights management, also known as copy protection). It is a real pain removing it from, for example, anything I buy from iTunes. There used to be a utility called JHymn, but it broke when Apple brought out iTunes version 6. Since then, on the Mac, there hasn’t been any way to remove DRM from iTunes songs without manually burning a CD and re-importing the tracks.

Until recently… Read the rest of this entry »

Op Art opened in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main yesterday. It contains optical illusions from the 1950’s and 1960’s by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Gianni Colombo.

We’re definitely planning to visit it in the next couple of weeks. It’s on until 20th May 2007.

The White House / Pentagon spin machine has shifted up a gear with their attempts to convince us that Iran is really, really evil. How long until they or Israel attacks them? The Guardian thinks we probably have about a year.

Our address book has been on our home computers since since the early-1990’s. First in Lotus Organiser, for a long time in an MS Access database, then in Act! and finally in Palm’s Desktop application, which we switched to when we changed to using Macs a few years ago. Looking back, I think the software I was most satisfied with was Act!, which is very flexible and powerful. It should be, as it’s aimed at business users, rather than home users. However, when we switched to the Macs, Act! only ran under Windows, and the Windows emulation software for Power PC Macs was slow, which is why we migrated the address book to the Palm Desktop.

We started using Palm PDAs in mid-1990s and since then, have always had the challenge of keeping contact data on a number of Palms and two or three computers in sync with each other. It’s not easy as the sync conduits which Palm supplies doesn’t handle multiple PDAs being synced with one PC well – they get confused and you can easily end up having several copies of the same contact in your database. It’s not a problem if you spot it quickly – you can check the date when each version was modified and manually delete the older copy, but it used to generate a lot of work until we got Palms which don’t forget their contents when the battery is empty, as when that happened, the conduit would usually allocate different internal keys when the contents of the database were recovered to the Palm after re-charging it and then sync them as new records to the other PDAs. I have manually removed 500-odd duplicate contacts more times than I care to remember because of that.

Of course, life gets even more complicated when you also want to keep the Palm Desktop synced across multiple Macs. We also print address labels for addresses in various international formats (the UK address format is by the worst to cater for as the British have almost completely unstructured multi-line addresses) and do a Christmas letter in OpenOffice (OOo), which gets printed out using the mass-mailing function in OOo. Both the labels and the mass-mailing documents rely heavily on OOo macros to format the addresses and other personal data correctly before it’s printed.

Where is all of this leading, you may be asking yourself? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not surprising that the US army let looters clear out museums and hospitals after the fall of Baghdad – just look at these quotes from those responsible for losing track of up to $20bn in $100 bills that was shipped to Iraq to finance the reconstruction of the country (my emphasis in the quote):

Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that “the subject of today’s hearing is the CPA’s use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people.“

Bremer’s financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”

Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”

Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?“

In other words, it’s not our money, why should we worry? Apart that is, from the suspicion that some of that missing money has financed the people involved in both the civil war in Iraq and the on-going attacks on military personnel.

It’s mind-blowingly arrogant, not the mention short sighted.