You have to hand it to the motoring journalists, public transport is no way to get around London. Except in a flying taxi driven by Milla Jovovitch dressed in a few bandages, with Natasha Henstridge and Charlize Theron to open the doors and the nice lady from the BT ads to handle any calls.

Otherwise, travelling by train, bus or tube is a miserable experience best left to those who do it for reasons difficult to comprehend for us who work from home by the sea. Albeit with 3,000 tons of timber at the end of our road. You can tell London commuters by their strange manner of dress, currently winkle-picker shoes and ‘designer’ glasses obviously designed by someone who has no intention of ever wearing them. With all the 4×4s in London you’d expect that as northerners they would dress in waxed jackets and cords with a dent in the leg where their whippets stand.

Then, the journey home is decorated with inane cell phone conversations delivered at a volume louder than the average MP3 player’s earphones. The local end of the call in the seat behind you is so damned unconvincing: “Yah, yah. I’ll get back to you on that. Mmmm, Oliver and Daisy are well, they really like the Steiner nursery… blah, blah, blah”. All the way from Clapham Junction to Haywards Heath. By East Croydon, their platitudes are so familiar you could join in.

ClamXav for Leopard

Commuters packed like sausages into the Tube are a sure way to pass on bird flu, Diogenes Syndrome and Blue Tongue. Just like our Macs when they get out into the virulent Internet, mixing with goodness knows what other operating systems from all over the world. Within a day of installing the latest version of ClamXav , the Mac’s Leopard-friendly and free virus detector, it flagged up a zillion infected emails, most ostensibly from eBay.

ClamXav is the work of Brit, Mark Allan, a freelance software engineer who has been adapting the Unix open source and award-winning ClamAV for Mac OS X. As well as a stand-alone checker, ClamXav has Folder Sentry which can be set to scan any folder automatically. If these include Mail’s Mailboxes and Downloads, plus the default download location for incoming files, nearly all the entry points for digital diseases are checked in the background.

Like previous version, Folder Sentry does quit occasionally but it is simple to open ClanXav to restart the Sentry, from the icon in the Finder’s menu bar. This also indicates when scanning is taking place.

As it is, at the moment there is still no need for a Mac virus detector but it is far better to be prepared than join the world of Windows with all the worms and Trojans and worse. ClamXav is covering all the bases and at a price we can all afford.