BlogOfTheMoon

He's back, and it's about time. I'm actually quite excited about this (having just watched Pyramids of Mars this afternoon) and feeling in a really Doctor Who mood to hear this news! Okay, so it's not until 2005, but it's something to look forward to .

This is a great one from The Register. The HP/Compaq website has an FAQ describing the location of the fabled any key.

It looks like GNU/Linux is really starting to take off. This Register article talks about countries and organisation that are starting to notice Linux and use it in a big way, which is quite cool.

I was on the iO stall for both days of freshers' fair which was quite fun, but has left me really quite tired and hoarse. Standing (and often dancing) for six hour stints on two days and talking (and often shouting) to people, trying to persuade them to join your society will often do that to you! While we didn't do as well as we did last year, we got a respectable number of members (80), with a few regulars still to join.

I finally releases ObSys 2.0 this afternoon. Our new course administration and application system is out the door! To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that it won't crash and burn, but I'm confident of my ability to fix any problems as they arise.

This has been quite a big job – not only did I rewrite our entire course administration system, but we've implemented a completely new set of new procedures for course tutors and radically changed our workflow as well. It wasn't supposed to this radical. This rewrite was supposed to be quite minor, but things just kept being added to it until I realised that it was two weeks until the start of term and that I was nowhere near finished, so the past few weeks have been a bit hectic. Still, it's all done now. Now all I have to worry is getting OCW finished. <Sigh> no rest for the wicked .

I went to see Spirited Away today, and it was absolutely brilliant. It was Hayao Miyazaki at his best. At the end of this film, I was sat in my seat in the cinema with a big goofy grin on my face that didn't fade for ages. Go and see this film. That's all there is to it, really.

I recently discovered Baghdad Burning, the blog of a girl living and writing in Baghdad. She writes very eloquently and makes me even more ashamed of the actions of my country in my name.

David Baron (respected Mozilla.org driver and editor of the CSS3 syntax working draft) has blogged about the philosophical reasons why he uses the Mozilla application suite over Mozilla Firebird. I haven't been able to bring myself to try Firebird yet, there's too many things that I like about the suite, but like David, I feel that an incremental change to the UI is preferable to completely ripping it out and starting from scratch.

Former environment secretary Michael Meacher writes in the Guardian that the war on terrorism is bogus. While some of what he says sounds a little bit paranoid to me, there's enough stuff there to give one pause for thought. The policies of the US government have worried me for a long time and this seems like confirmation of my worries. Or is that just me looking for a point of view sympathetic to myself? It's sometimes difficult to differentiate wishful thinking from reality, but it's something that we've all got to work at.