Sigh … Checked my email this morning to find about 50 spam comments on this weblog, about two for each of the last 20 or 30 posts, all posted during the night. Fortunately, the comments all came from the same IP address so it was fairly easy to delete them en masse from my database:… (read more)

License I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have finally got around to doing it. Given that this weblog is ‘publishing’, it makes sense to provide a proper license for anyone who wishes to make use of the material for other purposes. The obvious thing to choose is a Creative Commons license. I… (read more)

Rationale This is the first in a series of documents about the experiences of installing a new Debian workstation system. As a result of confusing my old installation by selecting a strange mixture of Debian/Testing and Debian/Unstable sources, I decided to re-install. And this time, I intend to Do It Right and also to Do… (read more)

We’ve got speed bumps in our road now. The builders packed up their kit and left yesterday. Today, the Line Painters arrived. There isn’t a speed bump outside our house, yet they felt the need to do this: Yes, that’s right, they’ve marked out the non-existent bumps. The interesting thing is that traffic is slowing… (read more)

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to upgrade the weblog software which this site runs from b2 to WordPress, ‘cos WordPress looks nice, is derived from b2, has database import scripts for b2 and has fuller features than b2. Unfortunately, lots of things just didn’t quite work well enough. Database import needed a… (read more)

Yesterday I went to LinuxWorld Expo 2004 at Olympia in London. The following ‘report’ is partly for my own benefit, in order to clarify what was said and done, but hopefully it will be of more general interest. The day started by me running for the bus, which is never a good idea. I’m glad… (read more)

Had a reply from the current webmaster at the site discussed in the previous post. Basically said “Yes, I know, it’s really awful, isn’t it? I inherited it from $PREDECESSOR and am half way through re-coding it. Revised site will be online soon.” Still makes a good example of How Not To Do It, though…. (read more)

I have recently sent the following email to the webmaster of the Association of University Administrators web site. The web site is truly awful for various reasons. My email reads: Dear http://www.aua.ac.uk/ webmaster, A colleague pointed me at your web site – she was trying to access information about one of the workshops. She had… (read more)