It’s been ages since we’ve had a storm this cool. If only it hadn’t been so short

• Since I’m a fan of KDE and also a Mac user, I was interested to see the recent discussion on various sites (spurned, as always, by Slashdot) about how there was an apparent falling-out between the KHTML team and the Apple devs working on WebCore. It’s surprised me to learn that what started as KDE devs whinging about users making unreasonable demands, has led to even more people making unreasonable demands — including a Firefox dev! Fortunately, at least kdedevelopers has a post clearly listing the facts of the matter.
• Is the Department of Immigration populated by people who are stupid, or just deaf/blind? Actually, I’m being harsh — even a deaf/blind person would be able to figure out that you don’t deport your own citizens.
• Transperth are teh suck for posting on their Web site about diversions in William Street yesterday, but completely ignoring the much, much, much bigger problem that happened in South Perth (until the most recent message, timed three hours after the problem started). According to the old message on their site and the NewMetroRail site, a water main had burst in William Street, but it was only affecting bus routes through the city. Oh yes. Didn’t any of those bureaucrat dongs bother to look out the window and notice that the Kwinana freeway southbound was closed? Of course not. And they couldn’t even get an e-mail out correctly — the message I got at 4pm (again, three hours after it all started) contained rubbish about some delay on Wednesday. So much for keeping us poor customers in the loop.

This evening, after some America’s Army and BZFlag (mmm, jumping tanks …) with the boys from work in the G5 lab, I met up with Anna to go see The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

My opinion? I don’t care about the critics bagging it — that movie is awesomeness incarnate. Even for someone like Anna who’s read the books.

Stephen Fry is awesome as the narrator, and Alan Rickman is the most perfectly-cast depressed robot I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen many a poorly-cast depressed robot, I tells ya!). The puppet effects are typical high-quality Henson work, and the Magrathean planet-building factory is some jaw-dropping CG art.

Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s an awful lot better than anything else that Disney have financed recently (not counting the Pixar films, of course). I recommend it.

And on an entirely unrelated note … while reading news of Blair’s win in the UK, I noticed a story about an astrologer suing NASA over the Deep Impact mission which will, apparently, violate the natural balance of the universe. So how long will it be before they get issued a fine for littering on Mars?

What’s the bet that the picture editors of the Sunday Times don’t live in the southern suburbs?

In their dual-page spread on cost blowouts for the southern suburbs railway (which, admittedly, is a very poor indictment of the State Government), they showed some photos of problem areas in the construction work. Except that for “Leach Highway”, they used a picture of South Street, with Murdoch Park n Ride clearly visible (and the real Leach Highway also visible in the distance). For “South Street”, they showed Rowley Road, which is 20 kilometres further south (here’s a tip: Murdoch has not been surrounded by bushland for many years, kids). And for “Thomas Road, Kwinana”, they showed … another photo of South Street, this time from a different angle.

’Tis a quality News Limited publication, indeed.