Skull Attack

There is a mystery behind Brains SA; what exactly does it stand for? Among those who know, it is universally revered as skull attack. I’ve reasonably fond of it, but tonight, perhaps, I finally understood how it came by it’s moniker.

Spiderman III, X-Men III and Son of Rambow

Beginning of term, so I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that I haven’t blogged for ages. Life does get slightly swamped by work at this time of year; yesterday, I was so tired after working at full-tilt for two weeks that I even took most of the day off.

OBO Format and Manchester Syntax

At Neuroinformatics 2009, David Sutherland and I talked about the problems of ontology building. One of the current (and past!) difficulties is to choose an appropriate language for representing the knowledge in your ontology. I thought I would write my thoughts up as a post; this will probably result in the most boring thing I have ever written (I am sure someone will point out worse offenses); syntax is dull but distressingly important.

Neuroinformatics 2009

This is the third year in a row that I have been to Neuroinformatics (or it’s forerunner, Databasing the Brain). It’s still turning out to be an enjoyable meeting, even though there is still lots of it that I don’t understand. Come to think of, perhaps because there is lots of it that I don’t understand.

Modification in the Future

Make has been driving me mad for the last week. It keeps on complaining about “modification time in the future”. Normally, this happens because you’re using rmeote files from a server which doesn’t have sync’d time. But this is rare these days. Anyway, it was complain that the file was 10E+06 seconds in the future; that’s a really, really big clock skew.