Welcome
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Welcome to rho.org.uk, a little web site maintained by Rob Hague
(see below). There's a variety of stuff here - poke around and see
what you find.
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Rob Hague
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As mentioned above, this site is written and maintained by
Rob Hague, an expert at talking about himself in the third person.
Rob's
homepage can be found here.
In 2002, he tried (and succeeded) to
write a novel in
a month. At some point he'll take the logo off the front page. But not
yet.
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Software
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I occasionally write things that might be of some use to
other people (and isn't owned by some
huge corporation
or other). Some of this can
be found here.
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Mac OS X Odds & Sods
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I've had an Apple iBook for a while now, an have generally been very pleased with it. I've created a
virtual dumping ground for my musings about Mac OS X here.
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Links
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This page is a collection of
links to useful/interesting/fun stuff that I've come
across.
You may have arrived here by mistake; if you're an opera
fan, try roh.org.uk. If you're
looking for Reproductive Health Outlook, they're
here.
I also collaborate with Ben Chalmers to produce the
Imaginary Movie
Database, a site dedicated to those films that other sources
seem to miss. We've not updated in a while, but we'll start again Real Soon Now. Honest.
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About This Site and Whatnot
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This site is basically a homepage for Rob Hague (webmaster@rho.org.uk). I'm
happy to receive comments about the site, but please don't
send advertising material, ways to Make $$$ Now, or
Your CV.
If you want to keep track of updates to the site without the tiresome hassle
of actually visiting it, bung the RSS Feed
into your favorite news agregator (I use NetNewsWire Lite).
This site is generated by blosxom, with
the following plugins:
- theme
- rating
- meta
- seemore
- archives (modified)
- entriescache
- bloglikeapirate
(disabled)
- fixed
- blox
- interpolate_fancy
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ThisService
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Today, John Gruber mentioned a utility called ThisService, which seems to offer the same sort of thing as SilverService, in a slightly different way. This suggests that there's some interest in the idea, so I might look into dusting off the latter. (If you're interested, mail me and let me know.)
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Surprise Delivery
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I got into work this morning to find a package on my desk - PLAY.COM had delivered my new DS Lite. This came as something of a surprise, as the official European release date is tomorrow. Not that I'm complaining - it means I get to play Mario Kart DS, which PLAY shipped separately last week.
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Raising The Drunken Rant Bar
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For the last week or so, I've been dipping into Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants, a disorganised collection of essays written by Steve Yegge, a software engineer at Amazon and now Google. He has lots to say on various aspects of programming, ranging from interviewing to Emacs to lanugauges to continued learning. All good stuff, and he even references Cthulhu and Amber.
(Actually, I'm slightly miffed that he's beaten me to the Amber/Lisp simile that's been rolling around in my brain for a while now. Ah well, it's sufficiently obvious that I'd be a little surprised if it hadn't turned up somewhere before...)
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When The Long Tail Wags The Dog
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Dan Bricklin (of VisiCalc fame) has posted When The Long Tail Wags The Dog, an interesting essay on the appeal of general purpose applications (e.g., spreadsheets) compared to specialised ones for popular cases (e.g., tax calculation). His argument is that, given that you can only learn a finite number of tools, you're going to pick at least some general purpose ones, as those are more likely to fulfill your specific needs when said needs diverge from the popular. My view is that he doesn't properly consider hard problems, where solving the problem, in your way or any other, is too difficult or costly for the user, but nevertheless he makes a good point.
A good book on the subject is A Small Matter of Programming, by Bonnie Nardi. The copy I borrowed proved invaluable during my PhD, and I've just picked up a copy to reread (under a tenner on Amazon Marketplace - thanks, Bournemouth University). I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in end-user programming.
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The BDFL Has My Phone!
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Guido van Rossum has just got the same phone that I have - the excellent Nokia 6630. He's raving about the Python port for Series 60, so I may have to actually get round to using it as opposed to merely having the icon sat in the menu. Actually, I think this will really come into its own when Nokia introduce the E-series in a few months time; two of the models have full QWERTY keyboards (one Blackberry-style, the other folding), which will make using Python (and PuTTY) on the phone a whole lot nicer.
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