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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A Christmas Message
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Tori's parents very kindly got me a box of Quality Street for
Chirstmas, and consequently I had a purple one for the first time in
several years. For those of you not familiar with the confectionary in
question, they consist of a hazelnut, surrounded by a thin layer of
caramel, all encased in a chocolate shell. As I was happily eating
this, I began to wonder how they made the oversized version that can
be bought individually. Did they employ some sort of genetically
engineered super-hazelnut? In an endeavour to find out, I bought one,
and disected it.
As you can see, they just pad it out with caramel. This seems to be
a swiz, although I'm not entirely sure why.
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Bite-Sized Chunks
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Both Steven and Tori requested that I break the HTML version of the
novel into smaller chunks, to make it more manageable. Kind-hearted soul
that I am, I dived into the Perl script and produced such a vesion,
which is now linked alongside the text and monolithic HTML versions.
(Sorry, no luck with the PDF version yet...)
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I may live to regret this...
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...but I've posted to the web; see the links in the top box,
to the left. I'm slightly paranoid about this, but hey, I know
that it's not exactly 1984, so I should be able to handle
a little (or a lot) of criticism. You never know, some of it
might be constructive...
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Thank $ENTITY It's All Over
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Well, that's it, then. Last night, I submitted to the
NaNoWriMo website, and hence am a fully validated winner. I've
got the icon (see right), the certificate, and everything. Now I
just need to wait for my masterwork to finish rattling off the
printer, then I can go and meet up with other U.K. NaNoWriMos in
London.
(As far as this site goes, I'm probably going to post a copy
of the novel for people to point and laugh at. This'll probably
happen next week sometime.)
TTFN
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Yay!
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I did it! At a little after 6:30 tonight, I passed the 50,00 word
mark. I've got a couple of sections left to write, and I want to tidy it
up a bit before I submit it to NaNoWriMo and print it out, but,
basically, yay!
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Going well...
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Things are going quite well; I'm ahead of schedule, and it
looks like I'll make 50,000 by Saturday (probably on
Saturday. Anyway, I have a plan for the remaining
5,614 words, and I plan to try to get about 1,000 words ahead
tonight, so should be able to turn up at The Moon On The Water
on Sunday brandishing a completed novel. Wiigii!
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Now with added validation!
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I've rejigged the pages so that they validate as proper XHTML
(Transitional only, I'm afraid. I do some murky things with
tables in order to get reasonable results for everything back to
Netscape 4, and I don't think it's time to give those up just
yet.) See the buttons at the bottom of the page...
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Head above water
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I managed to (finally) get back on track last Saturday, and
have managed to stay on the right side of the green line since
then. I'm not very far ahead of schedule, but at least I'll be
able to hold my head up high at the Cambridge NaNoWriMo meet
tonight. (Not many people have responded - I think it got a bit
overshadowed by the London event - but, hey, it's an excuse to
go to the pub.)
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Wiigii!
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It all started with some comic book character mugs Steven has.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've spent far too much time this week
reading the archives of
It's Walky, right back from when it used
to be called "Roomies" and everyone had big, big hair. I highly recommend it
(it even seemed to actually increase my producutivity; I've no idea how.)
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D'Oh!
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It's a sad day; I've dropped below the green line. Actually, I was
expecting this by this point, but it's not too bad; I should be able to
catch up at the weekend.
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Almost ahead of myself.
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Only managed to make it to 8228 words, so (unless I do a
couple of hundred at some point today, which I'll probably not get
a chance to), I'll slip below the green line. Still, I guess I can
catch up tomorrow...
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Above the line (just)
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Not a bad weekend; I've managed to stick to the
2000-words-a-day target without too much hassle. As tomorrow is
Bonfire Night, I'll not be getting anything done, so I'm going
to try and get ahead of myself (8500 at least, maybe 9000)
tonight.
On Ben's suggestion, I've also added a "Triangle of Delight"
to the graph; this involved some disgusting Gnuplot hackery, but
it works.
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These Words Don't Count
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As you can see, I've got off to a flying start, pissing
around with this web page instead of getting todays 2000 words
in. Still, it's workable now, so I don't really have an excuse
to not work on the novel...
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Friday Morning Grab-Bag
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I've come across a couple of interesting things on my daily
trawl through the web. The first is a nice article entitled
"Top Ten MacOS X Tips for Unix Geeks" at the O'Reily
website. A tie in with their "OSX for Unix Geeks" book (which
I've not seen much of), it starts of with the mind-boggling
trivial ("You can find the Terminal application by navigating
to /Applications/Utilities in the Finder. Drag the
Terminal application to your dock so you can access it
quickly."), but by hint 3 is giving you quite useful tips on
substantial stuff like Startup items and /etc. The
second was
this hint at macosxhints.com about
getting an iBook to drive two monitors in true PowerBook
fashion. I think that my iBook is one of the qualifying
models, but given the dire yet plausible horror stories about
a botched hack permanently wrecking the firmware, I'm not
going to try it until I need to.
In other news, Bluetooth is working like a charm; I've been
using it to transfer VCards to and from my phone, and check my
mail while sitting waiting for a Neal Stephenson (yes, that's
Neal Stephenson) talk to start. I got the modem scripts
from www.taniwha.org.uk, and
setting it up was fairly straightforwards; mail me if you'd
like more details.
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Apple Destroys Trees - Film At 11
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I've just taken delivery of a
D-Link
Bluetooth adaptor, which I can use with my
Nokia 6310i
to get a dialup connection while I'm sitting on a train back
from Nottingham. Anyway, if you follow the link, you'll see
that it's a dinky little dongle-like device, about
45x16x8mm. It came in a box with the standard page-and-a-half
"this is what a USB port looks like" user guide, repeated in a
dozen languages. That box was rattling around inside a
350x250x200mm box, presumably provided by the courier. So,
assuming that the recipient knows how to plug a USB connector
in to a USB port, then we could fit 2,625 Bluetooth adaptors
into the box, and still have space left. That seems a little
wasteful.
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Added UnityWiki
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I wanted to set up a
Wiki so that a group of
us could collaborate on designing a role-playing game
setting. As I wanted something easy to install, I chose
PikiPiki
(MoinMoin has a lot
more features, but is a lot more complex and requires distutils,
which wasn't installed on the target machine). Anyway, I've
hacked the script around to add a couple of nice features and
tidy things up, and then
Ben
asked for CVS access as he wanted to make some improvements and
install it at work. So, I set up a SourceForge project, and
hence world+dog can now download the source and fiddle with
it. See the box to the left for details.
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NaNoWriMo - I Must Be Mad
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A while ago,
Ben mentioned
NaNoWriMo - that's
National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000
word novel in November. Against my better judgement, I've
signed up, and I'll be posting updates somewhere
on the site. Watch this space (or take the vastly more popular
route, and don't).
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You Learn Something New Every Day
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Today's question: what exactly is a pretensioner?
Well, it's...
- A large, complicated and difficult to fit gadget
that sits under your seat and pulls the seatbelt tight
when you have a crash
(www.howstuffworks.com)
Apparently, Corsa ones come with explosives in them.
- Bloody expensive.
- Fairly essential in a "not dying while driving down
the A1 to Nottingham" way, particularly if your seatbelt
is prone to spontaneously popping out of the holder at
inopportune moments, such as when you're pulling in to the
outside lane.
Educational, isn't it?
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Things That Stop Me Doing Work On Monday
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In case you've not seen it, look at
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.
Not only is it "laugh until you shake and people walking past your
office think you're insane" funny, but the author got into a legal
argument with The Mail On Sunday, and he's friends with a load of
ex-staffers from Amiga Power.
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New Scripts
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As you may or may not notice, I've rejigged the scripts that generate
the site a little. The most user-visible change is that the index page now
carries the 5 most recent items from any section, allowing you to
get a summary. Enjoy.
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New Sections - Mac and Me
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Further to the previous news item, I plumped for the
iBook in the end, and have so far been very pleased with
it. Accordingly, I've added a Mac
section to the site; hopefully, somebody somewhere will
find it interesting.
I've also added a separate
homepage. Both are currently a bit bare-bones, but will
get padded out with guff in the fullness of time.
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First Post!
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Sorry about the title. Anyway, here's a real homepage
where I can add personal info without cluttering up the main
page (which obviously serves as an invaluable resource for
so many). I intend to replace the photo ASAP, by the way.
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The King Is Dead, Long Live The King
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Like a phoenix, Scary-Go-Round has
risen from the ashes of Bobbins; read and enjoy,
especially the lift operator. (On a slightly more confusing
note, I tried to put a little in the Spooky Jar, but couldn't
connect to PayPal. Maybe this is why it's at $0.)
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Got Fink Working
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I've had another go at getting Fink working, and this time
succeeded. Last time I managed to miss out an entire step in
the instructions (fink scanpackages) - I must've been asleep
or something. Anyway, I'm installing xfree86, more out of
necessity than desire. I need to run Python Tkinter programs,
and although I have the native Mac OS X Tk installed, I cant
get Python to recognise it when building from source. I'm
trying out something
I've found on the Pythomac-SIG mailing list, but until I get
that to work, it's X11 or nothing. In any case, I'll probably
need it to run Gimp until the native version arrives.
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Mac 1, Unix 0
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Some success, some failure. On the plus side, I've now
played with all the "Digital Hub" apps successfully. I used
iMovie to splice together a couple of interview videos I have
to transcribe, imported Lou Reed's "Transformer" and the theme
from Amelie into iTunes (I'm listening to "Perfect Day" at
this very moment) and got a couple of photos into iPhoto. The
latter is the most interesting, as it involved getting my ZiO
SmartMedia reader working. I was a little disappointed that it
didn't work straight off, but when I went to Microtech's
site and downloaded the drivers, everything went
swimmingly.
I also downloaded the OS X 1.1.5 update. I'm impressed with
what I've seen of Software Update, and it installed the
upgrade with no problems. I've not seen the dramatic speed
increases everyone seems to be crediting it with, but then
again I've not really started stretching the iBook yet.
On the Unix side, things have been going a lot less
smoothly. I tried to install Fink in order to get
things like Python and Carbon Emacs and start getting real
work done. However, something went wrong. It's almost
certainly due to my dodgy install of the developer tools (I
downloaded the image from ADC, but it was corrupted. I
ploughed on with the install regardless, and ended up with
only half the tools. D'Oh.) I've removed it, and in the
process of downloading the image again (not going via a PC and
a dodgy CD-R this time).
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Got it
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I'm typing this entry on my shiny new iBook. I got it
Friday morning, but this is the first real chance I've had to
play with it. I've not really found much out yet. I had a
slightly worrying moment Friday night when I was populating
the hard drive with the restore CDs (not sure why they can't
ship the hard drive with the system set up on it). It
complained that the modem couldn't hear a dialtone, but seemed
to connect to Apple and submit my registration and iTools details
fine. However, when I started trying out apps, the modem
claimed to still be connected, even though it wasn't (I could
hear a dial tone on the line via my phone). Disconnecting just
hung. Anyway, I tried again this morning and it seems to work
fine (I'm using it now to SSH into the lab and type this), so
it's probably just a glitch in the installer.
The only other problem I've seen so far is the on
switch. It works fine, in that it turns the computer on and
off, but I swear I saw the switches on other iBooks glowing
(similar to the collar on the power connector). I'll check
this out.
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Pre-purchase Cognitive Dissonance
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I'm currently contemplating getting a laptop, for working while
away from home, and for giving PowerPoint-like presentations
(although I'll be using PDF, of course). I'm looking to spend
about £1000, and battery life is important so I want to avoid
second-hand machines. The current front runners are an end-of-line
Vaio that I saw (although the spec was fairly ropey), a
bottom-of-the-range Thinkpad, or Apple's new iBook. If anyone has any
suggestions, mail me at
rob@rho.org.uk.
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Added newfile
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I've added newfile, all packaged up. It's simple, but
it's useful.
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In, Out, Shake It All About
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About a week ago, Microsoft and UniSys put up WeHaveTheWayOut.com,
a site advocating moving over from complicated, difficult
to manage Unix systems to easy-to-administer, secure Windows
boxes. However, a quick check on Netcraft revealed the
site was running Apache/FreeBSD - hardly a ringing
endorsement. The site was soon migrated to Windows, but then
failed and was down for several days. Meanwhile, someone
else put up WeHaveTheWayIn, a
site advocating Open-Source and proprietary Unix as an
alternative to Windows. This really is the sort of stuff you
couldn't make up.
(
This site has a similar theme, but couched as a 12-step
programme...)
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Added "Software"
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Expansion continues apace; I've added a page with some
little bits of (open source) software I've
written. Currently, there's not much there, but I have stuff
I want to add to it when I have the time...
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Page Created
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Title says it all, really. I intend to put more on here,
but for now it's just the point to access the Bookaroo .tgz
file.
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I'm 24
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It's my birthday today; I'm now officially 24. Hurrah.
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Hear yourself think
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Quietpc.com has a
whole range of products designed to dull the hovercraft-like
roar of the modern PC, including replacement fans, PSUs and
hard drive mountings. As my home PC makes a noise like a
Harrier jump jet, I'll be spending some money here pretty
soon...
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Pixar go back to their roots
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As everyone knows, the new iMac is more than a little
similar to an angle-poise lamp. Accrodingly, Apple
commisioned Pixar to animate the adverts, and the results
can be found here.
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Added "Links"
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I've added a (currently fairly meagre) links page. And you
thought I was never going to update this...
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Shifman...
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The first Link Of The Day has got to be
this account of ones man's struggle against reality.
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Up and Running
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Wahey! Well, it took a while for me to get my correct
credit card details to DomainBuster, and for
the approprite changes to percolate through various bits of
Internet plumbing, but I've finally got the site
working. There's not much here yet, but I'll be sorting that
out.
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