Welcome
|
|
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.
|
|
Rob Hague
|
|
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.
|
|
Software
|
|
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.
|
|
Mac OS X Odds & Sods
|
|
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.
|
|
Links
|
|
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.
|
|
About This Site and Whatnot
|
|
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
|
|
|
Dave didn't whack my google, but it is nevertheless whacked
|
|
A few months ago, I was meant to be going to Dave Gorman's Googlewhack
Experience, but unfortunately had to cancel at the last minute as it was
inconveniently on the night I was flying out for UbiComp. Tori saved me the
badge pictured as a souvenir. Another consolation prize arrived yesterday in
the form of an e-mail from one Phil Bradley (who I don't know, but it goes to
show that not all unsolicited e-mail is unwelcome). It cheerfully informed me
that I was a googlewhack for gesticulating
taramasalata. Yay the internet.
|
|
|
|
I've been Registered
|
|
I got a name-check in The Register
today, for my sort-of-entry into their Jennicam eulogy
competition. I'd like to
thank my agent, and Tori, who pointed out the typo in the first place, and...
|
|
|
|
Metadata, Good and Bad
|
|
I've been looking into RDF
recently, as I'm writing an XML-based bibliography tool (by the way,
if anyone knows of an existing RDF vocabulary for describing citations
in journals, please, please, please mail me and let me know what it is),
and it looks pretty useful for a variety of things, including a
messaging/blogging/browsing thingy I've been vaguely thinking about
for a while now - more when and if I get round to writing it.
Anyway, while scouring the web for resources (there are lots, as long
as what you're interested in is RSS; I'm not), I came across a nice
antidote to
metadata. Handy to bring you down to earth if you're getting
carried away with the whole semantic web thing.
|
|
|
|
Towers, As Far As The Eye Can See
|
|
I don't normally just re-list links from other sites, but I found this link on SlashDot (which I made a resolution
not to read years ago, and haven't, but I've subscribed to the RSS
feed for the links), and I couldn't resist. Go programming silliness.
|
|
|
|
Deck The Halls With Boughs Of Holly
|
|
It's that time of year again; carol singers roasting on an open fire
and whatnot. Last year, Tori persuaded me that it was a good idea to
go halves on a seven foot six artificial tree, which was a good idea
with the high ceilings of the place I was in last year, but a bit
dodgier in our current flat. Nevertheless, it came up in
conversation, so I risked life and limb getting it out of the loft
(we don't have a ladder), and set it up.
I'd just finished, and we were decorating it, when Tori pointed out
that you're not meant to put decorations up until the 19th. So I'm
not allowed to turn the lights on, and it's sitting forlornly in the
corner looking unilluminated and slightly sad. I'll post a picture of
the tree in all it's glory when she lets me switch it on.
|
|
|
|
Poplee will bleeive ayhinntg they raed
|
|
Anyone with an e-mail address has probably seen the meme that begins
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy...", and claims that it's
as easy to read a sentence where the letters in the words are reordered, apart
from the first and last, as one where they're not. It's very convincing, until
you realise that it doesn't work. This
page picks it apart bit by bit.
|
|
|
|
nXML-mode: How XML should Work
|
|
James Clark, writer of expat, editor of the XSLT Recommendation and all-round XML
genius, has done it again, by writing an XML editing mode for Emacs that
doesn't suck. In all fairness, PSGML-mode isn't terrible - I wouldn't have been
using it daily for the last few years if it was - but it was an SGML editor
with XML functionality bolted on, which meant it was unnecessarily
complicated, and couldn't do anything useful without a DTD. nXML-mode is still in
alpha, and doesn't have a pretty download page yet, but is nevertheless the
bee's knees, the dog's bollocks, and almost any other part of any animal you'd
care to name (except, perhaps, the dingo's kidneys). It's based on RELAX NG
schemas (and comes with XHTML, XSLT and DocBook out of the box), works fine
without any validation, supports namespaces, and autocompletes like a dream.
Hoorah!
(It may seem like I'm getting a little overexcited about Yet Another Emacs
Mode, but I'm getting my head down to write my thesis, and hence will be
writing even more XML than usual over the next few months, so I welcome this
like a plumber would welcome a new, revolutionary sort of self-assembling
pipe. Or something.)
|
|
|
|
News is dead! Long live News!
|
|
A few weeks ago, NTK mentioned GMane, a mailing-list to NNTP gateway. I
never really got into the whole newsgroup thing, so I didn't pay much
attention. However, last week I noticed that the traffic from the blosxom mailing list was getting a little voluminous,
and realised that a newsreader would probably be a better tool to handle it. I
gave GMane a try, and indeed, it's far better. I'd recommend it to anyone
subscribed to mid- to high-volume public mailing lists.
|
|
|
|
CoolURI 0.2
|
|
I've added a requested feature to the CoolURI Blosxom
plugin; it'll now provide default flavours for URIs of the form
blosxom.cgi/path/to/entry, where "entry" is an entry as opposed to a
category.
|
|
|
|
Alas...
|
|
... I've decided not to do NaNoWriMo
this year. I have a thesis to be writing.
Good look to everyone who is, though. As a side note, I've repaired the broken
links to last year's "novel". At some
point, I may even get round to editing it. But don't hold your breath.
|
|
|
|
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
|
|
Usually, "comic book" is a term of derision as far as films are concerned. In
this case, though, the source material is Alan Moore's excellent graphic
novel, so it'd be more of a complement. Which means we're going to have to
find a new term of derision, because the film is appalling. To be fair, I was
watching it on a nine inch screen in the back of the seat in front of me, and
the tape kept jumping, so I probably didn't get as much from the special
effects as I would've done on the big screen, but this just meant that I paid
more attention to the script. Oh, the script...
See more ...
|
|
|
|
Argh! My Life Points!
|
|
I've just caught an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh!, one of the current batch of
lazily-animated Japanese tie-in cartoons, designed to sell things. In this
case, it's a collectable card game, but the brilliant thing is that the
cartoon seems to be entirely about people playing the card game. Now I
know that Pokemon involved people involving engaging in the same sort of
things that characters in the game do, Yu-Gi-Oh actually centres around two
people standing around in little pods, drawing cards from a deck, and taking
turns. They shout card names at each other, speak sotto voce to camera
to explain their tactics, and wax lyrical about the rules for minutes at a
time. Sheer genius, from a marketing point of view, at least.
|
|
|
|
Le fin de Concorde (or something)
|
|
In case you'd not noticed, today marks the final flight of
Concorde, the
worlds only supersonic commercial air liner. No longer will you be able to
experience three-hour London to New York flights with an odd combination of
in-flight vintage champaign and a passenger compartment as spacious as a
National Express coach (apparently; I've never flown on it). A couple of
high-profile safety problems didn't help, but the real problem was the cost;
there were never enough harried executives desperately wanting day trips to
New York to cover the inordinate cost of the fuel. If there had been more
demand, the price would've come down, other supersonic air liners would've
been built, and we probably wouldn't notice the decommisioning of Concorde. As
it is, comercial supersonic travel is, at least for now, consigned to the
history books along with that long pointy nosecone.
White elephant of the skies, we salute you.
|
|
|
|
The Beginning of the End
|
|
It's the last talk, and they're about to turn off the WiFi, so this'll be my
last entry 'til I get home. It's been a good conference; I've heard about and
seen some interesting work, met a lot of fun people, and drank quite a bit of
surprisingly good Seattle beer. One thing I've noticed is that I seem to fall
naturally into the role of devil's advocate; I'm defending arty projects and
ethnography to systems people one minute, then electronics and tracking
systems to HCI people the next. It's nice that there's such a range of
specialities at one conference; I hope it stays that way, as opposed to
fragmenting into narrower venues.
|
|
|
|
My contribution...
|
|
I've just taken down the poster that I've been displaying (well, that a
pinboard has been displaying on my behalf), and it occured to me that I should
probably make it available online.
So here it is.
I'm planning to do a proper page for the
Rainbow Group site in
the next week or so, which would serve to fill out the details somewhat.
|
|
|
|
Patent Pending?
|
|
I've just seen a presentation of a great piece of work from Mitsubishi
Research. Basically, it allows you to use a normal LED to sense light levels,
with only a microcontroller and a single extra trace on your PCB. This means
it can be added to a device that already has an LED and microcontroller at
give or take zero cost. What's more, as you now have both an emitter and a
receiver, you can use it for short range bidirectional communication. It's
very clever, very useful, and, unfortunately, very patented.
Now I'm not sure how I feel about this. Unlike, say, the one-click shopping
patent, there are no technical grounds to object to it. It's original,
non-obvious, and hasn't been done before. It's a piece of apparatus, and it
solves a real problem (many patent systems require a physical instantiation
and/or usefulness). However, it seems a crying shame that the technology can't
be freely used and incorperated into other devices. The patent system was
designed to protect the original inventors, allowing them to exploit the
invention for a time while guaranteeing that it's (eventually) available to
the public. This seems a laudable aim, but loses it's lustre when the
exploitation rights are assigned to a corporation. I don't think that's really
what's bothering me, though. I think it's that in this case, patenting the
technology both reduces the potential for research, but also reduces the
chance of wide dissemenation of the technology - even a slight per-device
license fee would significantly reduce the cost benefit of the technique.
Still, it was a very cool paper.
|
|
|
|
Cool URIs
|
|
As of this morning, I've officially released my first
Blosxom plugin -
CoolURI.
It allows the use of extension-free, date-based permalinks, like
the ones described in
"Cool URIs don't
change". It's pretty simple, but does the job well enough for
now, and means that when something better comes along I won't need to
change the URLs again. Which is the entire point.
|
|
|
|
Popped my eBay cherry
|
|
Today is a momentous day. Bands played, speeches were made, ribbons were cut.
Or they should've been, for today is the day I put my first item up for sale
on eBay. Actually, it's Tori's item; her iBook, that she doesn't use any more
now she's here with access to my PC (which I tend to spurn in favour of my own
iBook). Anyway, the auction is
here
if you're in the market for a robust, cute-looking laptop with a firewire
port.
|
|
|
|
Licensing Rant
|
|
The software on this site is licensed under a variety of
OSI-approved open
source licences. UnityWiki is unambiguously a derivative work
of PikiPiki, which is covered by the
GPL, and
hence is distributed under the same licence. The two original
projects, Bookaroo and Newfile, are licensed under the
MIT
Licence (basically equivalent to the
advertising-clause-free version of the BSD licence).
See more ...
|
|
|
|
Talking about Talking
|
|
I'm sat in a talk about blogging, so it seems appropriate that I should tell
the world via the wonder of RSS. I should probably
start listenting again now, though.
|
|
|
|
I'm blogging this right now
|
|
I'm writing this from UbiComp in Seattle;
just in case you don't believe me, here's photographic evidence:
I've only skimmed over the programme so far, but there looks to be a lot of
interesting stuff here.
This afternon I've got to do a one-minute talk to persuade people to come and
see my poster. At some point, I should probably decide what to say.
|
|
|
|
Coke uses GPS to track prizewinners
|
|
It looks like UbiComp-like location aware technologies are making their way
into the mainstream. Apparently Coke are planning to use
GPS
receivers in winning cans
to seek out people and present them with HumVees or large amounts
of gold. I'm not they've really thought this through - aside from the
technical issues of putting a GPS recevier in a can (what happens if you open
the can underground? Or on the wrong side of a tall building? Or in a
reasonably thick tent?) , I don't really think that buying a can of carbonated
beverage with vegetable extract can reasonably be taken to imply that you give
your consent for a multinational corperation to track your movements. Maybe
there's a shrink-wrap EULA on the ringpull, but even then it's probably
a case for Lord Denning's Big Red Hand.
|
|
|
|
Fun with NTL
|
|
Having spent far too much of another Sunday trying to work out where
the problem with the web is due top my ISP or Safari having one of it's spats,
I've learnt two things. One is that NTL tech support operators are somewhat
startled if the first thing you say to them is "Your web proxy
inktomi1-cam.server.ntl.com drops the connection if you send it an HTTP POST
request longer than about 1.1k", and the other is that
this
site, that Ben pointed me at last time this happened, has all the answers.
(To be fair, once the NTL guy had got over the intial shock, he did give me
the list of alternative proxy servers, but they were only numeric IPs, which
for some reason didn't work on Mac OS X).
|
|
|
|
Mmm... Blowfish...
|
|
After looking for ages, I've recently found
SSHKeychain, an
Aqua-integrated ssh-agent thaat works the way I want it to. Other agents have
done the job adequately, but SSHKeychain has a bunch of little features that
make it stand out from the crowd. It'll run in the menubar (so it doesn't take
up space in the dock), but more importantly it makes use of the Keychain. Not
only can you store your passphrases in there, but the agent can forget keys
when the machine sleeps, and ask you for the (Keychain) passphrase on wake, or
the next time the agent is accessed.
Now I just need to get round to sorting out an on-demand wrapper for SSH
tunnels...
|
|
|
|
Prepare To Be Boarded...
|
|
...For it be International Talk
Like A Pirate Day. Yar! Shiver me timbers, splice the main brace, and so
forth. (Note to self: avoid calling Tori "wench", lest ye be forced to walk
the plank)
(Avast, I be raising a flagon to shipmate
Jason Clark, who be joining me in
Blogging-Like-A-Pirate. Aaarrr!)
Update: Simon has
piratised his web page in admirably minimalist fashion, and of course one of
my favourite comics is officially It Be
Walky! for the day. Yarrr!
|
|
|
|
Now Powered By Blosxom
|
|
Phew. That was a hairy ten minutes or so. I managed to completely trash my
docroot directory whilst trying to move the testing and ready Blosxomed website
to the new host (called, with absolutely no connection to Steven Kitson,
"ocelot"). For some reason, rsync didn't seem to want to do the right thing.
Anyway, it's all sorted out now, so the site is officially generated by
Blosxom (statically at the moment, but I plan to have a mixture of static and
dynamic eventually). Archives are all there, but not linked to - I'm planning
do some reworking over the weekend, now everything is in place.
|
|
|
|
|
|
As Tori was away at the weekend, I got the chance to sit
down and get my head around Blosxom.
Once I'd reminded myself that XML is a means to an end, and
not an end in itself, I started to see ways in which I could distort it
to fit my own weird designs. I've now just about got it doing what I
want, but things need a little bit more polishing before it goes
live.
|
|
|
|
Good thing, bad thing
|
|
Good Thing: Getting a poster accepted at UbiComp 2003.
Bad Thing: Said conference clashing with the night I'm meant to
be going to see Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Thingummy. Dammit.
|
|
|
|
|
|
That is indeed the question. I'm 90% finished with my ad hoc Python
Script, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to use Blosxom
in the long run, as I get to leverage all of the great plugins people write
for it (and would probably contribute one or two of my own). I think I've
figured out a way to do what I want to do with it, so this weekend I
might suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Perl and try
again.
|
|
|
|
Why 1984 wasn't like "1984"
|
|
Apple's famous commercial for the release of the Macintosh,
shown during the 1984 Superbowl, is probably one of the most
famous, and most effective, TV ads in histroy.
This page
not only has a Quicktime version of the ad, but also has an
interesting scholarly analysis of what it means, and where it
sits in a wider context.
|
|
|
|
Look at me, MA
|
|
I've not updated the page for a while, as I've been a little
busy since I got back from Switzerland. In the two months (eep -
I didn't realise it was that long until just now) I've been
back, I've been to Roman and Carries wedding in the US (and very
nice it was too), got my MA (which basically means that I'm
entitled to wear a longer gown, should I want to), and done more
than a few supervisions. However, the exams have started now, so
I've finally got nothing to distract me from doing the PhD work
that I badly need to do if I'm going to finish anywhere near
December.
Which obviously means that I'm thinking of rewriting the
software that generates this site.
I've been considering
Blosxom,
which is certainly a very neat piece of software, but I'm not
sure how easy it would be to get it to work with all the
existing XSLT stuff,
which I don't want to throw away. We'll see what happens; I'm
sure I'll pick the option that wastes the most time. Damn my
subconscious.
|
|
|
|
A Conversation
|
|
I found this
page when idly browsing
wilwheaton.net while waiting for
a kernel image to transfer of a serial line (which, by the way, takes an
age, and eventually failed for reasons that are, so far, unknown. Bah.).
I think it sums things up quite nicely.
|
|
|
|
CompSci History
|
|
This
page has a load of links to information about almost
every programming language you can imagine, but more
importantly, it has a five-page diagram showing where
they're all descended from! OK, it's not that exciting,
but I find it interesting. There a couple of mistakes
though, so I might have to assemble my own version...
|
|
|
|
Dammit
|
|
When I find myself actually agreeing with the
actions of Anne Campbell, you know that something's seriously
wrong.
|
|
|
|
The Jargon File
|
|
The Jargon File's old
homepage seems to be unceremoniously redirecting visitors to random
Linux-oriented sites, so the link goes to a mirror. If you've not heard of it
before, it's "a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many
aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor." Taken with a grain of
salt, it's fairly interesting, and you can easily get lost in it for hours. I
particularly like the AI
Koans and A
Story About Magic.
|
|
|
|
Yikes
|
|
Follow the links in a MacSlash
story about web badges, I ended up skimming Apple's
Guidlines for Using Apple Trademarks and Copyrights, and noticed
the following, fairly broad, prohibition:
3. Variations, Takeoffs or Abbreviations: You may not
use an image of a real apple or other variation of the Apple logo
for any purpose.
"Any purpose". Thousand's of unimaginative still-life painters must
be quaking in their boots.
|
|
|
|
Grüezi
|
|
There haven't been any updates for a while, as I've been busy
settling into my new surrounds in Switzerland, where I'm doing a 3-month
internship at IBM's Zurich Research
Lab. I don't have an internet connection at home, so I can only
add updates from the lab, but I should be able to manage that now and
again.
|
|
|
|
|