2003/09

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

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NaNoWriMo 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

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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.

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.

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.

ImMDB

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
Power By Blosxom Get Firefox Creative Commons License: TEXT ONLY
Sun, 28 Sep 2003

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...

Fri, 19 Sep 2003

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.

Mon, 08 Sep 2003

Still Blosxoming

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.

Wed, 03 Sep 2003

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.

To Blosxom, Or Not To Blosxom

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.

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