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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Argh! My Life Points!
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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.
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Le fin de Concorde (or something)
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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.
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The Beginning of the End
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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.
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My contribution...
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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.
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Patent Pending?
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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.
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Cool URIs
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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.
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Popped my eBay cherry
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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.
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Licensing Rant
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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 ...
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Talking about Talking
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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.
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I'm blogging this right now
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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.
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Coke uses GPS to track prizewinners
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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.
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