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
|
|
|
FireFox 1.0 Released
|
|
You may not have heard (they've been keeping it pretty quiet), but those crazy
cats at the Mozilla Foundation have released version 1.0 of their lightweight
browser, FireFox. Could
be curtains for NCSA
Mosaic...
|
|
|
|
Bloglines
|
|
After being a happy user of NetNewsWire Lite, I've decided to try out an online news aggregator,
namely BlogLines, in order to have access
to feeds (and, more importantly, the list of which article's I've read and
which I haven't) available in multiple places, across several platforms. A
particularly nice feature of BlogLines is that they have several notifier
applications, including a a FireFox extension, to let you know when there are
new articles to read. I'll try it for a week or two, and then put up a post
about how it's going.
|
|
|
|
Venerable Educational Institution Saved by Caius
|
|
Mmm... Chips with mayonnaise...
|
|
|
|
Makes a change from Viagra
|
|
Got into work this morning to find some interesting spam waiting for me. It
begins:
You\'re invited to shop for large selection of bombs and different
kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air,
surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the
following types of rockets you will be
able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power
stations, bridges, factories and anything
else that comes your mind. Most items are in stock and available for
next day freight delivery in the USA.
Worldwide delivery is available at additional cost. Prices are
negotiable.
It go on to list todays specials, including cluster bombs and high explosive
fragmentation air bombs. Fuel-air explosives are apparently out of stock.
Of course, this could all be a complete con, and you may never get the
megadeath weapons you order. However, if I were looking to defraud someone
for large amounts of money, I'd think twice before picking a mark who was in
the process of shopping around for military hardware. Then again, I'm not the
sort of person who sends out spam, so what do I know.
|
|
|
|
Sensible Title Bars Under Windows XP
|
|
I made a simple but useful discovery today at work; it is possible to
make the title bars on Windows XP a reasonable size without resorting to a
thrid-party skinning tool or the "classic" look (yes, yes - I know the classic
window furniture looks far less like it belongs around The Square Window, but
the toolkit and colour scheme is far better in the XP theme). Just go to the
"Appearance" tab of Display Properties, and click Advanced. Select a title bar
in the illustration, and you can change the font and size, allowing you to
make the title bar smaller. Selecting "System" (which is only available at
10pt) makes the title bar eighteen pixels, which is more or less the same as
Classic. I've no idea why I didn't spot this earlier, but I'm glad I did.
|
|
|
|
Stick 'Em Up
|
|
Peter suggested this on IM last night...
|
|
|
|
Still here
|
|
Just a quick note to say that I'm still here, even though I've not added
anything to the site in a while. I've been a little busy with a whole bunch of
stuff - finishing my thesis, starting at Azuro, and moving house. I also unwisely
agreed to run a six-week roleplaying game at the same time. However,
everything's just about finished now, so I should be able to get round to
some site spring-cleaning that I've been meaning to do for a while.
First thing, I'll be looking at moving the site over to the Blosxom version 3. I also might change over
to dynamic content, depending on various hosting details. Oh, and I've updated
the design little - now the news half is wider than the static content.
There'll probably be more changes on top of this; watch this space...
|
|
|
|
InKeWriMo
|
|
If you're at all interesting in open source or Linux (either for it or against
it), you can't have missed the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's recent
report suggesting that Linus Torvalds couldn't have possibly have written a
kernel that quickly without cribbing the code from Minix. The assertion has
been roundly dismissed by Tannenbaum, Stallman, Torvalds and various others, but
got me thinking; how difficult is it to get a kernel up and running?
Could I do it?
Like a pebble causing a landslide, this thought lead inextricably to the idea
of InKeWriMo - International Kernel Writing Month (c.f.
NaNoWriMo). A month is perhaps a little
ambitious if you're doing it in your spare time, and I'm more than a little
busy for the next couple of months, but still...
|
|
|
|
Extensible Programming for the 21st Century
|
|
I've just had my bi-monthly heart attack, when I stumble across something that
seems to scoop my entire thesis, and spend the morning frantically chasing
references to check that it doesn't. In this case, it was a fairly interesting
article (linked
to from this
SlashDot thead) about "extensible programming", wherein instead of
communicating data between components in terms of streams of characters,
á la the Unix command line, we use something a little more
structured, which at the moment translates as XML. He also brings in a lot of
together other ideas, such as Scheme hygienic macros, in a view that's spookily
similar to my own way of thinking. Worth a look.
(In case you're wondering, the thing that worried me thesis-wise was the
fourth footnote, which alludes to the fact that .NET makes translation between
source languages "almost possible" via common intermediate form. I've checked,
and I can't find anything suggesting that anyone actually does this with .NET.
If you're reading this, and know of someone who does, then please let me know.)
|
|
|
|
Got One
|
|
After a few weeks of phone calls, interviews and such, I've accepted a job at Azuro, a small EDA startup. Now all I have to do is finish this damn thesis...
|
|
|
|
Added CV
|
|
As I'm looking for a job at the moment (as well as writing up, which is why
I've not done anything to the site for a while), I've added my CV to my homepage. Enjoy.
|
|
|
|
ClickPod?
|
|
The recent Register
article about
Clicker
(a piece of software I'd get in an instant
if it supported my workhorse-like 6310i) got me wondering why Apple hadn't
done something similar themselves (as they've done in the past with other
third party software such as Watson). One thing that did occur is that it
would involve writing software for other people's devices (i.e., the phones),
and that's something they've traditionally been happy to leave to others.
However, there is an alternative route that they could take - the
much-postulated
BluePod
(a iPod with Bluetooth). Think about it; a platform they control,
synchronization software that's already written, and an ideal user interface
for remote controlling things. Even if they don't enable the personal radio
station mode that everyone's focusing on, adding Bluetooth to the iPod would
make the syncing of contacts, calendars and other low-volume data easier, and
would further cement the iPod's place as an accessory to your Mac (a position
that's been diluted a little by the addition of Windows compatibility).
Now we just need to convince Apple to make the damn thing.
|
|
|
|
Where can you see lions?
|
|
Only in Kenya, apparently.
|
|
|
|
SilverService 0.1 Released
|
|
SilverService is a little application
that I had the idea for a year ago, and I got round to writing a couple of
weeks ago. I've tidied it up, and written a ReadMe file, and now I'm foisting
it on the world under the GPL. I chose that particular licence because this is
something that a) I'd like to keep working on, and the GPL might offer a little
bit of leverage when getting permission from a future employer, and b) it's
something that could easily be embraced and extended as a shareware or
commercial app should someone feel like it, unless of course it's copylefted.
I'm starting the versioning at 0 because there are still some things I want to
add before I'll consider it to be complete. One is the ability to manage
bigger scripts (as opposed to just one-liners), and the other is some sort of
plugin or extension system.
I'd be very interested to hear any comments you have about the software; mail me.
|
|
|
|
RAM - Cureall or Panacea?
|
|
I've just installed the 512MB SODIMM that I bought with my birthday money
(thanks, guys) into the iBook, and the difference is, well, even better than I
was expecting. Applications launch faster, waking from sleep is near
instantaneous, switching between applications is no longer accompanied by five
or ten seconds of the spinning beachball, the sun is shining a little
brighter, and the shooting pains in my wrists are gone. Is extra RAM the
solution to all of the world's ills? I think it just might be.
(I may be exaggerating a tiny bit, but the difference really is remarkable.
Not that the iBook was particularly bad to start off with, but now running
four or five applications at once is that bit smoother.)
|
|
|
|
"Best Technical Documentation Ever"
|
|
Ben has pointed me at Why's (Poignant) Guide to
Ruby, which he quite correctly describes as the best technical
documentation ever. Read it and you'll see why. Scarily, it's also got me
(re)interested in Ruby - its full, pouting lips and SmallTalk-like use of
anonymous blocks is threatening to tempt me away from the housecoat / slippers
/ significant whitespace cosiness of Python. It's probably a temporary
infatuation, but you never know...
|
|
|
|
Added CLOTH
|
|
I've had the source for CLOTH, a rewrite of a simple library that I wrote at
AT&T, laying around for a while now (OK, a year and a bit). Anyway, I finally
got round to tidying it up, so here it is.
|
|
|
|
Yet Another Way To Waste Time
|
|
John Gruber's Daring Fireball is one
of the few blogs that I read regularly. It's always worth a look, and this
morning was no exception; he provides a link
Folklore. It's run by Andy Hertzfeld, one
of the team who designed the original Mac, and is basically a repository of
anecdotes about, for want of a better word, “hacker culture”. At
the moment, it's filled with stories from the Mac project, which is a
particular treat given it's 20th aniversary (yesterday). It's like
the Jargon File, but without
the whole ultra
right wing neo-conservative gun nut angle.
|
|
|
|
42, Actually
|
|
The BBC have a story
about the new, might-actually-happen, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie.
They've cast two of the high points of Love, Actually - Martin Freeman
(Tim in The Office), and Bill Nighy ("Thankyou, Ant or Dec... Kids, don't buy
drugs - become a rock star, and they give them to you for free!") - as Arthur
and Slartibartfast respectively. They're also retaining the vocal talents of
Stephen Moore, the original Marvin ("God. I'm so depressed."). It's nice to
see they're not screwing it up
yet, although they still have to cast almost everyone else. Johnny Depp as
Zaphod? We can only hope.
|
|
|
|
Spot The Difference
|
|
To celebrate the 20 years of the Macintosh, Apple have released a very
slightly different version of everyone's favourite Superbowl
commercial.
|
|
|
|
Small but Useful
|
|
Raging Menace has a bunch of little
Mac OS X programs by Alex Harper, and very useful they are too. SideTrack is a replacement
driver that lets iBook and PowerBook users reconfigure the trackpad to provide
scrolling areas, tap-to-right-click and on. MenuMeters provides a set of
neat meters for memory, CPU usage and so on, that don't take up much screen
real estate; I've found it particularly useful to confirm that it is indeed
more memory that I need, not a faster processor (when the paging indicator
goes off the scale, that's a hint). I'll probably have a look at SleepTight at some point
too. It gives Jaguar the Panther-like functionality to lock the screen when
the machine sleeps. Handy when you're carting the machine round, but I'm only
using the iBook at home at the moment, so I don't really need it just yet.
|
|
|
|
|