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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Spam plagiarism
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Like a lot of people, I use a bayesian spam filter, trained to sift the crap from the mail I'm interested in. It's pretty good; I can't remember the last time I got a false positive, and most spam goes straight into the junk folder. One or two still get through, though. Appending random poetry to the end of the message worked for a while, but training makes that less effective. However, today I received a message with the following tacked on the end:
Watching anything from a Michael Moore documentary to a CBC investigative report, I know I like reality. So why do I hate (and I mean that with the full intensity intended by someone who rarely uses that word) reality television shows? Because reality TV isn't insightful commentary. Voyeuristic melodrama that is anything but real has no chance of being more than annoying and boring. I used to think blogs were to e-zines what reality television shows were to dramas. Now, I think the comparison would be more effective if blogs were perceived more like independent film. And reality television scheduled in between soap operas.
My first thought was that random poetry had become more sophisticated, and vaguely topical. However, as I read it I became less and less convinced. Turns out that this was in fact written by a human; a quick Google search reveals the original post on someone's Blogspot blog. This may have been going on for a while, but it's the first time I've seen it. I think it's an interesting development; the blogoshpere is providing spammers with a near-infinite supply of chatty, lucid (more or less) prose that's far more realistic than machine-generated text could realistically hope to be. I'm not sure how effective bayesian filtering will be against such techniques, but my guess is that it more or less neutralises the positive score as an indicator, meaning that the negative score is more important. I'm curious to see what happens.
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Online WIMPs
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This looks quite interesting; a (fairly successful) attempt to simulate a standard desktop metaphor GUI using dynamic HTML. I don't think it's necessarily the way to go about the problem, though - the desktop metaphor is starting to creak around the edges after three decades - but it's still worth a look.
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Shiver Me Timbers!
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Aaar! As ye may well have noticed, today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day. This day be notable for two reasons; firstly, everyone is talking like a pirate, and secondly, there be significantly more people on the seven seas using software written by me. Hoist the mainbrace!
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Internet history, Manufactured for Your Convenience
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The Million Dollar Homepage has had a few articles in the press today; basically, someone who's about to start University is flogging permanent space on a mosaic-like page by the pixel (well, by the 100-pixel block), in order to finance his studies. It's brazen, it's novel, and I like it. Good luck to him.
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Inequality and Risk and Paul and Tim
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Paul Graham is always worth a read, and his recent essay on inequality and risk is no exception. It revisits a topic that he's written on before, namely that the economic inequality caused by rewarding productive behaviour (his example, starting a start-up) is a good thing, as it drives people to create wealth, thereby raising the general level of wealth for everyone. I agree with the basic thrust of the argument, but diverge when it comes to the details - for example, how much to tax the rich. Tim Bray (he of XML fame) has written an interesting and lucid response. I think my own opinion lies somewhere in the middle of the two viewpoints, but I'm not yet sure exactly where on that line.
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JustZIPit - The bright side of hard disk failure
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On Sunday, the hard drive on my PC decided to give up the ghost. Fortunately,
I managed to get the important stuff backed up before it went entirely, but it
does mean I've had to buy a new disk, and spend far too long yesterday and
today reinstalling things (fortunately, as I've got the iBook as well, I can
do work in parallel, but it's still a pain). Anyway, I was casting about for a
free (as in beer) Zip utility for Windows (2000 - I've not got XP), and I came
across JustZIPit, a neat
little piece of software that disposes of the overdone UI of WinZip and its
clones, and replaces it with two actions; click on an archive to decompress it
into a folder in the same directory, and select a context menu item to produce
an archive from a file or directory. Nice.
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Wil Wheaton is right...
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...this is the coolest watch ever.
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Oops...
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Yesterday, I knocked up a quick CGI interface so that I can post to this site more easily (hidden behind SSL and only accesible via a different hostname, natch). On the plus side, this means that I might update more frequently. On the down side, it means that I managed to accidentally publish several test entries. Oops. Still, normal service has been resumed. I hope.
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How Things Work
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Almost anyone who grew up in Britain will be familiar with Ladybird books -
small, thin hardbacks that went from basic reading ("Dick has a ball. See the
ball.") to fact-filled fun for older kids such as their "How Things Work"
series ("What's this, grandad?" "It's like HowStuffWorks.com in a book." "What's
a book?" etc...). Anyway, someone's gone to the trouble of scanning in the
1971 and 1979 editions of How Things
Work... The Computer, and they're great. I particularly like the 1971 idea of
"A small
digital computer designed for the businessman" (top left).
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Disaster!
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I just typed in my name while trying to customize Firefox's search behaviour,
and it seems that I'm no longer the internet's number one source of Rob
Hague related information! This site is only the second hit in
Google.
Some other Rob Hague in Australia
has taken the crown. I'll have to think of some way I can regain my Number 1
status, which might be tricky as my eponymous nemesis has actual
content that people may want to look at, as opposed to just a random bunch
of stuff and pictures of disected
chocolates. That's just not playing the game.
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Azuro lanuched
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Azuro was officially launched today, along
with our power-saving product PowerCentric.
Yay!
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Ring my friend, I said you'd call
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As of about 4:20 yesterday, I am now sufficiently qualified to manage a
Kwikimart. Woohoo!
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Manamana
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From this article on Disney's plan to relaunch The Muppets:
As if to illustrate this point, when I contacted Disney its vice-president of corporate communications for Europe replied: "Disney has deemed irreverence as one of the five core equities of the Muppets (humorous, heartwarming, puppet-inspired and topical being the other four)."
I would say that's pretty much case closed.
Indeed.
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Don't forget to vote
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(Especially if you live in March East.)
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Creative Commons
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I've added Creative Commons licences
(both human- and machine-readable) licences for the text of the site. Note
that these apply only to the text, and not to images or other stuff (I may
change my mind about that latter). I'm working under the assumption that, if
people want to, they'll copy the material here anyway, so I may as well
make explicit the conditions I'm happy for this to happen under.
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The Cutting Edge
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While going through my BlogLines feeds this morning, I came across this article
on SlashDot. It caught my eye because it's about the BroadBand Phone, which
was developed and initially rolled out at AT&T Labs, Cambridge, during my time
there. My time there before my PhD, four years ago. Honestly, if I
didn't have RSS keeping me up to date with the latest news, I don't know what
I'd do.
(Check out the BroadBand
Phone out, though - it's a cool project, and it's good to know it's
continued in some form despite the closure of the lab.)
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