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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