2006/02

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).

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Mon, 20 Feb 2006

When The Long Tail Wags The Dog

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Dan Bricklin (of VisiCalc fame) has posted When The Long Tail Wags The Dog, an interesting essay on the appeal of general purpose applications (e.g., spreadsheets) compared to specialised ones for popular cases (e.g., tax calculation). His argument is that, given that you can only learn a finite number of tools, you're going to pick at least some general purpose ones, as those are more likely to fulfill your specific needs when said needs diverge from the popular. My view is that he doesn't properly consider hard problems, where solving the problem, in your way or any other, is too difficult or costly for the user, but nevertheless he makes a good point.

A good book on the subject is A Small Matter of Programming, by Bonnie Nardi. The copy I borrowed proved invaluable during my PhD, and I've just picked up a copy to reread (under a tenner on Amazon Marketplace - thanks, Bournemouth University). I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in end-user programming.

Tue, 14 Feb 2006

The BDFL Has My Phone!

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Guido van Rossum has just got the same phone that I have - the excellent Nokia 6630. He's raving about the Python port for Series 60, so I may have to actually get round to using it as opposed to merely having the icon sat in the menu. Actually, I think this will really come into its own when Nokia introduce the E-series in a few months time; two of the models have full QWERTY keyboards (one Blackberry-style, the other folding), which will make using Python (and PuTTY) on the phone a whole lot nicer.

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