Robin

Real 'blog being syndicated

2006-12-01T01:35:52Z

I just found out that someone who I don't know is syndicating my actual blog with livejournal, so if any folks on here are interested in following it, you can add robins_blog to your friends list.

Thanks to whoever did this, it's appreciated.

Well there goes the thesis...

2004-06-03T08:10:14Z

For better or for worse, I have rediscovered NetHack. A real time-sucker of a game, but worth playing if you like something a bit old-school.

There goes my free time...

Auckland is Useless

2003-12-22T01:29:54Z

Stupid crime rate. Stupid car thieves. (*)

So updating hasn't happened quite as much as I hoped, mainly due to lack of internet access.

Currently in Auckland, carless. Not much stuff in it, so not the end of the world. Between the 4 of us it probably adds up to around $1000 or so. If I'm lucky I may get new boots and a new diskman out of it, but the $300 excess on my insurance eats into that a little bit.

Most annoyingly, Catherine lost a full film. That would be the most irreplaceable out of everything.

(*) Apologies to players of "Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition".
Oh, that reminds me, I've been buying up a lot of Cheapass games, which is all good (and I still have fortunately)

Travelling update - readers digest form

2003-12-15T22:23:27Z

OK, I've been a bit slack about this, so here is details on where I've been and so forth.

On Saturday the 6th, we finally go ourselves organised and headed away from Dunedin, reaching Christchurch. Stayed there with an old friend of mine for the night, and the proceeded on to Blenheim. Visited my brother, who is at the Air Force base there, and then camped overnight beside a river.

The next day we went to Picton, pottered around there for a few hours and crossed the ferry in the evening. Spent a few (about 5) days in Wellington, staying with Brad and Cathy. Bought a few things that I didn't need but are good nonetheless (games, books, stuff like that) and met up with a goodly number of people that I hadn't seen for a while.

After leaving Wellington, we went to Kapiti to meet up with Ben, who was joining us from that point on, exchanged the car for bigger one, stayed the night, and then on to Levin. Got there, stayed the night at Jen's place. Proceeded on in the morning to Palmeston North where we tented on the backyard of some of Catherine's relations, moved on in the morning, and stopped on the south shore of Lake Taupo, near a place called Tauranga-Taupo (confusing because it isn't inbetween Tauranga and Taupo, but is about 20 mins short of Taupo). Pitched tent in a rest-stop, played Kill Doctor Lucky until late and eventually slept.

Then we went to Rotarua, where I am now, and it smells funny (note to the non-NZers: Rotarua is the home of a lot of geothermal activity, and the place smells of sulphur (think rotten eggs)). Stayed in a very convenient holiday-home/flat type thing that we got cheap due to people knowing people knowing people.

There you have the itinerary to date, we have been pretty much playing the travelling by ear which is quite good. Hopefully I'll get around to updating this in the future a bit more regularly, and will be able to provide a non-condensed version for your reading pleasure :)

I'm not sure where we are going after Rotarua, but it will be probably Tauranga. Eventually we will probably get to Hamilton, the Coramandal, Auckland and so on.

More as I get around to writing it :)

Mars closeness

2003-08-25T12:33:14Z

On the 26th (I don't know what time zone, but I suspect something USAian) Mars is at its closest point to earth. Provided it isn't cloudy, over the next few days, you should get some very nice views of it.

For those interested, here is a screenshot from Stellarium showing where to look at about 00:30, from Dunedin. It isn't too far away from zenith (straight up), slightly to the north.

For those interested...

2003-08-21T23:33:50Z

...in the quake, I had my computer pulling the drums down every hour.

Check out this.

(pass this URL around to interested folk, just don't get me slashdotted :)

Brief summary: initial shock was 7.1 at 00:14, 70km NE of Te Anau, and there was a 6.2 aftershock at 02:12.

I'm going to have to give my grandparents a call, they live in Te Anau.

In the tradition of Buffy...

2003-06-24T11:34:26Z

...there is a Harry Potter musical.

Check it out here.

People downloading music should have their computer destroyed

2003-06-19T07:22:00Z

...according to a US Senator. Seems just a little bit harsh to me (the technical difficulties aside, I could see people complaining about $2000 worth of damage for attempting to download an album).

The article lives here.

Update:
Oh, the irony. Turns out he advocates destroying his own computer. Look here.

Hopefully interesting writeup #1 - Trepia

2003-06-03T12:41:54Z

Saw on slashdot today an interesting sounding program called Trepia. My goal was to download and play with it a bit to see what it was like, however currently there is only a windows version and when running using Wine[0] it was convinced that I wasn't connected to the internet, which made it rather difficult to test.

So instead I'm going to ramble a bit about what I read about it, which piqued my interest for no apparent reason.

In a nutshell, the program behaves a bit like any IM program, except it adds to your roster (or buddy list, or whatever) people who are geographically close to you.

I'm curious about the geographical linking. Presumably, it does it based on IP address, given that it never asked where I was. However, even within New Zealand that's not feasible for people on ADSL, as (so far as I can tell) we all share an address pool within the ISP. I guess it would work well for dialup however. And anyone behind a NAT[1] box is going to appear to be in Limbo with the rest of the private-address-space people.

That aside, I suspect that it could still work moderately well for the bulk of the end users. I do wonder a bit how long the interest of talking to random people would last. It may have a similar appeal to finding random people on ICQ. (Can you specify a location when doing that? It's been a very long time since I've used the normal ICQ client)

So, if anyone trys it out, I'd be interested to hear your impressions. The program can be found here, and seems to be well behaved with regards to not leaving much guff behind when uninstalled.

[0] A windows subsystem (not really an emulator, but it does a similar job) for Linux.
[1] NAT allows multiple computers to access the internet, all behind one connection. However it means that all the computers have a fake address, one which is never used on the internet proper.

First p0st!

2003-05-31T01:02:14Z

OK, I've succumbed. Finally set one of these things up. However, I don't really think that I'm interesting enough to write about, and so I'll probably end up using it as an incentive to write things that interest me, and post them here for a bit of an audience.

This may be subject to change, we'll see.

Also note that my page is pretty default as I write this. As I have creative spells, this will change in the (hopefully) near future.