Robin Lee Powell's Hobbies Page

Lojban

I am currently studying Lojban, a beautiful, elegant constructed spoken language (i.e. a language to be spoken by people, and not one for programming). It's based on predicate logic, although it's not nearly as cold as that makes it sound. I'm enjoying it so much that I'm really starting to hate English.
I am the official web admin for lojban.org, as well as the person who hosts the site.
I have a page of lojbanic stuff I've done.

I maintain, or have created, a variety of pieces of software, mostly freely available in one sense or another.

I've written a TUI client for the XMMS2 music server called Cluck.
I'm writing a page on migrating from Opera to Firefox. Opera is a non-free, very good web browser. FireFox is free web browser that so far I'm undecided on, but I'm giving it a good try. Having been spoiled by Opera, I spent a fair bit of time re-creating some of Opera's features on Firefox, hence the page.
I've made a multilingual patch for the mooix MOO, which so far as I'm aware turns it into the first fully multilingual MUD ever.
As a side effect of the moz project, I have written and expanded upon syntax highlighting and indentation files for Oz.
a DC-Net Implementation, which is a system for cryptographically secure anonymous communications networks; and Goggle (Current Version: 2.8.1), which is a turn viewer for the Play By E-Mail game Galaxy.
I've written a shell script for word lookup in lojban. The vocab files need to be gotten from the lojban website.

I have a method of personal data backup that seems to be fairly novel, in that it has all of the following properties: I back up multiple OSes on multiple machines, I synchronize it offsite, the offsite backup is encrypted, I don't have to synch everything every time I backup (which is daily, by the way) and it's free (except for the accounts).
I've written a document on something that has been specifically declared impossible (look for "Can I `apt-get arch-upgrade` from an already installed i386 debian?"), which is always fun. I've written up how to upgrade a Debian system from i386 to amd64. This is very much not for the faint of heart.
I used to hate RedHat a whole big bunch, but then someone showed me how to install apt on RedHat (apt, or dpkg or whatever, is Debian's package management system), and now I hate it less.

I wrote a page on threading in Windows mail clients because I found myself explaining that stuff to people a lot. Currently, by far the best threading Windows mail client is GMail, a web-based e-mail service run by Google.
I program computers as a hobby. I am currently on a quest to become a generalist in the field of programming language design. I may or may not eventually design one myself (I'm thinking about designing one based on lojban), but regardless I want to become highly knowledgeable about the underlying issues. To that end, here's a diatribe on programming language design features, which explains in some detail what I like and dislike about various features that various programming languages use. It's amazingly incomplete. And horribly out of date; I'm not even sure how much I agree with anymore.
I am a crypto geek. I enjoy encrypted e-mail, but since no-one has ever sent me any, I no longer know the passphrases to my PGP keys. Oh well.
I keep telling myself I'm going to get a wearable computer. I'm still waiting for a display that does more than 800x600 at this point.

I do quite a variety of gaming, and I've made myself a wiki for writing up gaming-related stuff.

I've also made a wiki for more general stuff, currently mostly sysadminning related.

I was the President of the Waterloo Science Fiction Club, whose mandate is to promote interest in and information about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Gaming.
I was the Sysadmin for the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club, where this page is hosted.
I used to do a talk on Privacy and Anonymity in E-Mail about every eight months when I went to Waterloo (I now live in California :). Ah, memories.

To my great surprise, there's still a CSC page about that talk. Gives me warm fuzzies.
I was, long ago, in the process of creating a new MOO/MUD server called MOZ, which is written in the Oz language, a very elegant multi-paradigmatic language.

MOZ is designed to have all the good features of CoolMUD and LambdaMOO that I can reasonably implement, with the addition of support for multiple command languages (currently English and Lojban), the feature of being written in the language it implements, capability security, and more.
I am the official maintainer for CoolMUD (Current Version: 2.3 Beta), a very nice mud server with a lot of unique features such as the ability to link two servers together seemlessly. Or, at least, they were unique features at the time. I don't actually use it, though.