About rhuvok.com


Who is rhuvok?

rhuvok in a suit

Good question. My real name is Colin Bate. I currently live in Leganés, which is just outside of Madrid, Spain. I have a BCSc from Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada and I am currently finishing up my Erasmus Mundus Advanced Masters of Science in Network and eBusiness Centered Computing. More details of what I am up to at the moment are available at EuropeAdventure.ca.

I have been designing for the web in a professional capacity for over ten years now. I started out with a company in grade nine and have since taken to freelancing and started my own company not too long ago: rhuvium Information Services.

This site is my personal project and has existed in this form for four years and in some form for over six.

What does rhuvok mean?

Unlike some people’s nicknames or ‘handles’, it doesn’t have a profound beginning. It is more or less the combination of the letters rh from rhombus, a computer zine I published in high school and the letter k, which for some reason is my favorite letter. The uvo just seemed to fit. The idea was that this name is unique (even on the Internet) and I revel in that fact. :)

What software/hardware powers this site?

Currently the site is running on torch which is the undergraduate server for the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie. It is a pretty hefty machine, but it is obviously used for many things by hundreds of users. Torch is running Apache v1.3.31 and PHP 4.3.10.

On the software side of things, I am running a custom built content management system called echo! that has been a work in progress for three years. It is written in PHP and it connects to a MySQL backend. All of my coding including the XHTML and CSS are done by hand using the fabulous Mac text editor: TextMate. A lot of the images in my posts are prepared using EasyCrop. Most everything else is prepared using Photoshop or Macromedia Flash.

Anything else?

I think that about covers it. Enjoy yourself here — explore the archives and you can even sign up for an account to access the forums.

rhuvok

Written by Colin Bate