Woohoo, I have an interview.

Before they offered me a face-to-face interview they wanted to do a telephone interview first. This consisted of a series of technical questions I really wasn’t prepared for (“What’s the difference between an inner join and an outer join in SQL?”, “What are the restrictions on cookies?”, “What do the HTTP status codes 302 and 303 mean?”).

But since they offered me the interview I guess I did quite well :)

(On an unrelated note, “Woohoo” is not in the Google spellchecker database but “Whoop” is….)

jobs, interviews, web developer, PHP developer

Oooh, I’m now getting between ten and twenty spam comments a day. They’re all obviously from the same source but all for different sites, from different names and different IP addresses. They still all have a very obvious form and content so the spam filter in Wordpress is catching them. One final odd part, they’re all on the same post too…

Me and a friend of mine came up with an idea a while ago for a new website. Basically it would document really annoying things people do in a semi-anonymous way.

The motivation came mainly from people being completely unable to park their car properly. The most distinctive is one I unfortunately I have no evidence of. There was a minibus parked in a disabled parking space. Fair enough; it was probably carrying old people. The bad part is it was so badly parked that it actually blocked four parking spaces!

Anyway here’s a couple of pictures of some rather bad parking (not quite enough space to fit a car in there). It’s tough to know who to blame since we don’t know who parked first, but that white van seems quite far from the white line to the right. This may become a regular thing… just search Technorati for inconsiderate :)

The creator of Galactic Horde has started a new development and news blog.

Go check it out :P

GH, Galactic Horde, new blog, online games, shockwave, shockwave games

I recently applied for a job and they wanted some URLs of examples of my work. At the same time my server went down :( But it’s up again now obviously.

I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.

It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.

Not much to say except, yay, it’s December.

For anyone outside the UK, I’m referring to the digital TV broadcast by British Sky Broadcasting (if that is still their name).

They are stuffing far too many channels on there and as a consequence the quality is dropping. Before, you could occasionally see compression artefacts on the images, now they are everywhere. It’s especially noticeable with full screen changes when it’s dark. And once you know what it looks like it is impossible to ignore.

I have a scary theory though. Next year they are going to release SkyHD - basically Sky transmitting a High Definition signal. Now if they compress the channels the way they are now then it really won’t help since compression artefacts look worse at high resolutions. Unless the reason they are compressing channels is to fit higher bandwidth HD signals in. Or they could be doing it intentionally to exaggerate the gains from HDTV…

I’ve started editing more on Wikipedia. Not entirely sure why, but it’s quite fun.

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, it’s a free online Encyclopedia that is editable by anyone. Also all the content is completely redistributable providing the license is kept with it. It’s theoretically multilingual too but only a handful of languages actually have content to rival print Encyclopedias. But the others are coming along.

I’ve also written a couple of articles that I don’t really know anything about - I just distilled stuff from various online sources. It’s easier than I thought too.

Me on Wikipedia/

You may have noticed that all the tags on my posts point to URLs of the form /ob-search/_search+term_. That’s a reasonably simple bit of mod rewriting. This article is aimed at people who can do that.

I wanted a way for the search box to point to the same pages. I figured I could point the search form at a fake page and redirect (it with a HTTP status code of 302 so it is sent to the browser and the user sees it in his/her address bar) to the nice URL (which would secretly redirect to the real one).

So I came up with the following:

RewriteRule ^fake-search.php?s=(*.)$ /ob-search/$1

It didn’t work. Unfortunately Apache strips of query strings before the get to Rewriting and the reattaches them. So to sort it out I had to hack off the query string with one rule (which is accessed using an environment variable) and then extract the bit I wanted with another rule:

RewriteRule fake-search.php /-%{QUERY_STRING}? RewriteRule ^/-s=(.*)$ /ob-search/$1 [R=302] RewriteRule ^/ob-search/(.*)$ /index.php?s=$1

The third rule just does the “simple” redirecting as a said in the beginning.

The ? appending the query string on to the end afterwards. The hyphen in the first two lines could be anything you want - it’s just something for the second rule to recognise.

To finish it off I altered the search form’s action attribute to point to fake-search.php and all was well :) Try it :D