Tibs Wilderness

A good night indeed.

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:25:22 GMT

So I forewarned in a previous post, I was having my birthday party last night. I opted against the drunk post this time around, because frankly, I didn't have the time to make.

It was 4am when I finally packed it in, 5 when everyone 'cept those who were sleeping here took off. One friend slept in his car (I don't know why, there's plenty of sofa's in the house) and the rest took a taxi home.

I've discovered my limit is half a 700ml bottle of Jamesons, a few glasses of Jim Beam and a one to two six packs of Carlton before drinking becomes so incredibly painful that continuing on is considered a bad idea.

Between drinking games, breaking up one potential fight between a couple of friends and trying to keep my balance, I'd say it was an eventful and successful night. Comparison wise, I enjoyed my 18th more, but, thems the breaks.

Very contented

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:17:58 GMT

Had a great day for my 21st. Got a new monitor and an iPod touch. Two toys that will bring me hours of entertainment. Really loving the fact I'm typing this post with my iPod.

My first bought app with this dealy was a telnet/ssh client. Chatters worked well and I was able to reboot IU with it easy enough. So that's awesome.

I still maintain that an app of somekind to recieve messages would be incredibly awesome. Realistically it probably won't happen, but it's worth sewing the seed.

Outside of that, my new monitor rocks, the only negative part is developing websites for if might be a little harder at 1680x1050 resolution. But if any problems occur, I'll probably discover them tomorrow.

Friend came over today and treated me to a really nice steak. That and several beers later, here I am. =D Even got a couple of freebies because he's the step son of the owner and generally if we drink there, we taste test potential beer they might end up selling. It owns.

With that I'm taking my drunk self to bed. See you crazy cats tomorrow!

Ah! 21!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:55:34 GMT

That's right folks, it is now exactly 12:00am my time, that makes it officially the 12.11.2009. This means that I am now 21 years of age, making me a full adult.

Now I get to go to bed, sleep, and awaken to a really expensive gift from my two brothers AND my new monitor. I sense a good day ahead.

On the other hand: Stupid coming of age.

--(Also, BYOND's clock for my time zone is off by five minutes.)

You know what I want?

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:15:59 GMT

I've sampled a lot of beer in my time (comes with a legal drinking age being at 18), friends and I tend to find the weirdest sounding imported beer we can find but haven't consumed before, buy and drink it.

With these purchases we've discovered that next to Australia, Russia makes a nice beer (along with a nice Vodka).

But in all my experience, I've had sweet beer, bitter beer, ordinary nothing-special beer, terrible american beer (don't deny it, your beer is horrible) I want a sour beer.

Someone invent that, make billions, and give me a lifetime free supply... Or some of the profits as it's my idea. Sponges, taking all my hard work.

Working around .htaccess, compelte control of the URL.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:21:34 GMT

So for the past little while I was looking for a way to do clean URLs (url.com/articles/something) without resorting to .htaccess redirects for the pages.

I found my every attempt in doing it using .htaccess to result in limited usability often breaking with unexpected input. Experiments on tiberath.com resulted in massive headaches until I eventually gave up on it.

So I gots to thinking of how to do it another way. With a little conferring with Mobius, we decided that PHP is a fairly strong language, and we should have no troubles parsing the URL with it.

Unfortunately for us, this sacrifices a little bit of speed (negligible amounts really, but efficiency nuts will yell at us. Eh, they know exactly where they can go. Given today's computers, the milliseconds it takes to run the following functions aren't worth sacrificing the new freedom I gave myself) but makes up everything in usability.

So I got to work, and with a little regex help from Mobius, came up with a solution I was happy with. Of course, anyone who isn't me will probably find the scripts useless, as I format my URL's far different than most people would normally do.

For the most part, you'll find most URLs formatted something not unlike .com?action=account&page=register where I'm more inclined to run through the alphabet: .com?a=account&b=register only varying from this method with important things like an id number: .com?a=members&b=profile&id=20

With this in mind, I wrote the following PHP script.

function fix_uri($uri, $nockey = false) {
    $new_uri = array();
    $i = 97;
    foreach($uri as $key) {
        if(substr_count($key, "=")) {
            $key = explode("=", $key);
            $new_uri[ckey($key[0])] = $nockey ? $key[1] : ckey($key[1]);
        } else if($key) {
            $new_uri[chr($i)] = $nockey ? $key : ckey($key);
            $i++;
        }
    }
    return $new_uri;
}
    
function ckey($t) { 
    return strtolower(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9@]/','',$t)); 
}

A quick Google search for the .htaccess code I needed resorted in this .htaccess script:

RewriteEngine on

#Auto-redirect all pages to index.php
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Effectively, all URL's are redirected to index.php. With exception to files and sub-folders. Which was a major bonus I never actually took into consideration when designing this script (and something that had pained me terrible when attempting it with .htaccess redirects).

Throwing this script in my header.php (hearder.php is called before any output to the website is done, and generally only outputs stuff that are on all pages at the very bottom of the file):

$uri = fix_uri(preg_split('![/|?|&|;|$]!', urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])));
$uri_a = fix_uri(preg_split('![/|?|&|;|$]!', urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])), true);

I'm given a clean URL and a complete URL. The resulting executions give me all kinds of crazy URLs to work with, effectively, something like this: ~~http://www.isorath.com/OMG/this/is/A/valid/ url?that=SeEms&to=enJOY?working=properly!!/using/ all&kinds=of?weird=methos;that;I;seem=to/enjoy doing~~ - ONLINE EXAMPLE NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

Of course, a URL would never get that big and ridiculous, but you get the idea behind it. Using my own style of formatting URLs (which is in fact, quite handy for say, me, because I don't actually have to change anything in pre-existing websites (minus tiberath.com, that I did differently)), I'm able to provide incredibly clean URLs at the same time as giving myself absolutely no headaches. And if I was to say update the page and give it another division in the URL, I'd have to change absolutely nothing.

The complete index.php you saw on the link above is simply this:

<?
    function fix_uri($uri, $nockey = false) {
        $new_uri = array();
        $i = 97;
        foreach($uri as $key) {
            if(substr_count($key, "=")) {
                $key = explode("=", $key);
                $new_uri[ckey($key[0])] = $nockey ? $key[1] : ckey($key[1]);
            } else if($key) {
                $new_uri[chr($i)] = $nockey ? $key : ckey($key);
                $i++;
            }
        }
        return $new_uri;
    }
    
    function ckey($t) { 
        return strtolower(preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9@]/','',$t)); 
    }
    
    $uri = fix_uri(preg_split('![/|?|&|;|$]!', urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])));
    $uri_a = fix_uri(preg_split('![/|?|&|;|$]!', urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])), true);
        
    echo("The complete URL is: " . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "<br /><br />The clean URL is: <pre>" . print_r($uri, true) . "</pre><br /><br />The direct URL is: <pre>" . print_r($uri_a, true) . "</pre>");
?>

I'm contented with this. The major setback to it I can foresee but haven't yet tested, is it might mess with Search Engine Optimisation (as technically, all pages will report as index.php). Again, I'm not particularly phased. According to my Google Analytics page, the URLs are reporting correctly, so it's possible Search Engine Optimisation will be saved (or improved if you didn't have any kind of clean URL before hand).

That's all there is to it really. Anyone who uses PHP and hates the thought of .htaccess is free to use it and do as they see fit.

[Update]
The results of the now offline example URL.

The complete URL is: /omg/this/is/a/valid/url?that=seems&to=enjoy?working=properly/using/all&kinds=of?weird=methos;that;I;seem=to/enjoy

The clean URL is:

Array
(
    [a] => omg
    [b] => this
    [c] => is
    [d] => a
    [e] => valid
    [f] => url
    [that] => seems
    [to] => enjoy
    [working] => properly
    [g] => using
    [h] => all
    [kinds] => of
    [weird] => methos
    [i] => that
    [j] => i
    [seem] => to
    [k] => enjoy
)



The direct URL is:

Array
(
    [a] => omg
    [b] => this
    [c] => is
    [d] => a
    [e] => valid
    [f] => url
    [that] => seems
    [to] => enjoy
    [working] => properly
    [g] => using
    [h] => all
    [kinds] => of
    [weird] => methos
    [i] => that
    [j] => I
    [seem] => to
    [k] => enjoy
)

Drink Pepsi, annihilate thousands!

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:13:53 GMT

So there's this "new" advertisement for Pepsi Max on television lately. I don't know if other countries get it or even if other states do, but it's pretty stupid.

It starts off with a girl and a guy just getting out of bed, clearly after a one night stand. She says she's going for a shower, so he goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge. Insert bottle shot of Pepsi Max.

Queue there's a knock on the door, it's the girls parents. Her being in the shower can't answer it, and given the guys look, they probably suspect she's all innocent. So naturally, he did what every guy does in such a 'difficult' situation. He drinks the Pepsi Max.

Suddenly, a swat team bursts through the window, and begin to tidy the place up. Apparently they have guns that can shoot covers onto and under beds, effectively making it. Why not. So they clean the place.

Cut to the woman getting out of the shower. She walks into her lounge to see the place all cleaned and her male friend on the window with one of the swat team. He makes a "Call Me" sign and they jump out.

The stupid thing is, in the background of that shot, you can see bombs landing on all the surrounding suburb. So they've just cleaned this flat and are now laying waste to the surrounding area. I know carnage makes me want to drink Pepsi Max!

(I'm lying. I'm staying with Coke. And none of that other flavour diet or zero crap.)

Ah! November!

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:18:03 GMT

I have three 21st birthday parties to attend this month (one being my own!). My party on the 14th, a friends party on the 21st and another friends party on the 28th. I foresee my liver hating me.

I should probably forewarn that if I have access to a computer, I'll undoubtedly post something stupid here, I always seem to.

Hm, I'm going to need some cigars!

So I finished Buso Renkin.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:41:11 GMT

So I finally finished Buso Renkin. It's quite an interesting title to say the least. Luckily as the show progressed, the problems I'd mentioned earlier appeared to be less noticeable, still there however.

I actually found myself enjoying this title, which is completely unlike me. Normally crude humour and stupidity turn me away from shows, but that apparently hasn't been the case here. I guess it was executed well enough that it didn't bother me as much as it could have. Could have done without the absurd amount of crotch shots however...

One unfortunate thing about this title however, if it gets a big enough fan base on BYOND, you could probably expect an absurd amount of games based on it. Mostly because there is a limitless potential for it. The Buso Renkin objects themselves are usable by both humans and homunculus alike, and the powers involved can only be limited by ones imagination. Hey, at least it'd be refreshing.

But I'm not here to review the anime (I did that here), just to state that I enjoyed it.

(Speaking of which, I also finished watching Heroic Age the other day. A truly fantastic title! More on that later however.)

It's about time.

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:51:30 GMT

For the last few years, I've found myself wanting to drink more coffee than tea, the only problem with this was: I hated the taste of coffee.

Why would someone want to drink something he clearly hates the taste of, you ask? Simple: Efficiency. Coffee is a great source of caffeine, something I've been absorbing into my body, every day, for the past fifteen years. As up until recently, I've been drinking multiple cups of tea every day for the aforementioned fifteen years, averaging from anywhere between 3 to 12 a day (during the particularly bad days the last time I quit smoking, I was going on 20 or more). Aside from tea, I had a 600ml bottle of coke every day for the last three years of my school life.

(I like to think all the milk in the absurd amount of tea I drink is the reason I've never broken or so much as fractured a bone in my life. But I doubt it.)

And after much trials, it's finally happened. You see, the human body is an interesting thing, apparently, you only have to suffer the taste of something you hate so many times before you get used to it, and maybe even begin to enjoy it. Of course, coffee was a foul bitter taste and that couldn't be helped.

So over the past few months, I've been slowly subjecting myself to the taste of various available coffees in the house and just now, I found myself enjoying the taste of one. Hurrah. Many, many sleepless nights to come, working away in my dark corer on various projects.

If you hadn't already told, several times, I'd probably care.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:06:39 GMT

So I watched the first four episodes of Buso Renkin last night. I figured I might as well give it a try, I have nothing better to do with my time.

Unfortunately, this title has gone to opposite way to Inuyasha. Instead of recapping every episode thus far, they decided to re-explain points that had just been explained, several times, at great length, whether you want them to or not.

I'm fairly sure from the first to forth episode, they only changed every second sentence. You can make a drinking game out of this anime, every time they say "that's the power of (his/my) Buso Renkin", take a shot. Unfortunately, you'd be dead from alcohol poisoning by the third episode.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the need for filler, but I'd much rather listen to corny anime-themed Japanese music with a bunch of dancing girls every time they need something to bridge gaps. Sure, it has nothing to do with anything that's just happened, but it wouldn't bore me to tears, and is easier to skip without suddenly missing key plot points.

Seriously, I'd prefer this for filler.
(Sexual References... I think)

Yes, I'm also aware the song is Swedish.

Other than that small complaint, it doesn't bother me. The male protagonists inherit stupidity tends to annoy me less than your average comic relief character. Unfortunately, the comic relief character appears to be one of his friends, but I can't be certain only four episodes in. But on the plus side, the females keep referring to him as a pervert, and he's already tried to give the protagonist a porn magazine. This is a bonus.

At the moment, the series can go either way. Once I've either watched it all, or at the very least, as much as I can tolerate, I'll give a better review about it.