My hand hurts. A lot. The muscles that connect my fingers are dead, the tendons aren’t letting me grip anymore and holding anything with any mass is damn near impossible. Twitchy-twitchy, it goes.

Why doesn’t it work, you ask? What foul fate befell my hand? What savagery mutilated it so? I’ll tell you: bowling. Today, I went bowling for four and a half hours. Now, that might not seem like an excess to some people (Americans who are obsessed with the sport), but to someone who has played only once in the last year it’s a lot.

It was, however, a very good 8 games. I managed to win 3 of those even though the machine was randomly giving us all extra pins (that we never knocked down) and taking some away. The scores were consistently over 100 (which is alright for where I live – not many people bowl regularly), and the atmosphere was competitive enough (without getting remotely serious) to make it seem like a real victory when winning.

Despite the loss of my hand for the next few days, I think I might go bowling more often. It’s fun, and cheaper than I remembered. And there’s always those crazy ball-polishing machines to keep people entertained.

I finally got around to integrating the fantastic Textile into Finetto (the CMS for this site). Thanks to Dean Allen for letting me use it.

Incidentally, this will be the first public post I make since the integration so if anything goes wrong, ignore all that praise.

Welcome to another PHP challenge! This time we’re looking at something fundamental to all programming languages (for practical purposes: sorting. I want a script that takes in an array of strings and sorts it (the strings will probably be filenames without paths). The rules?

• You must not use any of PHP’s predefined sorting functions,
• It must be case-insensitive (“imagic – 1” and “ImAgic – 1” are the same thing) but preserve case structure in the returned array,
• All scripts must return a sorted array and be named CISorter,
• All functions submitted are considered public domain and hence can be reproduced and used with or without credit to anyone by anyone (so no bitching if someone rips off your script after the challenge finishes),
• The winning script will be archived here for prosperity and to help others,
• New rules may be added here at any time and my decision is final,
• All functions should be submitted to solitude@vkps.co.uk,
• The deadline for all entries is 12pm GMT on the 26th March 2003,
• The winning script will be the one deemed the most efficient (mostly based on time efficiency but, if two entrants are close, spacial efficiency will be looked at.

Hope this one is challenging and can be reasonably done (unlike the last one). Good luck!

I’ve partially fixed the problems outlined in the article, “Failure”. Unfortunately a new one has creeped up: I can’t delete or edit any files at all. The last post I made was a test to check if everything was working. I can’t get rid of it. Very frustrating.

The changes that work (hopefully) are:

• The RSS has moved. To find it, either use standard auto-discovery or click the orange XML button on the navigation bar. This was done to facilitate future changes that are in motion,
• I finally added an accessibility statement to the site. This has been done for a long time but I didn’t have a link to it. Read at your leisure,
• The archives still work but, since updating, are a bit twitchy. If you notice anything odd, notify me.

I’m also going to be gone for a few days; probably Tuesday before any more updates are available. The next PHP challenge should go live around then too.

For those waiting on responses regarding PHP challenge #3, my apologies. I’ve been too busy to reply properly. This will be rectified by this time tomorrow! I’ve set a deadline now, so I’ll have some motivation to meet it. Most likely, I’ll extend the challenge deadline by a few days to allow for the amount of time I’ve not been answering people with regards to the challenge. Watch this space and the challenge entry itself for more details.

UPDATE: I’m abandoning this challenge. Too many different configurations of server exist (among other factors) for this to work properly all the time. Since the point of these challenges was to test people and provide code to the public (hence everything submitted is public domain), and I can’t helpfully do either, it’s over. Apologies to the people who submitted scripts already. I hope this unfortunate incident won’t stop anyone joining in next time.