I’ve made a few more changes to the site. Firstly, I finally got round to writing a new About page. Rather than just being a horrible mixture of previous about pages (themselves mixtures of earlier about pages), it’s an entirely original one. Hooray for not being lazy for ten minutes!

I also added a Code section to the site. This will archive various scripts (including the PHP challenge entries) and programs; for public consumption.

So, the BBC are testing the nation again. First time, they wanted to know our IQ (I did well), then our knowledge of current events and now… relationships. From objective subjects (IQ tests must be objective to count for anything) to something that is so subjective as to be viewed differently by everyone. Great thing to test.

Next up on the BBC’s schehdule is Favourite Things: you have to pick your favourite film out of a selection of 5 and are then castrated for getting it “wrong”. If only Stalin had thought of this.

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!