Some of you might have noticed that certain parts of the site (namely, the archives) have been inaccessible for the last few days, and others haven’t been updated (namely, the whole thing). Why, you ask? I’ve been talking about updating the back-end of the site a lot recently. On Friday I finally got the changes finished on the offline version of the site. One merge later with the online version and disaster. Here’s what went wrong:

1. My devbox (being Windows based) has no real understanding of file permissions. My online box (which runs on Linux) does. By scripting for the former, I failed to anticipate the “File Permission Denied” messages that my online site (rightly) gave me,
2. The archives. I completely forget to change the code for them, so it choked the minute the update went live. Doh,
3. The RSS feed died, inexplicably. It should be working again (I’ll know when this update goes online).

I had planned to fix all of this over the weekend, but a cold virus had other ideas. Until I get time to really thing about the problems facing the updated back-end, I thought it would be best to just switch to a back-up I made minutes before I made the change. (ALWAYS back-up before a big change, stuff like this is bound to happen).

One of the best Flash animations I’ve seen in a while: Triangle and Square. Short, funny and to the point.

Via Yeah, But Is It Art?.

It seems that I’m not the only one challenging people this week. Mark Pilgrim is playing with fridge magnets. My entry?

Seemed astute at the time.

Incidentally, this is the first time I’ve used an image on this site (in the content). Don’t know how it’ll look.

If you don’t know what PHP is, ignore this post and all others like it. If you do know, welcome to the VKPS PHP Scripting Challenge. Each week I’ll be asking people to create a script that solves a particular problem using the PHP scripting language. Quite simple really. It should help people think about efficient coding and improving their skills generally.

The first challenge is: Create a function that takes in two positive integers (whole numbers)and returns the greatest common divisor (GCD) of both. For those who don’t know, the GCD is the largest whole number which will divide another two integers exactly.

For example, 2 and 4 have GCD 2 (since 2 is the highest integer that divides them both exactly). 3 and 10 have GCD 1 and so forth.

So, any 2 positive integers will be passed in as parameters and your function should return an integer that is the GCD of them both. Send your functions to me at Solitude@vkps.co.uk. Easy!

Here are the rules:

• The winner is the person who writes the shortest script that works on sample integers that I will run on it,
• All functions must return a value,
• 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,
• GCD(0,0) is technically odd to define (some argue it should be 0), and hence ANY returned value for this case will be accepted (including no returned value),
• My decision is final, but the shortest (file size) script will be the winner

Closing date is: Monday, 24th February 2003. But if a better script is submitted over time it will be archived too (just not acknowledged as winning). Have fun.

So, if you’re looking at my site on the day this was posted, you’ll notice a slightly different style from usual. Why? Because it’s Valentine’s Day!

The important things about this (one-day) change is the time it took to implement. If you’ve got a site covered in tables, style throughout the mark-up and/or poorly conceived class names, an overhaul can realistically take a few days. I did this change in under 5 minutes.

How? If you look at my mark-up (View->Page Source, or the equivalent in your browser), you won’t see a single reference to colours or important images. All you will see is the basic information that makes up the page. That’s a good thing!

It means I only have to go into my stylesheets and change a few numbers to get a brand new design. Expect something more extreme for Easter.