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Accidents prone
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Loading ...As I’ve recently learned its easy to get into an accident. I’ll be taking it a lot easier for the next couple of weeks. Why you might ask, well pretty easy: ‘I got hit by a city bus’. Damn thing broke my collarbone, meaning I won’t be doing much work for the next week or so.
Just have to figure out know if it is going to mess up my schedule for graduating. Well guess I’ll be making less posts as well, so until next time…
Researching notebooks
Damn, why does your hardware always stop working when you need it most. I’ve been using my laptop for three years now. And its been working great, fast, huge disc and little bit of memory. Until a couple of weeks back. First the battery died so I can’t move more then 10 feet from the power supply. Then last week it started freezing at random moments, which is really anoying when working on applications or documents.
So I started lookin into new laptops, will tried anyway. But I’m a bit picky on laptops now a days. I wan’t one that doesn’t way a ton, is reasonable fast and has plenty of memory to spare. So I ended up with two potential candidates:
The Dell 410 and the Sony Viao-SZ1
vs. 
My favorite at the moment is the Sony, because its a lot cheaper with similar options. The only downside is the lack of configuration. Dell just gives you that much more options to choose from. Hmm, what to do. I really don’t know anymore.
Apache: Redirecting users
Today you’ll be learning about the power of internal and external redirects that you can make using Apache. Why, because you can! No serious if you are running a dynamic website those URLs aren’t really user friendly now are they.
This is sort of a follow up on one of my previous posts about how to set up a webserver using Apache. So lets introduce you to what we’re going to do, its the magic called mod_rewrite.
Simple example
Lets start of simple. Say you have a very popular page that will be moved to a new location after some redesign of the website. This is posing a big problem, you have a lot of visitors on your page and search engines seem to like it. But if you move it you will loose the traffic from your visitors and search engines seem to hate you for it, just keep in mind it’s nothing personal. So lets do some magic shan’t we, make a file called .httaccess and add the following line:
RewriteRule old\.html new.html [R,L]
So what did we just do, well two things we told the server to redirect any visitor requesting old.html to new.html and we told the server this would be the last rule to be applied. In other words it would stop loading and immediately send the information to the visitor.
Making URLs more user friendly
The next step in rewriting and redirecting is building a set of rules to use for a dynamic website. Why? Because it is easier for the visitor to remember and search engines like them more. Most of the websites currently on the internet are dynamically generated, which also means uggly URLS like page.php?id=1&page=3§ion=34&blah=gun. Not really worth the effort of remembering now is it!
Lets order Apache to rewrite a cleaner for of this URL to the nice URL that is in the example:
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)\.html page.php?id=$1&page=$2§ion=$3&blah=$4
Did you notice how simple that was. Now keep in mind this URL is still not visitor friendly, but we are getting there. In an optimal situation you could remove the ugly numbers and replace them with text. Something like: New York/Harlem/Sales/Guns.html.
Redirecting bad visitors
All websites have them visitors that just don’t want to obey the rules set by the webmaster. After multiple warnings you just got sick of them and decided to block them based on IP. Here again Apache can help you somewhat, please not that this is not good if you expect huge lists. In the case of long lists you’re probably better of letting the server side script dealing with them. Anyway I’ll show you how to block someone based on IP.
RewriteCond {%REMOTE_ADDR} “10.133.221.*”
RewriteRule .* http://www.google.com [R,L]
I did not just block one user though. I just blocked every visitor that comes from the range of IP 10.133.221.1 to 10.133.221.224, just love that Apache!
Redirecting textual browsers
Another good reason to perform redirects are to give visitors a page they can actually see. There are still some people out there that use a text only browser to surf the web. Sure your page looks good, but for them it might be a nightmare. So lets redirect them to a low-fi version of the website shan’t we.
RewriteCond {%HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Lynx.*"
RewriteRule (.*) low-fi/$1 [NC,L]
Again I’m looking for the user agent Lynx, which is a textual browser, and I am redirecting every request to a low-fi address. Here’s the sweet part, they don’t even now it’s being done! These redirects are all internally and never get to the visitor. All they see is the proper version of your website.
Enjoying the redirects and the power of Apache, well go ahead and play some with it. This post is ending so I’ll see you next time I guess.
The good & the bad
Today I was given some good new and some bad news. More accurately would probable be that it is one message that means both to me. So lets begin with the good: I got the job! No more job hunting, phew. I’ll start working there June 1 and will be their DBA (Database Architect).
Now for the bad news: I got the job. This means I will have to stop my work at Eximion on June 1. I’ve been working there for little over half a year now as a tool developer. More specifically for the level editor they are going to use to build the games.
This won’t come easy to me. I really love the programming of the level editor and getting into the game engine we’re developing over at Eximion. Just hope they will find someone to fill the spot as tools developer as there are some pretty hard deadlines to make. There really making some cool shit over there right now. Even some games in the creation, which you will find out more about by visiting the Eximion website. Just look at the concept art below that I ripped from the official website.
Laudra Creature (Copyright Eximion)
Hope to see more coming from them soon.
Job hunting
Just a quick one today, I hate it when I have to little time to post. So I will be done with my internship in June and will start working then. Well hopefully anyway. Luckilly I’m currently negotiating with a company for a job at their back-end department.
With a little bit of luck that will all work out. If so I’ll be able to start as soon as I’m done with the internship. If not then I guess I’ll have to start doing some hard work. I really hate going through the wanted ads and finding a job that I may like with a company that will like me!
I’ll let you all know how it turns out. Oh and I haven’t forgotten my promise to write another article on configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL. Just have no time for it right now.
