/*OMG! I Figured it Out!*/

A Programmers Eureka

I did not realize before today that, in the XHTML specification, when a URL contains an & (amphersand)(which they often do in these days of client and server side scripting) that it should always be escaped. Example: http://www.example.com/page.html?value1=1&value2=2

The reason being that if you were to assign a value to a "get variable" such as "lt" a browser may actually treat "lt" as the < (less than) symbol, rather than a variable, as it should.

Example: http://www.example.com/page.html?gt=1&lt=2 may end up being treated by a browser as: http://www.example.com/page.html?gt=1<=2 (note that the "<" symbol is in place of "&lt") which could lead to further complications.

I Am.
I dream.
I laugh and I weep.
I live and I die.
I create and I destroy.
I am loved and I am hated.
I love and I hate.
But most of all, and above all else,
I am loved as I love.
Therefore, I am till the day that,
I once was.

- Chris Hughan, Originally Dated 2002-04-28 01:47

The above is the only piece of poetry that I have ever been all that proud of writing. I recently decided to recover it using the Internet Archive (wayback machine.) It was inspired by the movie "AI: Artificial Intelligence."

Think: "Cogito, ergo sum" (Latin for: "I think, therefore I am.") A philosophical statement used by René Descartes, which became a foundational element of Western philosophy. "Cogito ergo sum" is a translation of Descartes' original French statement: "Je pense, donc je suis", which occurs in his Discourse on Method (1637).

When burning a MP3 CD to play in your Pioneer Premier DEH-P670MP CD player in your car, please be sure NOT to set the file system mode to ISO 9660:1999... It will not play in your deck. I got three god damned coasters to prove it. ISO 9660 probably works (untested, but I'm pretty sure it's documented that it does) and ISO 9660 + Joliet works for sure (tested, but I bet that the Joliet file system goes unused, still for maximum compatibility this is a safe bet.)

While working today at the pizza place I noticed the name "Scrooge, E" popped up on our call display while taking an order. For some strange reason I started wondering to myself "I wonder if I'll get any tip for this delivery."

I just spent an extra two hours trying to figure out how to get Apache HTTPd's mod_rewrite to strip the query string from bad (Code Red ISS worm) requests, all because I neglected to read two lines of text. You strip the query string simply by placing a ? (question mark) at the end of the Substitution URL in RewriteRule. I am notorious for skipping past all the boring text that describes how something works, skipping straight to the examples so that I can copy and paste them to try them out. Examples containing the trailing "?" were staring me in the face but I neglected to try them because I assumed that having a trailing "?" would just produce a rewritten URL with a trailing "?". It doesn't. Of course, never assume is (as it always has been for me) just one more rule that I set out for myself with the best intentions in mind, but never follow, because if I did it would [insert lame excuse here.]