OpenHuman is a page where you can open source yourself, kind of. It sounds crazy but the author says this is good because “openness is always good”. I think us humans have a strange future ahead of us.

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This weird and annoying problem I’ve spent quite some time on to solve today. The problem occurred on one of the websites that I administrate. The webshop on the site refused to go through with purchases from users accessing the website from domain.com, but worked fine for users accessing it from www.domain.com.

Don’t get me started on why the host doesn’t support mod_rewrite, but that was something that I didn’t have any power over, so I had to come up with some workaround.

If mod_rewrite had been supported, the problem would have been easy to solve. Then all I would have to do would have been to add the following lines to the .htaccess-file (I tried this and ended up with a 500-error):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com$1 [R,L]

So how did I solve this?
The solution is really ugly, and I’m not very proud of it, but it works for now. What I did was that I created an index.html-file (which didn’t exist, since the site is using PHP) like the one below:

Example-file (since the blog is restricted, and I cannot write html here). Right-click and save it. If you left-click on it, you will be redirected (duh!).

The next thing I did was a simple .htaccess-hack. Since my server loaded index.php before index.html, I added the following line to .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

(Apache looks for the files in the order they’re listed)

This took care of the entire problem. I never said it was a nice solution, au contraire, it’s really ugly, but it gets the job done.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve/solve this differently, please let me know.

Update 1: We describe a method to do this for a server over which you have full control in this article.

The other day me and Viktor were thinking that Viktor sure gets a lot of attention because of his awesome webcam. So we figured we ought to get one too! After all, I have a great view of Silicon Valley just out my window here. We could be the ‘Valley Cam’ or something catchy like that.

So we went down to Fry’s on Hamilton, found the IP enabled cameras and headed back. We scouted the best position of the camera, where it could be outdoors without being rained upon and so on. Once satisfied we happily went to configure the wireless networking functionality.

The camera we bought didn’t have wifi. It was the one camera in a whole section of IP enabled webcams that didn’t have wireless support!

Duh. So now we have to return it since we can’t get a cable out there. Well, at least we tried.

Our Blogger.com generated RSS/Atom feed is behaving rather oddly. It keeps bumping old posts up to the current date every time we make a new post. We apologize for this and we’re looking for a solution. Does anyone know anything about this problem?

I have recently had the peculiar experience of trying to hire software developers. I have read resumes, posted on different job boards, talked to people live and by phone.

The funny thing is that I have had to reject almost every single applicant.

You might say that perhaps I was too demanding. That’s certainly possible, but I don’t think that’s the case. The only thing I was looking for was the ability to independently solve simple programming problems. If I had lowered my requirements any further I don’t know what I’d be hiring but certainly it wouldn’t be software developers.

After having read dozens of resumes I felt confident in the abilities of a few candidates. They all had the right keywords in their resumes. They all had valuable real life experience. They all had been able to keep a job for more than a year. They had good educations.

So I administered my little litmus test. The test was to write a routine that finds the largest possible product of two numbers in an array of positive integers. I like this test because it’s just a couple of lines of code, so it shouldn’t take too long for the candidate – I don’t want to waste their time unnecessarily. At the same time there are many ways to solve the problem – some better than others.

I gave each candidate unlimited time to solve the problem. Since there weren’t any time constraints I didn’t think anyone would fail, and I expected to see excellent solutions.

What I saw was… strange. I gave the test to the people I thought were the top ten people from a set of 40-50 candidates from Silicon Valley.

Only two candidates came up with a working solution.

Even people who submitted their answers via email submitted non working solutions!

It’s not a large sample. Maybe I failed to find the top candidates out of all the applicants. But as anecdotal as it might be I am still shocked. How can highly educated software developers with many years of experience fail to write software to find the two largest numbers in a list?

What do you think? Is the educational system so horrible? Is software development fundamentally hard? Are resumes misleading? Did I just run across a bad batch?

Update 1: The cuzimatter links were updated on February 28th, 2007.