iamcal.com Since May 2000

If you use mod_rewrite and you've started getting random errors in your logs that look like "rewritten query string contains control characters or spaces", it's because of a security patch that breaks using backrefs as query params if they contain spaces (and certain other special characters). For example:

RewriteRule ^foo/([^/]+)$ foo.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]

This will still work for foo/bar but break for foo/bar%3Abaz. You need to add the B flag as follows:

RewriteRule ^foo/([^/]+)$ foo.php?page=$1 [L,QSA,B]

I've updated my 2022 reading list with all the 112 books I read in the year.

Highlights were Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.

A convergence of two of my interests: Tuble is a Worlde-style game where you guess Tube Stations.

AWS pro-tip: take a look through cost explorer every now and then, just in case you can reduce your bill by 65%, just by disabling unused services. And switch from Cloudfront to Cloudflare for anything simple that uses a lot of egress bandwidth.