Understanding Nothing

Things to expect if you’re considering eating in the Chelsea Winebar, Belfast, and planning to to pay by card, rather than cash:

• your card to repeatedly decline
• the staff to seem embarrassed for you, but insist on another card
• your second card to also decline
• the manager who is subsquently called to explain that their machine doesn’t really work very well
• said manager to try to claim that you need to understand that this is out of their control
• said manager to explain that if you don’t have cash or cheque book that he’ll have to escort you to the nearest cash point
• said manager to declare to the audience in the bar that if you don’t accept this, then he’ll prevent you from leaving
• said manager to announce loudly that he’s going to have to call the police if you try to leave without paying
• said manager to completely miss that you actually /have/ tried to pay
• said manager to seem to think that it’s the customer’s problem that their machine doesn’t work
• said manager to lose sight of the fact that it’s rarely a good idea to to accuse anyone (never mind a regular lunch customer for 6 years) of trying to leave without paying, and threatening to call the police on them in a crowded bar
• a subsequent telephone call to your credit card company to reveal that no attempt to take money from your card has even been made.

Businesses which try to pass their operational problems onto their customers – Just Say No!

I’ve been beating my head against Apache’s RedirectMatch syntax for the past few days.

I have a Media Wiki installation that was configured to have URLs of the form h**p://site.com/index.php?Article_Name

Following the advice on MetaWiki, I managed to make the URLs be of the form, h**p://site.com/wiki/Article_Name

But now I’m finding it completely impossible to set it up so that anyone visiting the old style URLs get handled properly.

I had hoped that I could use:

RedirectMatch /index.php?([^?]+) http://site.com/wiki/$1

This, however, appears to do nothing.

I had originally forgotten to backslash the question mark:

RedirectMatch /index.php?([^?]+) http://site.com/wiki/$1

This version worked, sort of, in that it redirected all old-style requests to h**p://site.com/wiki/p?oldname, which isn’t really what I want – but it implies that the idea is mostly correct.

There’s probably something really obvious that I’m missing, but my google-fu doesn’t seem up to it at the moment either.

Anyone have any clues? blog@tmtm.com…