I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could figure out what exactly was going wrong. The server was setup properly – I whipped up a quick test script, and it had no problems sending. Nothing was obviously wrong with the script itself… or so I thought.
During the course of my career, I’ve had to deal with some quite bizarre things jumping out at me from the source of pages. One developer I know, from a well-respected firm (to spare your blushes I won’t link to it, Kev) is in the habit of using <div id="mchammer">
“because it’s a wrapper”) but I think such oddities, which don’t break any SGML or XML parser, have pretty much broken me. I was briefly stymied this morning by the following querystring (identifying information stripped out):
Like many IT professionals, I’m still heavily involved in deploying and supporting Windows XP. While most of the compatibility and performance problems with Vista have been addressed in SP1, there is still a clear case for a lot of businesses to run XP for a variety of reasons, mainly revolving around compatibility with third-party applications.
I’d like to share one caveat I’ve recently discovered while setting up an editing workstation on XP to run Avid Xpress Pro.
The system had already been set up with a Vista Ultimate in line with the company’s migration policy, however it had to dual-boot into XP Pro 32-bit in order to run Avid, which relies on kernel-mode drivers that remain incompatible with Vista. It is my normal practice to slipstream all available service packs onto the install disc to cut down on install time, however during the process of the install I discovered that there is no way to install the Realtek HD Audio drivers after SP3 has been installed. So the procedure can best be summed up as:
Install XP SP2
Install all hardware drivers
Patch to SP3 using a separate disc
Install updates post-SP3.
Apparently Microsoft is aware of the issue, but given their retirement of XP to OEM channels on 30th June, I very much doubt that they will devote much effort to resolving it.
With any luck I should have news of Magellan Sitemap here shortly. Meanwhile I’ll finally be fixing the layout and putting together the final (rev. umpteen) graphics. Some content would probably help too…
Not to worry, I’ll have it all sorted but since I can’t seem to get Firefox to work in the office any design and layout stuff will have to be done at home. I’m working on a layout scheme based on the static one but allowing the columns to adjust to the user’s font size preference, using a mixture of ems and percentages. Coming soon: intelligent custom 404 error page.
Started converting proportions to relative measurements; text can now be resized via browser menus. Code needs cleaning up and converting to PHP templates. Started posting final images; header & dropshadows use png alpha transparency so I’ll have to write a browser sniffer to serve them to IE using the AlphaImageLoader filter.
