Web Development

Connecting PHP 4 to MySQL 5

I recently upgraded one of our MySQL servers from 4.1.22 to 5.1.26. In the process of upgrading, I dumped all the databases, uninstalled MySQL then installed a clean copy of 5.1.26. Then I manually created all the users and schemas by hand, then restored our backups to the new install. Everything went smoothly and all the servers that had PHP 5.x installed could connect with no problems (because they used the latest version of the MySQL client API.)
(more…)

MobileMe - what a bust (but getting better)

Wow. I’ve seen some pretty dismal web launches but I must say Apple and their MobileMe launch has become the colossus of debacles. After spending several hours (and I mean, literally, eight+ hours of off and on efforts) of trying to get my Outlook 2007 data to properly sync to MobileMe and to my iPhone, I am close to giving up.

Updated at 2008-07-17 @ 4:05 pm: It appears that it is working now! Wahoo! Resetting the sync history from the MobileMe control panel never worked, but I tried to reset my sync history from iTunes (Edit->Preferences->Syncing->Reset Sync History.) I then let the next automatically scheduled sync occur and it prompted me to choose what and how to sync. I told it to take my contacts on my PC and overwrite MobileMe and told the calendar to merge. When that finished, I logged into me.com and all my contacts were there! Next, I reset sync history again from iTunes and the next sync, I selected merge for my contacts and to overwrite MobileMe’s calendar with the one on my PC. That finished, and my calendar was updated, too. Keeping my fingers crossed!
(more…)

Fiddler2 and Bad Behavior

If you have ever had to debug HTTP traffic, you probably already know what a great tool Fiddler2 is. I was recently using it to debug some WordPress 2.5 issues I was having with a test blog and noticed I was getting an odd error returned from the web site: Error 403
(more…)

Vermillion Bistro website launched

I recently launched a new web site for Mike Selig’s Vermillion Water Grille, an upscale bar and restaurant located in downtown Little Rock. It’s a great place with a wonderful ambiance. The web site turned out really nice, too, if I do say so myself. It has my first real effort at a Google Maps mashup.

Daylight saving time and WordPress XMLRPC

Zempt is a desktop blogging client and writing tool that is especially useful for those that have multiple blogs. It enables you to write, edit and spell check new blog posts as well as edit previous blog entries by downloading, editing and reposting them. Having been involved with the Zempt project for five years (and being the only developer for the last two or three) I am pretty familiar with some of the issues that can come up with remote editing of blog posts.
(more…)

Upgrading PHP from 4 to 5 on IIS

I needed to make some notes when starting the process of upgrading all our IIS web servers from PHP4 to PHP5. I have found a few gotchas (which might only apply in our circumstance.)
(more…)

Embed YouTube with valid XHTML 1.1 strict

Thanks to hwa2u.com, I can now embed YouTube video with XHTML 1.1 strict markup. I wonder why YouTube’s default embed URLs aren’t compliant? I guess they are trying to hit as broad an audience as possible.

Outlook 2007 rendering engine time warp

In the most recent version of Office, Microsoft changed the rendering engine for HTML e-mail. As an HTML e-mail publisher, we worked for weeks designing the newsletter for Arkansas Online to adhere to XHTML 1.1 strict standards. It looks beautiful when viewed using nearly any current mail application — even across platforms — Thunderbird (Firefox) on Windows, Thunderbird (Firefox) on OS X, Apple Mail on OS X, Entourage on OS X, even Outlook 2003 on Windows, all display the message nearly exactly the same. It is an excellent example of cross-platform, cross-browser beauty.

Enter Outlook 2007. Microsoft decided to use the crippled rendering engine that was built into Word instead of using Internet Explorer for their mail application. This is apparently so that messages that are created in Word (using the crippled rendering engine to compose it) will look the same when rendered by the recipient (provided they are running Outlook 2007 with the same crippled rendering engine!) The biggest problem with this thinking is that they are now using a rendering engine that wasn’t even complete back in the mid 1990s!

Well, here is my example of an e-mail mis-rendered … please listen to the developers, Microsoft! This is a bad, bad idea. http://www.simmonsconsulting.com/projects/outlook2007.html