Month: October 2008

New Project, New Codebase, Urgent Timeline

I landed a new project about 5 days ago, and it had a 21 day timeline when I landed it. I’m the only developer on this project, but I do have a designer and, I’m going to recruit a tester as well. The money looks good for it, and the “client” is actually _another_ project manager who sits between us and the actual client. You may have remembered me bitching a lot about my last project (which turned into a horror show)

The idea is that I have walked away with several lessons from that, and that this project will be shorter and more lucrative (both!) as well as more fun to work on. I’m pretty happy with it so far, having finally found a place where inheritance was _really_ useful in site, rather than something I just sort of forced things to use for no good reason (other than a desire to be programming OO)

The codebase I inherited was, for a wonder, not a train-wreck (something that I was getting really sick of) Though I can see why they pulled the previous developer, based on timeline. (I would say he was about 10% done at the halfway mark on the schedual.) He does a lot of things diffrently from the way I would do them, but I can (almost) always repect his design choices while disagreeing.

I also got a chance to write a cool little 3 line javascript “form extender”. I have done this before in _much_ more complmicated ways, but I think I finally figured out the trick to it. Hopefully I will post a how-to as another post soon.

Weird little MySQL error.

So I just moved some code onto a new server, and I’m suddenly getting the warning:

mysql_query(): 14 is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in <bla bla bal> on line 47

A few other people seem to have gotten this error, but no one has posted a solution. (though one guy oh-so-annoyingly posted “I figured it out, so never mind” … Grrr. I mean, if you’re going to post a question, the answer should be in that thread if you ever figure it out….

So as soon as I figure out the answer I’m going to post it here.

I’m back with the solution:

I got clued onto it from this page: http://bytes.com/forum/thread638479.html . The error is coming because mysql_close was being called by the destructor, and because I was in safe mode the same MySQL resource was being used for each instance. What threw me even more though was that the destructor was being called at all, because I thought I only _had_ one instance. Turns out that there is a spot in my code where I (accidentaly) passed my DB object by value rather than refrence. This made a new copy of the object, which ran mysql_connect again, because it was in safe mode it returened the _same_ refrence. Then the object got unloaded, the destructor ran and closed the refrence, even though there was another instance of the object out there still using the same refrence.

Icky!

javascript’s parseInt is pretty evil

Javascript uses the + symbol for both addition and concatenation. This means that if you want to add a numeric value to data pulled from a user, you need to cast it to being a numeric type, like for instance an Int. Makes sense, so I use the parseInt function to cast with. OK, that’s fine so here is the kicker, if you pass it “09” it generates the value 0, not 9.

Hrmm, well that’s odd. If you pass in “9” it returns 9, but if you pass in “09” you get 0. I’m lucky I caught that in testing. It turns out that if you lead with a 0 then parseInt interprates as the value as an octal number. There is a way to deal with it though, you can pass in a second variable telling it what base the numbers it should be reading are.

So really you want parseInt(var, 10) not parseInt(var)