Bronwen Reid

When you try to open a text file or a comma-separated variable (CSV) file in Excel, you may receive the following error message:

SYLK: File format is not valid

This problems occurs because the first two letters in the file are uppercase “I” and “D”

Yes, that’s right – if you output data to a comma-separated text file and if the first fieldname is “ID” then Bang! Crash! Kaboom! Unhelpful error message! Confused user!

MS knowledge base article about the problem http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626 confirms that this is a problem with Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. Two possible fixes: you can change the uppercase “ID” to a lowercase “id” or you can put an apostrophe in front of the “ID”.

A few other things I have done this evening:

• Uploaded pdf files for a customer. (New to the job, got a website to look after, and it’s all rather daunting.)

• Set up example html pages to demonstrate how width of the browser window will affect the page design and layout.
  For this site, the designer’s original concept filled the page, and it was liquid, so when you resized the browser the webpage changed to fit. This affects text and image placement in ways which people never understand when they’re looking at a jpg or if you’re trying to explain it to them over the telephone; they’ve got to see a real-life example. So I made one.I used my pictures of a knitted dalek instead of the standard stock images – oddly satisfying.

• Php Problem with one of my sites
  Hosting company upgraded to latest version of PHP (5.2.4) over the weekend, and there’s a bug (http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=42523) which means that PHP_SELF isn’t giving the correct name for the executing script.
  Result : none of the forms work properly.

• Email Problem
  Some emails from site are not arriving. Tracked down to a smtp mail relay problem.
  Note to self: Should have been picked up in testing last week. In future always test with mail to and from addresses which are outside my main domain.

• Maximum upload size in IIS 6
  Trying to explain settings for AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed and MaxRequestEntityAllowed.

• Looking at configuration options for a suite of shopping carts, where we may (or may not) want to show prices, quantities, price + quantity (as a dropdown) or none of the above. It all depends. And it’s confusing.

• Deleted 309 spam comments from the blog moderation queue.
  The usual porn, but there were a suprising number about cars and ringtones. Have downloaded and installed the TanTanNoodles Spam Filter
  http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/spam-filter/

And my mother is under the impression that I spend my time making websites.

One of the problems I’ve always had with PHP error handling is catching the fatal errors. If a php script encounters a fatal error it stops, and the desired error handling code does not get executed.

So the user will (usually) be confronted with a blank screen and, worse still, since the error isn’t logged I don’t know about it and therefore can’t fix it.

It’s a rare and confident user who will report a blank page or other such glitch; people are so used to working with a certain level of pain when using a computer that they just assume it’s unavoidable or that it’s been caused by their own inadequacy in some way.

Anyway, (thank-you PHP London user group) I now have a solution using the register_shutdown_function()

<?
register_shutdown_function('cleanExit');

// ... go and do all sorts of exciting stuff ...

$running = false;

function cleanExit() {
	if ($GLOBALS['running'])) {
		// script is still running - it's an ERROR
		// tell Bronwen about the error
		// tell user it's not their fault
	}
}
>

‘My golden rule : Go slow. Don’t rush. Do one thing at a time.

On nuclear-powered subs, there’s a brass bar in front of the control panel for the power plant. When status alarms begin to go off, the engineers are trained to grab the brass bar with both hands and hold on until they’ve looked at all the dials and indicators, and understand exactly what’s going on in the system. What this does is help them overcome the temptation to start “fixing” things, throwing switches and opening valves. These quick fixes confuse the automatic recovery systems, bury the original fault beneath an onslaught of new conditions, and may cause a real, major disasters. It’s more effective to remember to do something (”Grab the bar!”) than to remember not to do something (”Don’t touch that dial!”)

Debugging: The Nine Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems