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Welcome to the personal web-site of Dez Iddon, a web-site developer / designer residing in Clonmel, Ireland. Come in, Stay a while, Stay Forever!!

12.07.2005 ~ '80004005'

« February 2012  »

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wtfF0nzie:   RT @eircom: Technology Career Opportunities #eircom are looking for "skilled specialists with expertise in a variety of areas" - http:// ...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:17:03


It isn't very often that I'm led so drastically off the desired path by a search engine. Two examples that I'm not going to detail come to mind, but this one is new!

Imagine the scenario:

A vague error message in a well established scripting language. The first natural response? Hit the documentation! Nothing. The error is intermittent, has something to do with an application variable being emptied and only occurs after the first day or so of uptime. Hit the search engines! A collection of database and dictionary object related fixes are returned - the term application is considered to be web application not the application object.. The code:

application(item) = ""

For the record the item var has a value! The results offered by google and clusty don't help at all (I did a series of refined searches that yielded the same results!). So I consider the problem:

The Solution:

A shot of jack daniels! No really! Exception handling is basic but effective in asp. Jack thought me that many years ago, he reminded me today. Some additional error handling helped identify a small related issue on the front-end - and in the space of seconds one of the most annoying bugs I've ever crossed is quashed . I love you Jack =x

The moral?

Virtual hosting can be good for measuring performance problems - this was a bug stress testing never exposed. And keep your variable names short kids. And never run with scissors!

Tags: computers, dev, unusual, work.