Where I’m @

20080213

!$@%#!&* Dell GX620s
In the summer of 2006, we bought 23 Dell Optiplex GX620s for one of the student labs/classrooms at the office. Under two years later, ten of them have had their power supplies and motherboards replaced. (Well, technically, nine have. One had to have the procedure done twice.) That's a failure rate of nearly 50%. Not so good. We could only find one public record of this kind of significant failure count, but we have spoken with an acquaintance at another higher ed institution who says some of her people have seen an unusually high failure rate with these. We'll be talking with our sales rep about this. Not a comforting thing.

Labels: dell, frustration, troubleshooting

20071112

WordPress Solution
When installing WordPress for a trial blog at our office, we ran into a common problem, but turned out to have an otherwise unmentioned solution. After getting everything installed, we were thrown the error that "Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress."

This was our first time installing PHP 5 (our other installs were long ago and used PHP 4), so apparently we forgot select MySQL and MySQLi to be added at install.

Ran the PHP installer again on Repair, and still got the error message.

The WordPress Codex has many postings about this, but none that succeeded for us.

We realized after many frustrating minutes that the PHP.ini file is not necessarily read on the fly, the way the MySQL config file is these days. We quickly ran iisreset (because our website is not so high-traffic that it can't be reset in early morning) and all was right with the world.

Labels: development, frustration, open source, PHP, troubleshooting

20070711

Wrestling with Selenium
We’re trying to use Selenium IDE in our brand spankin’ new QA phase of development (what a concept!) and it’s a steep curve. The basics are easy enough, and explained perfectly well at OpenQA, Selenium’s maker, or in one of a number of good tutorials. But it took us a while to complete the perfectly reasonable quest for a command reference. That is, we’re running into problem we find with tools from time to time (most often, but not always, with open-source projects), viz., that the information exists to get you going, but it’s terribly distributed, not from authoritative sources, and even in the aggregate not comprehensive. It also becomes more fragmented the more advanced it gets; noobs can get started, but advanced documentation is only for specific troubleshooting. Not that we have time to take on this task, either.

Update: Changed link destination for the command ref, as we found what may be the always-current one, with more poking around.

Labels: browsers, development, frustration, open source, testing, tools

20061129

Scratching Our Head So Much, We’re Going Bald
Not that we’ve studied it carefully or anything, but we really find ourselves not understanding the .NET GAC. On our development box, we naturally have no trouble building and running our various web applications. Like every good developer, we muck about with our dev box so much we could never untangle the strands and replicate the environment faithfully. However, we’re still not sure why we had to register the MySQL Connector dll on our integration server (and here we use the word “server” loosely). We included the appropriate dll file in what seemed to be all the appropriate places, but kept getting the dread error about how the “manifest definition . . . does not match”. We took a look at the GAC on the integration server using gacutil, saw that the MySQL Connector was not listed, and figured we’d just stick it in the GAC. That did the trick, but we’re still not sure why it was not working before.

Labels: .net, coding, frustration, GRB, microsoft