Laurabelle’s Blog

I did a lot of PHP and Perl hacking last night, modifying the PHP code I use to change stylesheets dynamically (so that I can use an external file to store the config data) and then writing some Perl code to duplicate the same functionality in my CGI scripts (mt-search.cgi and what used to be mt-comments.cgi).

The PHP code worked beautifully. Go me!

Then I wrote up the Perl, stuck it between a couple of <MTPerlScript> tags in a template, and watched it crash and burn. Decided enough was enough for one morning and went to bed.

In the middle of hacking Perl, I had made a couple of modifications to my PHP, which happened to break it as well. I only noticed this when I saw Senji's comment this morning on the individual archive page (in a subdirectory! very important in PHP, directory structure is) and noticed that it had layout styles but no colors. Cue frenzied debugging between a few files, followed by a few iterations of Oh! I'm dumb when I found a really stupid mistake (like renaming a file in the scripts but not in the filesystem).

Funnily enough, I just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth, which is all about learning from one's mistakes.

(The title of this entry is from a really neat little radio series called Mystery in the Air that aired in 1947. I have the episodes on tape, including the ads for Camel, which was sponsoring the show. The ads were all about experience and the wartime cigarette shortage when smokers had to take whatever they could get. The best part of the ads, though, is that they are each followed by a crash of ominous music as the program resumes.)