PHP - Aaaaalll the way home.

13:57.09 - Wednesday 25th February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Feck me but I'm tired. I am currently wrestling with a PHP rewrite of a restaurant website that has to feature online reservations and stuff. Somewhere along I painted myself into a corner by passing a couple of args through the querystring of every page that had anything to do with reservations while the user logged into an account, but then realised they might want to log into an account without going through all this and so it was really a waste of time passing all these args.

I've abandoned the passing-args-in-the-URL approach and dumped the desired destination page - complete with Query String if there is one - into a $_SESSION variable until such time as the login procedure has been completed. Meanwhile I have a tiny wee include at the top of every page that is memers-only which sends the user off to the login page if they haven't been already - all very simple and much cleaner. I am so tired and fed up with this that I can't even remember why I used this approach in the first place. Gah.

I haven't even started the admin area bit of the reservations yet, either. This is going to be another pain in the arse I can do without.

Unfriendly Users.

14:05.44 - Wednesday 25th February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Another phone call, this time moaning about not receiving any email for the past couple of days. This particular company has a Dell Optiplex Windows NT server in their office that collects all email from our webserver POP3 accounts and sorts it out into various email accounts offline, an approach I've never really seen the point of given it's a really small company of which maybe four people actually have email. Someone must have sold them it based on the premise of it being able to handle things 'when they get really really busy'. Hah.

While being moaned at, I quietly tap the user's details into mail2web and check to see what's in the POP3, and sure enough there are five messages dating back over the last couple of days, so the messages are getting to our server, but their's isn't picking them up. This doesn't stop them from blaming us, even though it was installed by a completely seperate company, because we answer the phones whereas the they don't.

I suggested a reboot about half an hour ago and haven't heard anything since. I guess it worked.

UT2004: Best. Game. Ever.

14:07.47 - Wednesday 25th February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Myself and Bootay vs 2 'Godlike' bots on the Onslaught map. Wheee!