Author: Alasdair

Bastard Amazon

Posted on by Alasdair

Some weeks ago, I order my mother’s christmas presents, and amazon assured me that I’d have them in time for christmas.

They lied, and I am faced with trying to buy my mother something at the airport tomorrow. This is the second time they have fucked me royally at the festive season.

I am not the only one they have done this to. They’ve shafted my colleague, too. And he’s provided a bit of help for anyone else that might be in the same boat. Do us both a favour, and pass the link around kids.

(And in all seriousness, if anyone knows anyone that works at Amazon, and would be willing to put this in front of them in a serious spirit of “we’d like to talk to someone about the standard of service you provide”, then please, do let me know…)

Links For Monday 12th December 2005

Posted on by Alasdair

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Before I forget:

Posted on by Alasdair

I’ve half written several LJ entries and ditched them over the last few weeks, trying to do my usual annual job of working out where my head is at after another year. And today, on the tube home, I read the best summation I can think of of why I have:

“I think it’s time for me to ditch all that surface dialogue stuff and have a dark night of the soul instead. I resolve to write down what I really think and feel. Work out in words what it is to be me and once that is done my works that detail the deeply personal will illuminate the universal. But now that I’ve tried to think about what I really think I realise that not only will nobody else give a toss about what I think or feel, but I don’t give a fuck either.

We get tired. We get down. We get happy. We get hungry. We want love. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want to think that there is more than there is. We want to make the world a better place. We want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.” – Bill Drummond, The Wild Highway

Anguish!

Posted on by Alasdair

I was at the whisky society with burge tonight. She drank this whisky. It was fucking fantastic, and I wanted some. I especially wanted some for myself, because I think it would have gone fucking brilliantly with a good cigar.

They’re sold out.

I’m going to crawl into a corner and cry, now.

(Anyone fancy drinking a few good whiskies in the next week or two?)

[Work] PHP/MS-SQL c onnect problem

Posted on by Alasdair

Here’s one for the PHP webnerds out there:

PHP/SQL7. At the start of every script, I include db.php which contains this:

$db = mssql_connect(‘devbox’,’foo’,’bar’);
mssql_select_db(‘[devsitedb]’, $db) or die (“Couldn’t open database connection”);

And then I pass that connection into the various classes and functions on the site. Fine and dandy.

However, in the course of one fo the scripts for this site, I need to hook into a second database temporarily, so I do this at the appropriate point:

$second_db = mssql_connect(‘devbox’,’jim’,’bob’);
mssql_select_db(‘[anothersitedb]’, $second_db) or die (“Couldn’t open second database connection”);

Then do what I need to with that connection and close it with mssql_close($second_db);

Here’s the problem, though: despite the fact that the two connections are clearly different, the second one is overwriting the first, so that when I come back to doing things with the first connection, it now can’t find any of the stored procedures i needs. This is true at any point after $second_db is opened, and it make no difference whether or not I close $second_db. The conenction is just being over-written.

At the point of opening, print_r($db) returns “Resource id #2”. And that holds true for the second connection as well – print_r($second_db) also returns “Resource id #2”.

mssql.max_links is set to -1, so there should be no problem with the number of connections that I’m making…

Obviously, I would like it if this didn’t happen, and $second_db become “Resource id #3”, thus allowing me to juggle the two connections as I need to.

Anyone out there had similar problems, or able to spot what I’m missing?