Errors that make you want to rip your head off

When you’re a web designer, or any other kind of programmer you’ll probably be familiar with following problem. You’re thinking about your newest design, making sketches, writing down your thoughts perform some tests and there it is… The Light… You have a superb idea!
And there you go, you start implementing. You program the screens, the backbone and whatever other thing you need to program, and then it’s time for the big moment. You press the button (or enter or anything), you’re expecting the best, the really best, ‘because let’s face it… you are the best… But the system says: “Nope, ain’t gonna do it”.
Yes, it’s sad but true, you got an error.
So you curse a little, browse through the code to see if you can find anything that shouldn’t be there, you start downloading half the internet, you curse a little more, you smoke 10 cigarettes in one hour like that’s going to help, and at the end… hopefully… you find a solution. Now that ruined all the fun didn’t it? Isn’t that one of those situations where you want to rip your head off?

Now here’s a case study:

In Drupal, I wanted to implement a fancy image gallery. As I’m not the kind of guy who wants to invent the warm water all over again (you may call it lazy if you want), I started browsing the web for solutions. And there it was, the image gallery I’d been dreaming of. So I read the manual, implemented the module, everything was ready to upload the first image, and BAM! An error:

Unable to create scaled Thumbnail image.

No man lost, maybe this module isn’t exactly bug-free, so I downloaded another fancy image gallery module (although not as fancy as the first one), implemented it, but again the system said “Screw you, ain’t gonna happen”.
So I started browsing the internet, downloaded thousand and one different tools, patches, and all other crap, but still nothing.
But then I found a forum, which stated that this error actually didn’t have anything to do with Drupal, but with my PHP installation… When I thought I was a specialist who could install Apache with PHP with my eyes closed I may have done something wrong after all. Next thing I knew I was messing up my installation, editing my PHP.ini file, adding new lines, deleting them again, adding them again, starting the web server, stopping it, restarting it… You know the drill, don’t you?
So are you wondering what solved the problem? Well… I was editing the wrong php.ini file. Whenever I found out which file was actually used it was piece of cake, and the upload of images worked well.

Isn’t that always the case? It’s those small stupid things which keep you up all night searching for a solution. It happens very rarely that I spend my time searching for a problem that appears to be a bug in the software. 99 percent of the time it’s just one stupid mistake.
That really makes me wanting to screw my head loose and put it on a stick!

1 comments:

Annabel Candy, Get In the Hot Spot said...

You have been busy... just catching up on your adventures. My hubby, the Mucho Man, now we have our own wd company, says Lytebox is good in case you ever need to do a gallery again.

There's always a learning curve and then you can sit back and enjoy experience. Usually the simplest options are best:)

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