Developer Blog

I have recently been upgrading a site written in classic ASP to use MySQL instead of SQL Server - a relatively straightforward task given the availability of an ODBC driver for MySQL. Testing on our development server, the new code worked perfectly.

Once uploaded to our hosting server, however, the site no longer worked correctly. More specifically, the page that was supposed to ‘list all properties’ was reporting that there were no properties in the database. This was definitely not the case! The connection string and code were identical on our development server and the hosting server.

A little debugging showed that the ODBC driver was actually returning an empty result set (0 rows) on a particular query. Some digging through Google showed that this is a known bug in old version of the MySQL ODBC driver.

It turns out, however, that older version of this driver have an annoying bug that causes some (valid) queries to fail silently and return an empty result set.

Dan.

Today we welcome a new member to our software development team - Paul Davies.

Paul has a computer science degree from Staffordshire University and has a wealth of commercial experience developing C#.NET systems.

Today we welcome a new member to our web development team - Ryan Murray.

Ryan has a computer science degree from Edinburgh University and has a wealth of commercial experience developing dynamic database-driven websites.

Encircle Marketing are a market research company specialising in the automotive aftermarket.

Acid Computer Services have designed and developed their new website.

Today we are proud to announce the launch of the new Cast UK website, for which Acid Computer Services have been solely responsible for the website development.

For recruiters, Cast UK can help with the following executive recruitment:

• Procurement Recruitment
• Supply Chain Recruitment
• Logistics Recruitment
• Engineering Recruitment
• Manufacturing Recruitment

For job seekers, Cast UK can help you find a job in the following sectors:

• Procurement Jobs
• Supply Chain Jobs
• Logistics Jobs
• Engineering Jobs
• Manufacturing Jobs

We have recently launched the new website for high street perfume retailer Passion For Perfume, which has been designed and developed by Acid Computer Services.

Passion For Perfume currently have 35 perfume stores across the UK and now have a full ecommerce store to help continue their fast expansion plans. The new online store sells a large range of men’s designer aftershaves and women’s designer perfumes from top brands such as Bvlgari, Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Dolce and Gabbana, DKNY, Gucci, Calvin Klein and Yves Saint Laurent.

I have just been writing some code to generate a barcode image in PHP, which I thought might be useful to others.

Firstly, you will need this free barcode font and to have the GD or GD2 extension installed on your server.

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This article aims to provide readers with an overview of the very basics of information retrieval. Understanding these principles can help you to optimise your website content for the search engines and also help you to analyse search engine algorithm changes. However, the details in this article are not intended to describe how modern search engines work, as they use many additional factors, including link analysis.

Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents / within documents. Information retrieval techniques form some of the most fundamental elements of web search engine technology. This article will discuss information retrieval in the context of search engines.

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We have launched some new pages on our main site www.acidcs.co.uk.

The sub-headings on each of the services pages (design, web development and software development) are now links to individual pages detailing the services we offer.

We have also added a website map and a free consultation request form.

We have recently been developing a program which involves retrieving emails into a ASP.NET system written in C#.

It was quickly realised that we would also need a spam filter to avoid spam messages clogging up the system. Firstly we created a black list and a white list to allow us to pre-approve/disapprove emails from certain addresses.

Next, we needed some way of retrieving a spam score (or probability) for the remaining messages. We looked immpediately to SpamAssassin and easily got it working on our Windows server using the excellent how to guide: Using SpamAssassin with Win32.

However, we did not want the mail to be filtered at the mail server level, we wanted to spam check the messages in our system as they were retrieved and store their spam score.

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