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.

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
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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

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 just finished the web design and development work on Color-Blind.co.uk, selling venetian blinds, vertical blinds and roller window blinds online.

Check it out to see some of our development skills in action and any comments will be very welcome.

Michael.

Well I’ve just found myself a problem that’s much harder than it looks. One of the systems I’m working on at the moment needs to support international users in various time zones. At first glance it seemed reasonably easy, ensure all the dates are saved as UTC and then in the display layer add (or subtract) the right number of hours to get the correct localised time. I’d have to take into account daylight saving but that’s not a major problem is it?

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We are having difficulty making a site in ASP that is dual-language (Russian & English) where all translations are stored in a MySQL database.

We have used a UTF-8 encoding in the database table and it appears that the Russian characters are being stored in there correctly.

Only certain parts of ASP seem to have the ability to be able to deal with non-ASCII characters. Response.Write seems to be fine and so do the Request methods.

However, trying to get ASP to interect with a database in Russian using ADO seems to be problematic. When putting russian characters into the database it appears to try to put them in as ASCII, the database then just does not understand these and just displays a series of question marks.

When trying to retrieve the Russian characters from the database (after entering them directly using MySQL Query Browser), ASP is expecting ASCII therefore turns each UTF-8 character into multiple ASCII characters. Resulting in nonsense!

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