I just spent ages chasing [what I thought was] a bug using $.getJSON in IE7 that turned out to be an issue with something else entirely.

If you’re using $(el).css or .animate with JSON, make sure you’ve terminated all items correctly and don’t have any hanging commas left over:

This case sent me particularly crazy as I was also dealing with an actual JSON request in the same general vicinity that I’d validated a bunch of times and seemed perfect.

Note to self: Before you go down the whitespace and text encoding rabbithole next time, make sure you’re actually checking the right JSON!

When you suspend/sleep a computer, often when you resume MAMP has lost track of the MySQL instance it started and can no longer connect to it. Not sure if this is a problem with the MySQL build being used, but as the problem has existed since 2009, I don’t have high hopes for it being fixed anytime soon.

The quickest solution is to kill off the process it had started previously and then hit “Start Servers” again — it just takes one line on the terminal.

killall -9 mysqld

Be aware that this will kill all running MySQL processes (including those outside of MAMP’s control) — this is normally fine, as no-one actually hosts websites on OS X!

The blue in the image above is actually a deep red!

Accordingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other artifacts in the image. Normally this just looks weird — sometimes, in the case of logo variants, it looks plausible but utterly incorrect! My guess is they’re using an older version of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those people emailing CMYK JPGs has to be a little bit niche, so I’m not heaps hopeful of this getting fixed too soon! The main reason I care is because web interfaces are so much faster than retrieving large attachments from IMAP stores.

I wish this weren’t just Vista being special!

I hadn’t changed any plugins, and the rest of the net was conspicuously quiet, so I figured that either my current host had near-simultaneously upgraded the database & corrupted something along the way (with MySQL this can result in read-only tables in certain cases, I’m told), or else there was something more sinister at work. No plugins had changed, and because nothing else functioned differently for even a moment I presumed innocence on their behalf. I tried with and without Google Gears enabled, with and without tags, in different saved statuses, and still nothing worked!

Anyway. Turns out it was my use of the term “wget”. (Even now I need to be careful as I write that!)

mod_security on Apache basically threw up its lunch every time I threatened to post about it. Accordingly, I can’t share with you some things that I’ve learnt in migration just yet, and haven’t been posting about anything else as I’ve been trying to resolve this problem, thinking it was preventing me from posting. Perhaps mod_security is trying to get me to write about more meaningful things than file transfer trickery! *yawn*

At any rate, it’s all over now and we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming shortly.