Starting with a Bang

Today was my first "working day" of the year, although in fact I did some work yesterday getting my last customer server upgraded to PHP 5 (PHP 4 is now on security patches only¹ and even that's drying up soon). And that was my mistake. I was lying in bed checking the weather forecast on my Nokia 770² when I noticed my most recent email was from Sarah, my contact at the customer. Bear in mind it was about 07:30 at this stage. Uh oh. She'd mailed me about an hour before (she starts very early) to say they couldn't send email any longer.

Argghh! I'd tested mail receipt after the upgrade (as I'd also upgraded their mail server and their virus/spam filtering) and their intranet in general but I'd not specifically tried sending an email.

Some frantic ferreting about in the code while still in my dressing gown revealed that PHP 5 had a different way of handling quoting to PHP 4³ and the fix was in place by 08:30 so at least I redeemed myself.

It was quite a quiet day after that.

1. I'm getting old, when I started out we were using PHP 3 and PHP 4 was about to be launched.
2. I am such a nerd
3. If you're interested it was a string which was defined as " \{$length}". In PHP 4 if $length was 475 that evaluated as " {475}", in PHP5 it evaluated as " \{475}".