Tag: error

JavaScript code quality

I’ve programmed in a lot of different languages, and with various IDE’s. The one area that has always been lacking is a simple means to review JavaScript code for common errors, both syntactical and format. This is where JSLint and JavaScript Lint come in…. these represent the tooling previously available to other languages like C++ and Java, where you can analyze code without actually executing it to identify problem areas. Often, these are items like ‘missing semicolons’ that occasionally cause difficult to find errors in browsers.

These can be scripted to execute from the command line or within (some) IDE’s on several operating systems.

MySQL (Windows) service startup error 1067

I’ve installed and managed dozens of MySQL installations for several years, occasionally it seems that an install just doesn’t run like it has in the past.

Recently I had a problem where the service would not start (Error 1067) on Windows Server 2003 (R2)… which is running under VMWare. After checking the obvious places and turning up nothing I started down the list of potential solutions exposed by Google search.

The ultimate solution it seems is that the ‘my.ini’ file needed to include the specific path information required by the service…. without it the service would not start.

Here’s my current file (c:\windows\my.ini) for reference:

[WinMySQLAdmin]
Server=C:/mysql40/bin/mysqld-nt.exe
[mysqld]
basedir=c:/mysql40
datadir=c:/mysql40/data

For the really observant readers of this entry… you will notice that this is for MySQL 4.0 (which is no longer officially supported). It’s mostly used as it is widely compatible across various host systems that are sometimes problematic with newer releases.

Cheers.

Custom JavaScript error notification

Debugging JavaScript errors is a time-consuming effort requiring keen eyes and a sharp mind.

MSIE typically only gives a cryptic ‘Object Expected’ error message and little more (even with the Microsoft Script Debugger installed!).

Some tools like FireBug and the Venkman debugger (both for Mozilla/Firefox) help in this matter, but often it helps to have an alert when an issue occurs.

Here’s a simple implementation that I’ve found useful…

[script type=”text/javascript”]
window.onerror=myErrorHandler;

function myErrorHandler(msg,url,l){
var txt=”There was an error on this page.\n”;
txt+=”Error: ” + msg + “\n”;
txt+=”URL: ” + url + “\n”;
txt+=”Line: ” + l + “\n\n”;
txt+=”Click OK to continue.\n\n”;
alert(txt); return true; }
[/script]

REFERENCES:

That’s it….