[Windows] How to obtain meaningful application dumps from your clients

Step 1. Have them download and install the userdump package from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E089CA41-6A87-40C8-BF69-28AC08570B7E&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Step 2. In the userdump configuration, have them add your application.exe to the list of monitored processes

Step 3. Have them run your application and when the error strikes a dump will be saved to the windows directory

Step 4. Have them browse the windows directory, order by modified and send you the last .dmp file

Step 5. Analyze the dump file with WinDBG from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.mspx

[HTML] Internet Explorer ignores TD width attribute when TD with colspan and large content is present

Let's take a HTML table with fix width and two fixed width columns:

<table width="500" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td width="300">a</td><td width="200">b</td></tr></table>

This will render in IE and Firefox as it is supposed to: one col 300 px and the other col 200 px.
If you add another row with one cell with colspan = 2, and the content is wide, like:

<tr><td colspan="2"><div style="'width:490px;'">aaaa</div</td></tr>

..this works just fine in Firefox, but in IE it may break the widths of the other two cols, although it fits just fine in the table width. Very weird.

The fix is to use percentage width on the first column and to not specify a width for the second column. In this case, you would change the first row to:

<tr><td width="60%">a</td><td>b</td></tr>

This will behave the same in IE and Firefox.

[MySQL, PHP] Using UTF-8 correctly -- updated

Here is a simple recipe for people who need to work with UTF-8 only in PHP and MySQL:

In my.ini set the params below and restart the service:

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

In php.ini set the params below and restart the web server.

default_charset = "utf-8"

When using mysql/i to make a connection from PHP, execute the following after connecting:

mysqli_set_charset($db, 'utf8');

Use mb_xxx functions for string functions in PHP. See this page for reference:

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets

Here is a summary of the functions calls you need to replace in PHP (incomplete):

mail() --> mb_send_mail()
strlen() --> mb_strlen()
strpos() --> mb_strpos()
stripos() --> mb_stripos()
strrpos() --> mb_strrpos()
substr() --> mb_substr()
strtolower() --> mb_strtolower()
strtoupper() --> mb_strtoupper()
ereg*() --> preg*() (In general preg* is recommended)
preg_* --> preg_* /ui (make sure you add /u switch for safety)
sprintf --> ??? (uncertain, probably sprintf works out of the box)
s[i] --> mb_substr(s, i, 1) (indexing gets byte, not char, at index)
strstr() --> mb_strstr()
stristr() --> mb_stristr()
split() --> mb_split()

For preg_* functions make sure character classes like [a-z] becomes [\pLl] and [A-Z] becomes [\pLu]

Also:

html_special_chars seems to work just fine. Not sure about addslashes. In general you should audit the correct usage of every string function throughout your application.

Bonus:

1. In MySQL, to sort correctly by a utf8 column, specify collation after order by (or specify collation on that column when you create the table). For example to order by a utf8 column with romanian collation:

select * from table order by column collate utf8_romanian_ci desc

This is meant as a simple guide for the situation when you use only utf8 throughout your database and your application, which should be fine for most languages.

2. I have not managed to make DBManager show UTF-8 characters in the results grid, so you will see garbage although the data is stored correctly. The same applies to the mysql command line client (on Windows).

3. There may be some problems with inserting blobs if the default charset is utf8, I am currently looking at this and update this.