February 10, 2008

Quote of the day

Posted in Software at 07:56 by Graham King

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

—Brian W. Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language and the “K” in “AWK”

Seen in Idiomatic Python.

February 8, 2008

AJAX, IE6 and System error: -1072896658

Posted in Software at 03:43 by Graham King

I have just spent a while wrestling with this problem, so in case anyone else comes across it.

Symptoms

  • You are making an AJAX query to your server - in my case using Yahoo’s excellent YUI, connection manager.
  • On IE6, using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object, you try and read the responseText parameter (or the YUI does for you).
  • IE says msxml3.dll: System error: -1072896658 (nice error eh?)
  • Everything works fine in Firefox

Solution

Make sure the response from your server has the correct mime type: ‘text/plain’ if it really is plain text. In my case I was sending a response of ‘text/html’ and sending plain text.

I wish you never experience this problem. If you do, hopefully this has helped you.

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