Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

Talk about being a busy entrepreneur…

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on August 2nd, 2007 filed in Ramblings, Entrepreneurship


• 4 Comments »
• (499 Views)

This was me at 8PM yesterday, happily playing squash at the Cyberjaya’s Community Club with an unknown guy from MMU who dared to challenge me for a match when suddenly I received an SMS message from one of my users who’s complaining about my site being inaccessible. I wasn’t playing happily anymore the rest of the game because I knew I have hundreds of users unable to access the site at that moment and I’m in the middle of a match! (no, I’m not talking about this website. This is just a blog.. come on.. )

So because my mood have been sapped, 20 minutes later I had to cut the match short, went looking around for a wi-fi enabled hotspot area around Cyberjaya and ended up squatting on the stairs of TMNet’s front door (a Malaysian broadband provider) to get access to their office’s wireless Internet to solve the problem. I just had to get online quickly!

Apparently my whole dedicated server was down. And it took more than 4 hours for my provider to actually get the server back up and running. That was the third time in a row my server went unaccessible and when you had to pay RM840 (USD250) every month for the server, you’ll expect a much better service than that. It was found out later that they had problem with the network cables and switches which were unfortunately connected to my server. So they sent some men all the way down to the datacenter (which was funnily at the same place I was squatting at) to fix the problem.

This is just one of the challenges you had to face of being an entrepreneur. Your sweet time can suddenly be interrupted by unexpected (and unwelcomed) circumstances. It can happen anytime and anywhere; while you’re having your dinner, while you’re in the cinema enjoying your long-awaited movie, even while doing your “business” in the toilet. Suddenly a problem creeps in and you had to immediately change your mindset from whatever-ur-doing-at-the-moment to having the problem fixed, unless if its not an urgent one.

And I haven’t yet talked about how I had to deal with users’ complaints afterwards.

Sometimes it can be tiring… but that’s what keeps entrepreneurship interesting…

“CLI has stopped working” on Windows Vista

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on July 22nd, 2007 filed in PHP, CakePHP


• 30 Comments »
• (6,706 Views)

I am posting this information because I want other people who’s facing the same problem as I had to be able to find the solution when searching through Google. I know I didn’t. So for PHP users who are using XAMPP on Windows Vista, pay attention (other WAMPs could be affected too)…

The Problem

Being a CakePHP baker, I had the tendency to try out the Bake script (a convenient command-line interface (CLI) tool in CakePHP which helps programmers to create all the necessary Model classes, Controller classes, and View template files based on the database schema - alongside with some optional basic CRUD methods). So after I set-up the console so that it can run PHP and the bake script, I typed in “cake” into the cmd box and pressed Enter. The Cake console appeared to be running successfully, but there is this annoying error box which kept on popping up everytime I run a command/script. This error box carried the message “CLI has stopped working”. Oddly, the CLI could still be used afterwards

At first I thought it was a CakePHP problem, but when I tried running the command “php -v” to check the PHP information, the same problem happened. So I knew this must be a PHP problem instead of CakePHP’s.

A short Googling around suggested me that most of the people having this problem are those who uses XAMPP on Vista. Initially I decided to just forget about the problem and move on since the scripts did run without problems. But to make matters worse, everytime I start up my Komodo Edit IDE, that error box pops up like 5 times in a row. Now that annoyed me to the bone so I decided to have this problem fixed.

The Solution

I paid a visit to PHP.net in hope to find something helpful and found a line somewhere in the PHP 5.2.3 changelog that caught my attention:

“Fixed commandline handling for CLI and CGI. (Marcus, Johannes)”

Realising that the PHP version used in XAMPP is version 5.2.2, I immediately downloaded the PHP 5.2.3 binaries in hope that replacing the PHP in the XAMPP folder with the new version of PHP would fix this problem. To my amazement, it did. No more annoying pop-ups.. yay!

Update: The “Actual” Solution

Turns out that the actual culprit to this problem is the mysqli extension (mysqli_php.dll) distributed with XAMPP. So instead of replacing all of the latest PHP distribution, you only need to replace that particular extension with the one that came pre-installed with XAMPP. That is sufficient enough to get rid of the annoying alert box.

So there.. if you ever face the “CLI has stopped working” error on your Vista machine, don’t just give up and disable CLI straight away. Simply download the latest PHP binaries and replace it into where you installed PHP (eg: C:\xampp\php) overwriting everything. Practically, you may only need to replace the mysqli_php.dll extension. That should do the trick.