For the love of pete!
July 1, 2005 – 5:22 pmI feel like I wasted six hours of my life today at work… We’re launching a new site next week, and in the course of last-minute testing on the production server we finally stumbled across the small fact that the payment system wasn’t working. Another developer and I debugged, debugged, and debugged some more, but we just couldn’t find the solution.
Quick summary of the problem: we’re sending our payment info to the credit card processor through a third-party perl module that hasn’t been updated in years. When I sent test info from the command line, everything worked perfectly. As soon as I started trying to do things from a browser, though, it all went to pot. I tried simple test scripts, eighty-seven different ways of looking at debugging info, and anything else we could think of. At the end of the aforementioned six hours, I found a new, more verbose way to look at the errors we were getting and realized that the perl module was looking for yet another file in a place where that file didn’t live, so I copied it over - and voila!
I coulda been so much more productive today if only someone had, I don’t know, written some documentation on how to properly install this code… but I guess I just want to live in fantasyworld. Who has time for documentation, after all?
