The new version of the site has been slow at loading the icons (wich are a Glyphicons web font) for buttons and when I check the Javascript console in Chrome (Ctrl+Shift+J) it shows the following error:

[code]GET /fonts/glyphicons-halflings-regular.woff 404 (Not Found)[/code]

After much testing and Googling it turns out my old IIS server does not have Mime types registered for .woff files.

So I go in to the IIS console, click MIME Types icon and add .woff as application/octet-stream – problem solved!

I wrote the following php function that can be used to split a string in two or more pieces. One parameter is at what character or string you want to split. For example if you want to split at a space to not break up words, or split at a period to not split up sentences, at certain html tags such as <h1> to keep headlines and text in same column etc.

The function returns a string array with columns.

Example how to use:
[code lang=”php”]
$TextString = "some text to split")
$Columns = SplitIntoColumns ($TextString, 2, "<h1>");
echo ($Columns[0]);
echo ($Columns[1]);
[/code]

Function
[code lang=”php”]
function SplitIntoColumns ($InputString, $Columns, $SplitString) {

// Source: http://blog.tjitjing.com/
//
// Splits a string into x number of columns and returns result as an array of columns
//
// Parameters:
// $InputString String to be split into columns
// $Columns Number of columns
// $SplitString String to look for to not split midtext etc
//
// Change history:
// 2011-01-25/Max Version 1
//

// Find middle of text
$ColLength = strlen($InputString)/$Columns;

// Split into columns
for($ColCount = 1; $ColCount <= $Columns; $ColCount++) {

// Find $SplitString, position to cut
$Pos = strpos($InputString , $SplitString , $LastPos + $ColLength);
if ($Pos === false) {
$Pos = strlen($InputString);
}

// Cut out column
$Output[$ColCount – 1] = substr($InputString, $LastPos, $Pos – $LastPos);

$LastPos = $Pos;

}

return $Output;

}
[/code]

[Edit: VB.NET version: Split text in two columns in VB.NET]

Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_multi_init()

First I spent a lot of time trying to find information on how to install cURL on a Windows IIS installation, downloaded the cURL package, moved around files, copied to c:\windows\system32, updated php.ini and did all sorts of things described in forums, blogs and manuals but could not get it to work.

Finally I decided to upgrade my PHP from 5.3.1 to the latest 5.3.2 release. I downloaded the PHP Windows MSI installer and there in the Setup Wizard you can simply select what extensions you want to install. Selected cURL and it worked like a charm I guess it was just to easy…

(I post about this not only to let everyone know how stupid I am but since I could not find this info anywhere it could be good to document it)

I also tried running the installer again in “Change” mode to add and remove Extensions and the installer seems to be doing a pretty good job at adding and removing files + updating php.ini the way you would expect it to.

At one point I tried installing all Extensions but that got me in to trouble giving me a “oci.dll not found” trying to load an Oracle dll. My tip here is to install only the extensions you need or at least not any related to databases you do not use.

After clicking “Next” when you have selected what Extensions to install, the setup wizard may tell you files are locked and you have to restart the server after installing. A way to avoid this can be to (before clicking “Next”) stop the World Wide Web Publishing Service (from command line: NET STOP W3SVC). Just remember to start it again after!

Extensions available from install package in 5.3.2
bzip2
Curl
Enchant
EXIF
Fileinfo
GD2
Gettext
GMP
IMAP
Internationalization (intl)
LDAP
Multi-Byte String
MySQL
MySQLi
OpenSSL
Oracle (10)
Oracle (11g)
PDO
PostgreSQL
Shared Memory
SNMP
SOAP
Sockets
SQLite
SQLite 3
Tidy
XML-RPC
XSL

After a lot of googling and testing I finally found Bruce Kirkpatrick’s comment at the end of the PHP install manual

Seems it is no longer enough to have localhost in the servers local hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) you also have to comment out or remove the IPv6 equivalent.

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost

After I did this everything worked ok again. Thanks Bruce!

Problem

I just upgraded PHP on my Windows Server 2008 running IIS7 from PHP 5.2.10 to 5.3.1. Used the non-threaded install package and installed for FastCGI.

After the upgrade installation worked fine for some non-database driven pages and phpinfo worked fine but whenever a page tries to accessed the MySQL database the browser only gave me a 500 Internal Server Error.

Checking the php error log (C:\Windows\Temp\php-errors.log) I get messages like this:

[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Warning: mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32
[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Warning: mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32
[24-Feb-2010 13:44:36] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\XXX\init_page.inc on line 32