You know the ones. Not the ones where eveything goes wrong, they're easy to deal with. You just screw them up, throw them away and start over.
No, today is one of those days where everything is going swimmingly, then something utterly stumps you. Brick wall time. You can't see any reason for it, and everything seems to work except in one specific circumstance that shouldn't be any different to any other. And you scratch your head for hours, and when you finally track it down it's something really dim (in Eddie Izzard terms, "the printer has an on button?...").
Well, since I very nearly embarrassed myself with this one in the programming forum, and now I've sorted it I can kind of see the funny side, here's what brick walled me today:
I've been working on a new reporting system for one of our clients, and there was a bit of it that was just screaming for some AJAXy goodness. Not a core skill of mine, but one that I've been meaning to learn for some time. And after a few newb errors and oversights, I got it working in my dev environment with IE8. So I pulled down Firefox, and sure enough it worked in dev with Firefox 3.6 too.
So I rolled it down to test, and checked it with IE8, IE7, Chrome and Firefox running in my test environment. And there was much rejoicing.
Then the ultimate test: this tool is going to be used by NHS staff, so IE6 support was essential. First the problem of finding a computer that still had IE6 on it, since everyone in the unit had upgraded long ago. And I was about 10 seconds off pulling a spare box out and sticking a fresk copy of XP SP2 on it when I remembered our old projector PC hadn't been used in about a year (since the ceiling mounted projector died from hyperthermic shock) and sure enough, once I'd got it hooked up to the new projector and found a USB keyboard and mouse to hook up to, it was running good old 6.0
. So I loaded up the test site, nervously went to the AJAXy section, and..... RESULT! Perfect crossbrowser AJAX in IE6, 7, 8, FF 3.6 and Chrome 5. So, brim full of whatever it is success fills you with, I decided to top off a great day I'd fire up Opera and watch my AJAXy magic on one last browser.
Nothing.
No AJAXy goodness, just an empty <select>.
Error Console? Nothing. Developer Tools? Nothing. My tea leaves? Nothing (although admittedly that's because I don't drink tea...). So off I trotted to Hexus to beg the wise and good for some advice on where to start working out why this just wasn't working, and how running javascript that was working everywhere else but Opera would not leave any error messages either. And as my mouse hovered over the 'submit thread' button, a nagging voice said "One way that javascript wouldn't leave error messages is if it wasn't running....".
I couldn't be that dim could I?
Tools... Quick Preferences... Enable Javascript...? No check mark. My AJAX wasn't working, because I had *chose* to disable javascript in Opera last time I was using it.
Ahem. Well...
So, that's my "blindingly obvious but I missed it moment" today - anyone else having / had one?


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) and sure enough, once I'd got it hooked up to the new projector and found a USB keyboard and mouse to hook up to, it was running good old 6.0
. So I loaded up the test site, nervously went to the AJAXy section, and..... RESULT! Perfect crossbrowser AJAX in IE6, 7, 8, FF 3.6 and Chrome 5. So, brim full of whatever it is success fills you with, I decided to top off a great day I'd fire up Opera and watch my AJAXy magic on one last browser.

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and i did miss the eurofighters flying around (read one of my previous threads).

