Had an interesting couple of hours today when Gradwell installed PHP 5 on a box they thought wasn’t in the web cluster, but was. Hypothetical2 and InfoCMS emulate exceptions, so they have throw and catch functions and an Exception class. PHP 5 has real exceptions, so these words are sacred, the former being keywords and the latter being a built-in class. Needless to say some amount of chaos ensued. I rapidly updated all my live sites but in such way that I can be pretty sure I’ve introduced bugs.

Then later on this evening I was trying to do some stuff with the smtplib Python module and couldn’t get any mail to come through. After poking about for a bit I found that it was all jamming up in my MTA queue because my Mum’s ISP, Tiscali, wouldn’t return anything in reponse to an MX query. I guess this is their clever way of stopping worms from running riot, but it pissed me off, so now I’m using Zen’s servers instead :-).