It’s Saturday, normally a day of relaxation, but today I spent most of the day in a partner debugging session with Andrew, my collaborator on the mezzacotta Generators project. Gory details follow (feel free to skip if you’re not interested in boring computer programming stuff):
We started by updating our code to use Python version 3, rather than the old Version 2.7 that it had been running on. This required some code changes, which then had to be tested. And there was a strange bug that caused some of the generators, but not all of them, to intermittently fail when run by loading them from a web browser, but they all worked fine without failing when the same code was run from the web server command line.
After several hours of testing, we determined that the bug was being caused by a stray non-ASCII character in an input file. But it was only causing a problem when run by the web server, because it was operating in a different environment, and the default I/O encoding environment variable was set to ASCII on the web server, but UTF-8 on the command line. Setting that variable to UTF-8 in the wrapping PHP fixed it!
Anyway, we can now show off the Band Name Generator. If you have a garage band you need a name for (or even if you don’t), give it a try!
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