Puzzle 64 - Sat, 27 Dec 2008

As I was getting everything working on my websites, I got an email from someone who had just requested a trial key. It was sent to him but it didn’t work.

I checked and I found that the new site was producing different trial keys than the old site. I couldn’t imagine how that could be. Maybe the date on the new server was different (as I use the date to help determine the key).

I quickly generated the correct key and sent it to him so that he could start using Behold. But I definitely didn’t want that to happen to anyone else, especially someone who purchases Behold, so this had to be fixed pronto.

I debugged it step by step and narrowed it down to a PHP bitwise shift-left and shift-right function. To my surprise the answer was that shift-left and shift-right give different answers depending on whether you are using a 32-bit Operating System or a 64-bit Operating System. I found some appropriate solutions on the web to get the same results on both by ensuring the operations get 32-bit results on both Operating Systems. I’ll have to remember to make the same changes to my code in Behold once Delphi comes out with its 64-bit compiler, probably in a year or so.

This problem was so unexpected, and so was the solution to it. What this means is that IXWebhosting’s shared server I was on was a Windows 32-bit Operating System. But Netfirms Clustered Service I am now on is a Unix 64-bit Operating System. That pleases me since it should result in much improved performance for you when you visit my websites.