I only wish this story was an April Fools joke.

I'm still in the process of moving everything over to my Macbook. I'm nearly there, but one of the lingering tasks has been getting my invoicing system (BambooInvoice^*) up and running properly. I've been putting it off, mostly because I've got so many other "more important" things to do. What could be more important then collecting money you ask? Um... well... actually I got nothing - I guess its just a case of putting off my own stuff while I get other obligations out of the way.

Today, I had a chance to start migrating that stuff, and so at 4 o'clock I turned on the Dallas/Phoenix game (go Steve Nash!) and started tinkering. As it turns out, I wouldn't finish until nearly 7 o'clock. As the author of Bamboo, I've installed it literally dozens of times on many, many different environments. I figured this would be a 30 second process, then another 30 seconds to migrate over my data and I'd be done. Unfortunately, things never go that smoothly do they? The opening page loaded up, but no stylesheets would render, no images were visible, and darn it... the links didn't work. This is the first CodeIgniter site I've set up on my Macbook, so I figured it was probably just a little setting somewhere. No problem, let's go down the list.

• Fire up the phpinfo file. Everything looks fine there.
• OK, I've installed CodeIgniter a hundred times, its probably just the URI protocol. So I open up config/config.php, and change "$config['uri_protocol'] = "AUTO";" into all 4 recommended values. Nothing.
• Hmm... ok, next up, I try to force query strings. That'll get it... nope.
• Wow, this is frustrating!
• I run a few reduction tests to make sure xampp is properly reporting path_info properly... yup.
• So then I thought "the alias I set up must be botched", and proceed to learn more about the inner workings of Apache's httpd.conf file then I really ever wanted to. Still no solution at hand.
• I spend another bunch of minutes trying various htaccess rules to see if they were even getting read... they were.

So here I am, the author of the software and an active contributor to the framework it uses... tearing my hair out and starting to get really mad. It occurs to me that maybe Apache or PHP runs differently on OSX. Um... no, that'd be dumb. So I finally decide to take one more trip into my config file to see if I can find the problem. Holy Crap! There it is! I see the error and I solved the problem, and now BambooInvoice is up and running just fine.

And the problem? I had typed bamboobinvoice as the directory to look at (notice the extra "b"?)... I'm sure Freud would have a field day...