1.)  I can’t do CTRL+SHIFT+S to not show the styles on my page.  Instead my bookmarks show up on a sidebar.  Boo.

2.)  I can’t do CTRL+SHIFT+Y to inspect a particular element in the DOM and see where it sits in the DOM.  Instead, this “Jump to Tag” window pops up.
I will now search for a solution.  If anyone finds it before me, please comment.

On the Javascript side I use the serialize() function to take all my form data and pass it through to action.php.

$("#submit-form").submit(
function(){
var data = $(this).serialize();
$.post( "action.php", {
action: "ajax_verify_form",
data: data },
function(response){
alert(response);
return false;
}
);
return false;
}
);

On the PHP side:

if($action == "ajax_verify_form"){
$fields = explode("&",$data);
foreach($fields as $field){
$field_key_value = explode("=",$field);
$key = urldecode($field_key_value[0]);
$value = urldecode($field_key_value[1]);
eval("$$key = "$value";");
}
}

Now I have all the same variables from the client side on the PHP side. Now you can do whatever form-checking you need with PHP.  If you have an error, echo the error so the callback function on the jquery.post() function will catch it.

Here’s the Google Transit route: http://twurl.nl/genltl

I’ve been trying to tackle this issue for a while. I’ve been making a connection to an Oracle database using PHP, but I’d have to modify the environment variables to tell PHP where to find the Oracle installation and the tnsnames.ora file. To do this, I would use the putenv() PHP function to set the ORACLE_HOME and TNS_ADMIN variables. The problem was that it was being really really erratic. It would make a connection one day and the next day it’s not working. Did the freaking server admin make changes to the server? Am I pointing the environment variables to the right place? Trust me, I went over this issue for a long time.

Well the issue is that you’re not even supposed to be usnig putenv() to set environment variables. In fact it’s going to be deprecated by PHP ver. 6.0… Thanks to this PDF http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/underground-php-oracle-manual.pdf on page 100 it states that you’re supposed to be setting the environment variables in the shell that starts Apache. I’ve sent the request in to my server admin (since i don’t have rights) and I’m pretty confident that this will work.

[UPDATE]

Setting the environment variables on Apache worked…  for the most part.  It still craps out maybe like 10% of the time.  This is still an issue which still needs some investigation.