today = ‘VERY bad day’; 
it is only 10 AM and already I am ready to kick my computer.
My cron still is not working - (At least it isn’t a path problem this time) - it can’t access the DB even though all the access information is correct (tested in browser and works fine) and the cron is accessing as a user with full privileges. Dropped a trouble ticket off to the hosting service - maybe they can tell me what the problem is now, so I can fix it. I honestly thought that this whole thing with the cron would be easy once I had the script and command line set- AS IF.
Add to that - I am writing part of the administration area for my project and a stupid SQL ALTER command won’t work. It keeps throwing out a syntax error - and yet when I check out the manual for the DB and a book I have on the DB - it says it should work. But of course it doesn’t.
Command giving me headaches:
ALTER TABLE table ADD COLUMN TEST VARCHAR;
Database being used MySQL. Quote from manual:
ALTER [IGNORE] TABLE tbl_name alter_specification [, alter_specification] ...
alter_specification:
ADD [COLUMN] column_definition [FIRST | AFTER col_name ]
...
Quote from book (MySQL - visual blueprint series)
Example:
ALTER TABLE address ADD COLUMN (
country VARCHAR(10),
unit VARCHAR(5),
notes TEXT );
The parenthesis shown above in this example are not necessary unless you are adding more then 1 column.
So the word COLUMN is optional and the parens are optional. So why the heck isn’t it working?!?!