HTML considered harmful to airport terminals

(From jojobear99 via jessdev)

http://www.tenyearsofmylife.com/2004/02/15/ (click link to see picture)

HTML considered harmful to airport terminals

February 15, 2004

I was cracking up the other night when I walked past this monitor in the SFO terminal. I suppose airport info is xml fetched from a database somewhere, and that from time to time they have errors in the HTML conversion like this.

I always thought that United's redesigned arrival/depature listings looked slick though I had no idea it was just rendered HTML until now.

curl--

I was downloading two files with curl, and the download was taking ages (average rate about 4K/s), so I used a curlrc which said "resume where you left off" so that when I shut down the computer and re-started curl the next day, it would continue the task (project total time: about eight hours for the first file).

When it finished the first file, it wanted to resume the second file, but it used the same offset as it had used for the first file! Let's say it had downloaded 90MB of 100MB, so when I started curl today, it said "please give me data starting from offset 90'000'000". When I finished the file, it said, "please give me the data for the second file, starting from offset 90'000'000"... but the second file wasn't that large!

I would have expected "-C -" to mean "resume where you left off on each file, determining the offset individually for each file". But no.

So I removed the "-C -" because otherwise it wouldn't download the second file... and clobbered the first one because it decided to re-download from the beginning. *§$(§8.

Sinfest

No Sinfest at work. But Sinfest at home. And thanks to Opera 7, page from one comic to the next at the touch of the spacebar.

It is a goodness.

(Though I do sometimes get annoyed when Opera takes me to the "next" page when I've pressed the spacebar once too often on other pages.)