Continental airlines, me, and GUADEC

I know I should probably be positive, but I’ve never taken much of a liking to travelling (to put it mildly), and yesterday and today aren’t helping…

I had been trying to wake up earlier this week trying to naturally adjust myself to European time. I left to the airport yesterday at 7:30 am and was expecting to have arrived in Barcelona at 9:15 am today (Barcelona time) — about 8 hours ago. Continental airlines wasn’t very helpful with those plans, and seems to have forced me into Hawaiian time or something to boot. Between an unexpected layover in Detroit where we weren’t allowed to deplane (because no gates were available for the plane), a huge delay in my second flight from Cleveland to Newark (that was even worse than the first flight’s delay through Detroit and back to Cleveland) and several hours waiting in their customer service lines (5 different lines at two different airports, the last one requiring two hours alone and at which they took about 10-20 times longer trying to fix my schedule than they did anyone else’s), all that travel time that should have gotten me to Barcelona merely got me into a hotel on the east coast of the U.S. (specifically, Newark). I got to a hotel (after three tries despite Continental supposedly having found me a space at a first one) at about 2:30 a.m. this morning (within an hour of when my flight to Barcelona would be landing), and since I was in some line or another every second I wasn’t on a plane yesterday trying to figure out how to get to Barcelona, I had no meals other than a quick breakfast yesterday. It hasn’t been very fun hearing “everything is full” with details from Northwest, Delta, and Continental out of a dozen different airports (why am I the one that gets the short end of the stick when I had a confirmed flight months ago that I didn’t miss through any fault of mine?) Yesterday they confirmed me on a flight to London tonight and they think they can get me from London to Barcelona on a different airline, Iberia, but Iberia apparently was closed and not-answering-calls-from-Continental late last night so I have to check today to find out for sure whether this will work or they have to give me a different set of flight plans. 🙁

Good thing GUADEC is longer this year; I’m afraid that if it were only a couple of days, I’d be missing a huge percentage of the conference (if not the whole thing) due to the lovely Continental airlines. I’ll see you all in GUADEC whenever I finally make it.

simpler-dup-finder

I’ve been experimenting with a method to make it easier to check if a bug has already been filed. Not perfect by any means, but appears to be good enough to be useful. Definitely seems a lot better than showing users the most frequently duplicated bugs (which are likely to be totally unrelated) and just asking if their bug is a dupe of one of those. That’s what we currently do with bug-buddy, though to be fair, that was a big improvement over trying to use the bug-buddy keyword for the same purpose.

Biggest problem currently is that it can list the same bug multiple times (once per comment that appears to be related). My SQL skills really suck, so I haven’t been able to find a reasonable fix for it. Using ‘distinct’ on the bug_id appears to have no effect unless I also group by bug_id — but grouping by bug_id slows the speed of the query down dramatically. So for now, the same bug can be listed several times.

It can also be used in a format similar to the current simple-dup-finder, and works on both bugs with a stacktrace and those without. A few more details are here.

In other news, Vincent stopped letting me shove the work of coming up with an announcement email off on him. That’s unfortunate, as it means everyone has to suffer with a much more lame announcement (vuntz, J5, kmaraas, jdub, and federico all send out far more creative announcements than I do). I kind of liked the format we had going — take (possibly uneven) turns making releases and if it was my turn then get Vincent to do the announcement part. But, Vincent left early yesterday, so I did the only thing I could do — I copied what I could from Vincent’s last stable release announcement and used it.