Free holiday?
Does this mean that if you book a holiday across that date via Expedia, you get an extra day's stay for free?
Eurostar cancels 29 Feb 2008
The unmarried gals among you who were thinking of availing yourselves of the 2008 leap year by booking a romantic train excursion over the Channel with the other half, and popping the question on the one day which, as tradition dictates, you're allowed to get down on one knee and whip out an engagement ring, are advised to make …
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 11:47 GMT Simon Reed
Testing?
Surely you're not suggesting the technology systems relating to railways might not be thoroughly tested?
Actually, as a career IT bod, I find it beyond belief that such a trivially simple bug could be released into the live environment.
I would expect at least three people to be publicly humiliated for allowing that to go live. If I worked either in their coding or testing teams, I would be ashamed to be associated with them.
Actually, it is pathetically awful stuff like this that gives the rest of us in IT a bad name. Tossers.
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 12:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Pft, Eurostar
You're probably better off driving to Dover and getting your car on the ferry- it'll be less expensive, more comfy and certainly more enjoyable.
Oh, and you get to pick when you want to travel, too ...
Having had the "brilliant" opportunity to to travel on it a few times, I can say I've been on local trains in Germany offering better service (like a real bar in the train - not an empty car with a service counter selling cold coffee, warm soda, sticky sandwiches and half-molten candy bars for insane prices), better ride (like, being able to get up and walk to the bog without the train lurching and depositing you in someone's lap) , and better fares.
Bring back Hoverspeed!
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 12:28 GMT Chris Wood
re: -20 mins + 20 mins
"Yeah but it will take 20 mins+ longer for anyone to the South or West of London to reach St. Pancras compared with Waterloo."
Well as the majority of the UK is to the north of London I think you're in the minority here (plus a lot of locations to the south of London have train services to Victoria, which is a short tube ride to St Pancras without changing)
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 12:28 GMT Ross Fleming
@ Nigel R
Fair enough, so it won't take any longer for people in South or West London cos the 20 minutes cancel out (northern line from W'loo to Kings X easily 20mins or less), and 40 minutes less time for people in East or North London (they lose 2 x 20mins). Sounds like no-one loses out then! :-)
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 12:34 GMT bluesxman
Workaround, of sorts
If you select the 28th (for example) and select the 3 days either way radio you can get at the mythical 29th o' Feb at the next stage. So not a completely broken system. But still more than a bit shit.
How the hell did Trainline's engine get to become the de facto standard, when it's such a heaping pile of crap?
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 14:14 GMT BoldMan
This is astoundingly lazy coding!
Its a trivial thing to incorporate the leap year algorithm into code: divide the year by 4, if its an integer then its a leap year, unless its a century year then you divide by 400.
Mind you now we are post 2000 AD (are we in MegaCity One yet?) you can robably get away with leaving that last bit off.
This is nothing to do with the Y2K "bug" its just lazy coding.
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 14:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
A week and a half later...
You can only book 4 months in advance. I've been waiting to book this, and found out that they don't do 29th of Feb, about 3rd of November, the first day I could book the return leg of the journey.
Emailed them 4th November to tell them. Nothing. Phoned them last Thurday. Nothing.
I guess they want me to fly there...
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 17:50 GMT The Other Steve
year mod ( (year mod 100 > 0) ? 4 : 400) > 0 ? false : true
My date fu is a little rusty, but ISTR that the above will do the trick in a very compact kind of way barely even a full line of code, although the intent is hard to read(and I haven't checked it of course, that would be no fun).
Whoever programmed the date dropdown component wants to be shot.
@Mark Rendle :
I live near Newcastle, I went to Paris, it was shite. I'm not going back.
So you might not be to far off the truth.
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 19:23 GMT Morely Dotes
@ Simon Reed
"as a career IT bod, I find it beyond belief that such a trivially simple bug could be released into the live environment."
I don't. I used to get "gold" code from Microsoft (you know, pre-release set-in-stone software) when I was testing network products for the World's Largest Chipmaker(tm) that had such glaringly obvious mistakes that even Steve Ballmer could have seen them.
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Tuesday 13th November 2007 21:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
testing testing testing
But the point is you caught it during testing.
Daft bugs like this will always slip thru (the coder above with the wrongheaded leap year check proves this) - it's the tester responsibility to catch it. t
Anyway. HAHAHA !! I went for an interview at thetrainline for a testing job and they didn't even have the courtesy to get back to me. they were fretting as much about keeping the regulators sweet as they were about testing properly.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
