Just saw that Google Flights was introduce: for searching and booking flights online.
It needs some more work (see below), but it is a great start for a couple of reasons as compared to any of the competition I have seen:
A much more intuitive and clutter-free user interface
A blazingly fast response (SFO – AMS: response in about a second, all others took at least 10 seconds)
Try the user experience for yourself. A few things I liked:
In addition to selecting preferred airlines, you can select preferred Airline Alliances
(they share miles anyway).
Shows flight duration and allows you to sort on it
(ideal for business passengers)
Shows if you can have WiFi
(for geeks like me)
Uses hint-panes when you hoover the mouse over certain areas to fill in more detailed information
(like the airline that operates the flight, or the stops you make).
Shows a graph with fare-rate over time
(so you can pick days with lowest fare more easily; the sweet spot for SFO-AMS seems to be 2-5 day trips that include a saturday/sunday night).
Some things they need to work on:
You can search from USA to destinations outside USA, but not vice versa
(for instance, it finds SFO – AMS, but you are not allowed to enter AMS – SFO).
It is not included in the Google – Products list
(right now you can go from Flights to Web search, but not the other way around).
It always starts with a departure in SFO
(it would make sense if you can select your faviourite departure airport; I live about 10 minutes from AMS / EHAM).
It always starts with a departure date 16 days from now
(The last link is pun intended: it tests the Google search cache for refreshing pages that calculate information).
I knew that 2>&1 was needed to redirect both stderr and stdout, but for piping, it cannot be at the end of the line. This works in the categories shown at the bottom of the post.
(4) Redirecting both standard output and standard error to the same file or device is done by adding 2>&1 to the command line. This will only work in OS/2 and NT, not in MS-DOS.
Where you put 2>&1 is rather critical. It will only do what it is supposed to do when placed at the end of the command line (as Jennie Walker pointed out to me) or right before the next pipe ( | ).
Example: batch file that checks if a few NarrowCast machines are indeed on-line and logged on with the right user.
It uses PsLoggedOn to verify who is logged on, and Explorer to show a hidden share.
The pipe is needed to verify there is indeed a domain user logged on.
@echo off
for %%m in (Machine1 Machine2 Machine3) do call :show %%m
goto :pause
:show
echo %1
%~dp0PsLoggedOn -L \\%1 2>&1 | find /I "MYDOMAIN\"
start explorer /e,\\%1\NarrowCast$
goto :end
:pause
pause
:end
The hint for each bar even does the views per visitor math (seems to average around 1.25 views per visitor on this blog, will update this when a longer period has passed).
public static void CreateUnderlyingDirectory(string path)
{
string directoryPath = Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
Directory.CreateDirectory(directoryPath); // NOP if it exists, will create all parent directories if not
}
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 