Martin Geisler Online

I’ve finally booked flights for me and Stéphanie for the summer! We’re going to the U2 Vertigo concert in Copenhagen on the 31th of July, and after that I’ll be going to Århus and Aalborg to visit friends and family while Stéphanie goes back.

We’ll arrive in Copenhagen on July the 31th with a flight from SWISS and Stéphanie will go back already on August the 2nd. I’ll then take a bus to Århus and Aalborg and first go back two weeks later on the 16th of July.

In those two weeks I hope to visit lots of people in both Århus and Aalborg!

That was the dates — now let me tell you about the booking experience… First of all: it’s a jungle trying to find the cheapest flight from A to B. There’s the cheap airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair, and I’ve flown with them before without any problems. But neither of them fly directly from Switzerland to Copenhagen which means that you’ll have to go by either London Stansted or Berlin and this complicates the whole thing, and is also likely to make the total cost higher than a direct flight.

About the total cost, then that’s a bit silly too: half of what you pay is called fuel, fees and taxes. And you’ll only see those at the end of your booking. I understand that the airline companies have to pay something to the airports to be allowed to land there, but could they not just include that in the price? That would make things more transparent when you’re comparing prices — ups, perhaps that’s why they haven’t done it! :-)

Finally a technical thing: the SWISS online booking system cannot handle two concurrent bookings made in the same browser. When trying to do so, you get this nice little warning:

Sorry: our system is unable to continue this transaction. Entering multiple inquiries or using the “Back” function of your browser can cause the system to freeze. Please close your internet window completely and start again.

I would suspect that they store the session data in a cookie, and thus the two tabs or browser windows will use the same cookie. That’s a shame, for making two concurrent bookings is exactly what I had to do in my case where Stéphanie and I will be flying back on different dates. And it’s not that it’s technically impossible to support multiple concurrent sessions in the same browser: it just requires that the session ID is embedded in the page and not in a cookie — EasyJet does it like this. A small detail in the implementation with a big impact on the functionality of the system as a whole.

Using Linux it was easy to overcome this limitation anyway: I simply logged in as another user, exported $DISPLAY to :0.0 and started another Firefox. Before doing this you’ll have to give the other user access to your X server, do this by copying your ~/.Xauthority file to the home directory of the other user. An alternative is to make a symbolic link to it and then ensure that the other user is able to read it (with root this works very nicely).

Another, more heavy-weight, solution would be to spawn a new display using something like GDM Flexiserver, but just copying or linking the ~/.Xauthority file is much easier, IMHO.