Visit Norway

-

It's been hectic times around here, mostly due to different changes at my workplace. Now it's time to start thinking on having some vacation. A summer trip seems a good idea but this year I've selected Norway: beautiful but expensive.

While there are tons of information on-line, I have found details are a bit sketchy. This is likely due to the fact I'm interested on cheap accommodation. Maybe the average wages in Norway are much higher than in my home country, Spain.

I've got some trouble getting things done online. There seems to be some odd behavior and this booking website, when browsed with Firefox on Ubuntu 8.04. The worst thing is that it was this the browser I was using when booking my flight with Norwegian.com and I was offered a very competitive car-rental price at the end of the airplane booking process.

Unfortunately when trying to go to book the car I was offered an almost empty page. I was wrong when I thought I could go back to the former page too. So I realized there was not way for to either book the car here nor to download the details about my flights.

To make things worse I had refused to create a user on Norwegian website as I wsa not planning to be buying more tickets anytime soon. However, lacking of a user login I had not clue on how to get my flight details. Email was producing no document either. I was expecting a bit more help after shelling out a couple of grands.

My wife, using her iMac, reported that airline website might allow us to get our flight details using the flight locator and lastname. Unfortunately, that didn't work either. No clue about why.

Frustrated I decided to go to check my flight on Amadeus system. I used CheckMyTrip website. I used the flight locator and my lastname (that included a dash) and voilà, I finally obtained my flight details. Good news.

Then I realized that the dashes on our lastnames have been erased in the booking process (maybe their online system does not like dashes). So armed with this new info I went back to Norwegian website and, finally, I was able to recover all the documents about all flight (pdf files with barcodes that can help you avoid the check-in if you fly without baggage). Of course the trick was not to used my lastname dash!

Even better, I was now able to book the car-rental at that best rate but only if I was using my wife's iMac with Firefox.

I guess the moral of the story is to be very careful when booking on-line using not the latest version of browsers, and, if possible, use the nasty Internet Explorer on Windows that seems to be what many developers consider the "standard".

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wish you a nice holiday :)
4:37 pm
misan said…
Thanks a lot. I can't wait.
5:38 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

-
Image
Variable Frequency Drives ( VFD ) allow the control of spindles so speed can accurately be controlled and a detailed acceleration profile for the spindle and reverse rotation can all be handled. In essence a VFD is an three phase inverter for three-phase AC motor. I am using a popular (I mean cheap) Chinese VFD and though the reference manual is not great, I could see there is a built-in RS-485 port. I usually control the start, stop and speed selection using the keyboard on the unit but I thought it will be more useful if I could control everything from the same Arduino is doing our CNC table control. Some cheap RS-485 off eBay and some lines of code later, I can start, stop and change the speed from an Arduino. What a cool thing to have! Some configuration of your VFD are needed before you can use it like that.  You need to set PD163=1 (I am using address 1 in the code). PD=164=1 (for setting serial to 9600bps) and PD165=0 (for using ASCII and 8N1 character for...
Read more

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

-
Image
After some experimentation, and delving a bit into the math of motion, I realized there can be a significant difference on the motion of a machine by just making small changes. A common and popular approach to smooth one axis of motion is to use a trapezoidal speed pattern, where acceleration and deceleration are uniformly accelerated movements (aka constant acceleration motion) separated by a portion happening at cruising speed. The problem comes with the fact that, while that approach is simple to understand and to code, it does contain sudden changes in the acceleration, that show as spikes on the acceleration derivative, called jerk. These sudden changes in the acceleration translate into undesired vibration in our machines. Most of that can be eliminated by selecting a motion pattern that does not contain sudden changes of acceleration. If we chose a mathematical function for our speed whose second derivative is continuous, then we reduce system vibration quite a lot. One ma...
Read more

Importing OpenSCAD designs into Onshape

-
Image
After using Onshape CAD software for a while I am really fond of it. So one natural thing to do, specially once they have released the Instructor's kit is to start using it in the classroom too. But one thing I was not so sure how to do was to use old designs I made using OpenSCAD. It does not mean I am completely quitting using OpenSCAD but suddenly I can see I can do assemblies in Onshape that will look quite nice for showing and documentation purposes if only I could easily import from OpenSCAD. I am glad to report that the route OpenSCAD --> FreeCAD --> Onshape worked brilliantly. Even more when a few tricks were applied. While some people suggest to import CSG files from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD, I have had more success by directly importing SCAD files into FreeCAD. One trick that worked well for me was to get rid of $fn references, so now circles become real circles (or cylinders) in FreeCAD. If a part keeps some $fn references then your cylinders or circles wi...
Read more