NT Incursion

Now I can see why people use NT - heck... I have two machines myself, and use them on a daily basis. But what's caused me trouble today is the DOS-Unix CRLF conversion problem. Specifically, The Weather Channel is now servicing two different pages/servers - one is Unix-based, and the other is NT-based. How do I know? One has redundant CR codes on every line and the other doesn't. Normally, I'd be OK with this, but sed doesn't allow for a regexp matching the control code. This makes it very hard to get rid of them. Thankfully, Solaris has dos2unix and it can strip the codes while leaving Unix files intact.

It just goes to show that once again, scraping screens is hard work when you can't pin down the screen to scrape. And while I understand load balancing, it really helps if the load balance between machines of the same type - at least of the same CRLF-design.

I also sent all my patches to the bidwatcher crew... I like the idea of having a single status line - as in the original version, but I understand the need for different UIs. Heck, we could even make it a preferences item and have them changed on the fly. Anyway, I sent in the patches and we'll see what they are going to do about it. I read on the forums that they are trying to get the 1.2.1 tar file updated, and maybe they'll incorporate these fixes and put up a 1.2.2. We'll have to see.