Tech.It.2.Me->{By.Anton.Perez}

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I haven’t been blogging due to my hectic schedule for the past week.  Most time-consuming is the preparation and shopping I had to attend to for my trip to the Philippines to see my ill grandfather.

I’ve been confirmed to fly on Eva Air via Taipei, Taiwan – and…I found a resource that will be helpful to the readers of my blog: Seat Guru.

According to their website, they state that they’re the ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information. 

What I especially found helpful are the diagrams they provide for about 90% of the major airlines’ seating charts.  It lets you know what seats are good and bad, as well as other pertinent information, such as ammenities.

Check it out!  Hope this helps.  =0)

My sister’s been shopping around for airline tickets to go to Asia without any luck.  So, the geekness in me felt the need to help her out. 

Scanning through some blogs I read regularly, I came across SideStep.com.  It is one of the “newer” travel websites that search a lot of other websites’ flight information, which got me curious as to what technology they use. 

Watching what other people/companies are doing and using helps me stay up-to-date with all these technologies.

I initally wasn’t able to figure out what technologies drive their website until I:

1. Used Steve Gibson’s excellent ID Serve tool to find out what web server they were using
2. Looked for file extensions and came across the .do extension on one of their links. 
3. Checked out the HTML code and scanned for methods that buttons and other input controls were calling.

So, for the web server, it’s none other than Apache (yeah!):

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:32:05 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.sidestep.com/
Content-Length: 294
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

For the back-end, it’s Java, most likely an Apache Struts implementation:

And of course, a ton of JavaScript code for client-side functionality.

From this brief investigation, I also learned that SideStep.com, though, a new comer is giving Orbitz and Expedia a run for their money.  Cool!  Better for us consumers.

To summarize: Try to regularly observe what other people and companies are doing, so as to keep yourself up-to-date.  And along with that, try the techniques I mentioned above for your investigation, as you might learn a thing or two.  =0)

Disclaimer: There are a lot of other techniques and tools that you can use, but the steps above, though, may be incomplete served the purpose of this post.