jmoiron.net

Editors Note: This entry was published late due to laziness and technical difficulties, and first appeared here on September 7th, 2008.

I am currently in a flight to Hong Kong. We have the window and the aisle on one of those large new Boeing planes, which means I am actually lounging on 2 seats quite comfortably. Curiously, although the air temperature outside is supposedly -64 degrees fahrenheit, my windowshade is too hot to touch.

I went to HK last year, but this time I'm going to hop over to Beijing instead of Bangkok and check me out some Olympics. I thought that I had prepared myself digitally for the flight, and armed with both my airplane laptop adapter and my regular power adapter (Continental's new 7x7 planes have AC power on all seats, which is pretty great!), I set out to do some work.

I have a local install of the website I develop professionally, and the first thing that I noticed was that a few widgets weren't working. Luckily for me, I had firebug and could investigate! Unluckily for me, I had upgraded Firefox and not Firebug shortly before leaving, and my firebug was hosed. FUN.

Still, Firefox has the javascript error console and I was able to figure out that I was missing a lot of javascript includes. Turns out that some of the YUI stuff we're using was being sourced or linked off of yahoo's servers and not from our own media server. I'm not sure how that works with the user agreement (I think Yahoo is willing to take that hit if it means more people are using YUI), but that shit don't work on planes.

After finally diagnosing this problem (Web browsers are really quiet about not finding resources linked from the page), I modified all that linking source to point to the local server, and it worked. Still no firebug (which is unfortunate, because I need to develop some heavy javascript widget stuff), but I guess I've learned my lesson: if you are going to have no internet, check that you can function without internet. It isn't always clear that you are using it (or not).