Lousy error reporting.

[swestrup]

So, I am reminded once again why I am taking extra time to put in propper error reporting in a parser than will only ever be run a few dozen times. I get burned by other folks lax attitude towards errors all the time. I mean here I am, trying to do some web browsing, and I keep getting these 'Page contains no data' errors. Now I know that that isn't correct, because the device I'm browsing is a read-only penguin, and there is no doubt that is contains data of some sort. I mean the fish counts alone will occupy a few K, never mind the DNA and its little dreamy dreams. So, I grab the penguin and ram home a packet sniffer, and I discover that, indeed, the penguin is emitting all sorts of responses to the http probes, but they aren't being relayed because they have a mime type of 'application/extended-penguin-device-error' which my browser thinks it understands, but it doesn't. Anyway, once I can see the errors, it becomes painfully obvious that something is wrong with the automount script. Sure enough for some reason it defaults to a FAT filesystem for a penguin, and this guy is fairly lean. He is, however, Reiser compatible, and so after a bit of script tweaking I fire up my browser again and suddenly his lunch is all over my web pages.

So, THAT problem is now solved and I just need to arrange the fish heads into correctly tabulated columns, and I'll be able to get on with something else.