Mario's World » thin client http://alvares.in/mario on travel technology, hacking and everything else Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:00:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Emirates ICE too thin? http://alvares.in/mario/20081218/emirates-ice-too-thin/ http://alvares.in/mario/20081218/emirates-ice-too-thin/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:04:41 +0000 mario http://alvares.in/mario/?p=602

Back in Dubai for a very busy 2 days. Took the Emirates flight.

Now this happens too often to me, but usually with touch screen kiosks. I managed to reboot ICE, which is the in-flight entertainment system on Emirates. Looks like some kind of thin-client application and it took about 5 minutes to download to my screen.

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Was going over some of my great hacking achievements over the past few years at SWITCH. One of the best was creating the Sabre POS for travel agents.

MySabre from Sabre is a 100% web-based application for travel agents to book airline tickets, hotels, cars, etc. Sabre said their app would only work in IE on Windows. It needed 3 logins to get to the booking screen. All I wanted to do initially was to get it running on Linux to reduce costs.

I took it all the way. Got it working on a Thin Client (disk-less) Linux station in FireFox. I reduced the logins required to just 1 and got rid of all the excess app interface that agents kept complaining about. Reduced the initial load time from about 5 mins to just about 15 secs. All that in just 3 days. :)

It supposedly caused quite a stir at the Sabre Head Office back in Texas.

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