Does this mean that if you book a holiday across that date via Expedia, you get an extra day's stay for free?

Yeah but it will take 20 mins+ longer for anyone to the South or West of London to reach St. Pancras compared with Waterloo.

Surely you're not suggesting the technology systems relating to railways might not be thoroughly tested?

Actually, as a career IT bod, I find it beyond belief that such a trivially simple bug could be released into the live environment.

I would expect at least three people to be publicly humiliated for allowing that to go live. If I worked either in their coding or testing teams, I would be ashamed to be associated with them.

Actually, it is pathetically awful stuff like this that gives the rest of us in IT a bad name. Tossers.

I notice that the same type of error occurs on the National Rail Enquiries website.

That's my next birthday...

Just tried to book a ticket on thetrainline.com and it interpretted 29/02 as "1 February 2008" - didn't the people who designed/implemented these systems foresee a leap year?!

You're probably better off driving to Dover and getting your car on the ferry- it'll be less expensive, more comfy and certainly more enjoyable.

Oh, and you get to pick when you want to travel, too ...

Having had the "brilliant" opportunity to to travel on it a few times, I can say I've been on local trains in Germany offering better service (like a real bar in the train - not an empty car with a service counter selling cold coffee, warm soda, sticky sandwiches and half-molten candy bars for insane prices), better ride (like, being able to get up and walk to the bog without the train lurching and depositing you in someone's lap) , and better fares.

Bring back Hoverspeed!

"Yeah but it will take 20 mins+ longer for anyone to the South or West of London to reach St. Pancras compared with Waterloo."

Well as the majority of the UK is to the north of London I think you're in the minority here (plus a lot of locations to the south of London have train services to Victoria, which is a short tube ride to St Pancras without changing)

'That's my next birthday...'

mine too! im gona be 6!

how old are you going to be?

Fair enough, so it won't take any longer for people in South or West London cos the 20 minutes cancel out (northern line from W'loo to Kings X easily 20mins or less), and 40 minutes less time for people in East or North London (they lose 2 x 20mins). Sounds like no-one loses out then! :-)

This works fine.... :)

(fill in london - paris 29.02.08)

http://plannerint.b-rail.be/bin//query.exe/nn?ld=IB&L=nsnl

If you select the 28th (for example) and select the 3 days either way radio you can get at the mythical 29th o' Feb at the next stage. So not a completely broken system. But still more than a bit shit.

How the hell did Trainline's engine get to become the de facto standard, when it's such a heaping pile of crap?

...use lastminute.com instead -- it works a treat.

Go to City Breaks/Eurostar breaks/Eurostar ticket.

(Declaration of interest: I work for lastminute.com)

"Ben Parr-Ferris"

Wasn't that some sort of coming of age ritual that Vulcan males had to go through???

...and Mine!

11th birthday!

Is this a throwover from the Y2K bug fix, returning to bite us in the bum?

alas it would appear you can book hotels on the 29th via expedia, in fact you can book the eurostar on their site for that day, probably fixed that one pretty darn quickly

Its a trivial thing to incorporate the leap year algorithm into code: divide the year by 4, if its an integer then its a leap year, unless its a century year then you divide by 400.

Mind you now we are post 2000 AD (are we in MegaCity One yet?) you can robably get away with leaving that last bit off.

This is nothing to do with the Y2K "bug" its just lazy coding.

You can only book 4 months in advance. I've been waiting to book this, and found out that they don't do 29th of Feb, about 3rd of November, the first day I could book the return leg of the journey.

Emailed them 4th November to tell them. Nothing. Phoned them last Thurday. Nothing.

I guess they want me to fly there...

Close. It's "Pon Farr".

No, this is just lazy arse coding of the worest kind!

The code for leap years is easy and anybody working with date classes should know it!

I always went for "divide two-digit year by four to integer and check the remainder, if zero, it's a leap year". Worked for 2000 perfectly happily.

I believe that there is a point in the future at which this one will get it wrong, but I'll be long dead and my code equally so.....

I was (optimistically) coding dates to be Y2K and Y2100 (not a leap year) compliant on departmental systems in 1976, and they wouldn't have screwed up like that. The coder should be taken outside and shot. (Well, not really, that would be murder)

<<No, this is just lazy arse coding of the worest kind!>>

-And that's spelling which won't get past the most generous parser. GOD!!! Children on this site.

@TeeCee - not true for 2100/2200/2300. - @BoldMan is correct

@Nigel R - the majority of this country don't actually live in London Town

@Mark Aggleton,

Like northerners* ever go to Paris. Or indeed, past t' working men's club at t' foot of t' road. Not that any of them actually work, of course.

*For the purposes of this pointlessly inflammatory comment, "north" may be considered to start at Islington.

kthxbye.

I'll have you know I once went as far as Batley when me whippet ran off!

Sophistication? Don't talk to me about sophistication, I've *been* to Leeds.

My date fu is a little rusty, but ISTR that the above will do the trick in a very compact kind of way barely even a full line of code, although the intent is hard to read(and I haven't checked it of course, that would be no fun).

Whoever programmed the date dropdown component wants to be shot.

@Mark Rendle :

I live near Newcastle, I went to Paris, it was shite. I'm not going back.

So you might not be to far off the truth.

So, anonymouscoward has a job! How the hell can he/she find the time to fit it in between postings?

"as a career IT bod, I find it beyond belief that such a trivially simple bug could be released into the live environment."

I don't. I used to get "gold" code from Microsoft (you know, pre-release set-in-stone software) when I was testing network products for the World's Largest Chipmaker(tm) that had such glaringly obvious mistakes that even Steve Ballmer could have seen them.

But the point is you caught it during testing.

Daft bugs like this will always slip thru (the coder above with the wrongheaded leap year check proves this) - it's the tester responsibility to catch it. t

Anyway. HAHAHA !! I went for an interview at thetrainline for a testing job and they didn't even have the courtesy to get back to me. they were fretting as much about keeping the regulators sweet as they were about testing properly.

<<No, this is just lazy arse coding of the worest kind!>>

-And that's spelling which won't get past the most generous parser. GOD!!! Children on this site.

Hold the front page!

Eurostar finds February 29th in leap year

It's all working now.