The Daily WTF
Many years ago, Yazeran needed to work with some floor-plan data. Now, fortunately for Yazeran, a vendor had already collected this information and packed it up behind a SOAP-based web service, so it would in theory be easy to get. This was long enough ago that SOAP was all the rage, and computers with multiple gigabytes of RAM were still on the higher end of things.
In fact, there was an end-point called GetFullDataExtract which promised to, as the name implies, get him all the data. Yazeran didn’t need all the data, but the other end-point, GetGMLBuildings returned only the subset of data Yazeran didn’t need. So Yazeran simply had to request too much.
Yazeran fired up a wget session with all the appropriate credentials and waited. And waited. And waited…
When the 20MB XML response finally downloaded, minutes later, it looked like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> <string xmlns=”http://tempuri.org/”><DataExtract> <Location ID=”13″
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