An open letter to developers of digital service manuals and information systems, particularly in the automotive and diesel mechanics industries. These software packages continue to require operating systems and other components that are literally a decade old, and I’m sick of supporting them.

While running my unit tests for an application I’m developing, I noticed that certain web service components were intermittently failing.  The failure was caused by irregularly formed XML responses from Amazon’s Web Services. The failures occured as Exceptions from within the Zend_Service_Amazon component, but upon further inspection I was able to discover that the HTTP Adapter being used from within Zend_Service_Amazon, which is by default Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Socket, was not returning the entire stream from Amazon.  After [...]