The government of the State of Chiapas has recently published on the web a list of the shelter where each victim of Hurricane Stan is right now, so their relatives can find out where they are and how to get in touch with them.
It is a good idea and undoubtel it was done in a hurry, but it is poorly implemented: the list is published in two formats: a 1.2MB PDF file and a 5.6MB HTML file (in the site the file size is listed at22MB!) that were exported directly from Microsoft Excel. If you are looking for a relative whose fate remains uncertain, it is kind of heartless to force you to download a 8MB PDF Viewer or a 5.6MB file to even start looking for your loved ones. Even more if the server doesn’t support content negotiation for GZIP compression, which would shrink the file to 262KB — under 5% of the original size! (bzip2 compression is even more efficient, the compressed file would be half that size). I will spare you of the rant about Microsoft’s disgusting HTML format.
Well, I downloaded the file and wrote a small perl script to clean up that file and import the records into a SQL database. It even does Soundex translation for improved accuracy thanks to Text::Soundex. Perl is Beautiful. If you can, you may want to publish that database on your own site to give people an opportunity to find their relatives, or point them to navegando.net where the search will be kept indifinitely and the database will be refreshed as needed.
BTW, my relatives reported while Stan was still in full force and all of them turned out unharmed.