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A historical day for aviation, today. De biggest airplane ever, the Airbus A380 has succeeded its first test flight in Toulouse. But a black day for travellers. A plane with 800 passengers, that means: longer queues at check-in, longer queues for boarding, longer waits at disembarking, longer waits for luggage. Moreover, an airplane of that size can only be filled on busy lines and therefore everybody will from now on have to travel via the big airports (“hubs”).
My ideal? More small planes, without stopovers in Paris, Frankfurt or Amsterdam. I want to arrive at the airport no earlier than 20 minutes before departure, fly direct to my destination, and leave the airport 10 minutes after landing. (Oh yeah, I also want Internet and power for my laptop in every plane, but that has nothing to do with the A380.) 2005-04-27
Since a few weeks, the French supermarket Carrefour sells a new product: Couques Amandes. In fact, they are the well-known Dutch “gevulde koeken” (almond cookies). In itself not surprising that you can now buy them in France as well, but what struck me was the name: “couque” is not a normal French word. There are apparently a few Belgian cookies that are called that. But it looks very much as if “couque” is simply the Dutch “koek” in French spelling... 2003-09-05
The mark-up in XML-based documents is often so verbose (relative to the other content), that some people have described XML documents as “self-describing.” A somewhat weaker claim is that such documents contain both content and structure. Neither is true. The structure is in the document format's definition (often summarized in a DTD), the mark-up only serves to tell a parser how the document maps into that structure. For example, the document doesn't tell which optional parts are omitted.
It is interesting that the claim of being “self-describing” seems to be only made of XML, not of other languages (Java, RTF, CSS, etc.), not even of relatively verbose ones (MIME, iCal, etc.). Or maybe people once claimed that Cobol was self-describing? 2003-02-12
The “semantic web” is a crusade against the practice of hiding the useful information of a Web page inside tons of advertisements, navigation links and other clutter.
The crusade will probably have some effect, but it is unlikely that information will ever be completely in the format that the reader wants, if only because it is hard for a reader to ask the right question (recall and precision). 2002-06-20
Do you always push the button of the pedestrian traffic light twice, too? For security?
If there had been a light or audible signal to indicate that the button press had been registered, people wouldn't push twice. Somewhere (in Japan?) I've seen such a traffic light. Another Japanese discovery: a pedestrian traffic light that indicates how long it takes before the light turns green. 2002-02-17
Bert Bos