This blog ends ...

... and is continued here.

My stereo set not being an FSM revisited

I solved this problem, mentioned earlier. It is published here. The solution entails treating a transition as a superstate in itself: a stateful transition (my term). Each exit, entry, and transition action (code) is treated as a substate of this superstate.

I also checked if this article was being linked to. It wasn't. Then I checked if it was indexed by Google. It was. But when I started looking for it with some sommon search terms, I couldn't find it. It turns out that I hadn't even given the article a proper HTML title tag and some meta tags. No-good webdeveloper, me. I fixed it now. I'm pretty sure somebody must be interested in it :)

Ontwikkelingen in rijsimulatorland

Ook al ben ik al een tijdje weg bij Green Dino, ik probeer de rijsimulatorwereld toch zo nu en dan een beetje te volgen. Dat doe ik gewoon door op 'rijsimulator' te Googlen. En dan vallen me verschillende dingen op:

1. De simulator van VStep schijnt nu binnenkort toch echt geplaatst te worden, en wel in Rotterdam. Er is nog steeds geen foto te vinden van dat ding, maar wel een aantal mooie renderings, bijvoorbeeld op hun website DriveZone. Informatie hierover zoeken gaat ook goed via VStep's CEO Pjotr van Schothorst. (Of is er al een geplaatst?)
2. De ANWB heeft Google betaald om op bovenaan de zoekresultatenlijst te verschijnen bij zoeken op "rijsimulator". Hahahaha!
3. Er is geen positief bericht te vinden over de ANWB simulator.
4. Kennelijk heeft Green Dino contact gehad met de Belgische ANWB(?), de VAB, af te leiden uit deze uitgebreide pagina met mooie foto's.
5. Er zijn weer een aantal simulators geplaatst, zoals die van het SimCenter.
6. Hoe komen ze bij VVCR aan zo'n coole mock-up? En waarom heten ze nu ook BOV BV?

Semantic MediaWiki

Imagine the combination of the Semantic Web and WikiPedia... the possibilities!

I am making an inventory of resources in this area, with the intent of perhaps making a contribution.

Google search RSS feed

Note to self: it is possible to create an RSS feed based on Google's new results for any query; use Google's "daterange:startdate-enddate" syntax to filter by the date content was first indexed. Note that the dates are Julian dates (number of days since 1 Jan. 4713 BC); each days starts at noon.

Remaining vertical space

In order to overcome a limitation of CSS that makes it impossible to say "fill the rest of this container with this element, vertically" I did some research. This resulted in this article.

SPARQL

In the last 5 months I have been working on an implementation of a SPARQL processor in PHP. SPARQL is W3C's latest RDF query language, which means it allows you to retrieve information from RDF files, which are the basis of the 'semantic web'. The process is somewhat similar to the use of SQL to query a database, except of course that the structure of the data is different. A working, though (very) buggy, version is available from my server. I implemented the entire specification, except for some points that are unclear to me.

I created some (54) testcases to test the processor. W3C is currently still working on the official testcases. They are written in another (relatively simple) language called N3. Maybe I will write an N3 interpreter later to run the testcases.

Other SPARQL implementations may be found here.