Captain’s log – July 2019

Statistics

I am puzzled by the number of hits for my article about the capital of Island. It is not my best piece of work and yet it is the most read one.  Paradoxically, the people who come to that page are from Island. Straeto has a good website and yet people look out for more.

This why the Spline exists: to identify and bridge the gap between the available information and the people who are looking for it. Then, I can see that the visitors  don’t spend much time on the Spline. Perhaps they don’t find what they are looking for.  Sorry to notice that. The recent series abut Paris and Montpellier are shifting to a more thorough  approach, with more information sorted in a hierarchical way.

I will add progressively the parts from July. Given the size, I might even split that month in weekly blocks.

Building blocks

More than 20 years ago, one of my university professors spoke about the German concept of Baukasten. At its core, it builds complex things by using a relative small set of very simple concepts. We live in a world of complexities. The computers and smart phones are sometimes hard to manage in order to obtain specific results.

The classic problem of connecting a printer or video projector to a PC is well known. Instead of creating one  standard interface, with a simple procedure, every device manufacturer (long list)  and every OS provider (Linux, OSX, Windows) make it an NP complex problem of cat and mouse. The most obvious part is the time lost reinventing the wheel, an annoying delay that reaches 10 minutes on a regular basis.

The XSTS code has become relatively complex. I am in the middle of baukasten-ing the code base. It is a normal process: try, fail, try, succeed, optimize, repeat. Some know it as fail fast, fail often, fail first and learn from the experience. Small improvements are the best way to progress.

In case you are interested, I am creating a series of pages about the graphic elements. You will find it in the XSTS series menu.

Still in July

This will be a very short week. I experimented with putting the line numbers on the colored lines. There is a small issue with the angle of the text. Maybe this is a limitation of the PDF format, or I need to do more precise calculations. Anyway, I believe a good map ought to be easy to read, yet comprehensive. Something like the following:

• from a distance, see only the important places of the transit network;
• at a closer look, differentiate the transit lines by colors and see all the stations;
• at less than 30 cm, be able to see small details like the individual number of each  line printed in a small font.

Some could call this high-level view, intermediate-level view, and detailed view. Three different categories of use, possibly three different categories of people.

The next step is to make XSTS generate Montreal-like schematics. It’s quite a big step. To my best knowledge, very few transit agencies implement it. Topology is serious stuff and some networks are simply too big for standard information handling. Except, maybe XSTS.

Only 2019 S2 entries in this log

Don’t worry, I am in the process of splitting the captain’s log in several pages, in order to make it easier to read. The original log for 2019 was too long and required lots of scrolling, especially on a mobile device. The log for the first half of 2019 will appear soon as an individual page under the Captain’s log menu.

Come back later and see for yourself ….