Today, at MIX08, Dean Hachamovitch – internet explorer general manager for Microosft, gave the developers, designers and technology influencers a preview of IE8. He gave us some of the features and development-criteria for this new version:

Just two of them are:

• the interoperability and the issues that exist when rendering the same page in different browsers. OK, Microosft has never admitted to have broken the web, but we all seem to have expirienced some issues in that area. Even after not breaking it – they fixed it
• when a page in a post/get event is prepared and the network is lost, the IE will adapt the submit-button becomes a save button, so the work done is not lost;
• I’ll post more when it becomes available here…

The developer beta can be found on www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8 as soon as this keynote will be over.

A few days ago the rumour came that both Microsoft and Google will be supporting OpenID. Even if today it seems to be more an experiment for the both of them, it shows the need for an online identity, based on open standards. The support of these large enterprises comes after several attempts to set, own and manage the online identity. Support to the OpenID could indicate the possibility to have a cease fire in this battle one day.
We have seen the Microsoft initiatives to own the identity (anyone remember project hailstorm and the related controversy?) and have all witnessed the omnipresence of Gmail-based logins. Even if we all are aware and convinced that an online identity is the missing key to make web2.0 work as we wish, giving it to the giants for management might not be the best idea.

That’s why I do hope that the both will keep on extending the support on OpenID, without trying to claim, own or manage it.

(via Bert Heymans, and Carsten Pötter)

Vandaag brengt De Standaard een artikel onder de kop “Belgie is twaalfde beste land om in te leven“. Geen idee of dat na een splitsing van BHV of na het vormen van een andere regering zal wijzigen

We blijken slechts een van de achterliggende klassementen te leiden: het televisiebezit. Een mens vroeg zich af waarom we FC De Kampioenen bleven heruitzenden, maar nu we weten dat 99,8% van de huishoudens een TV hebben, begrijp ik dat er misschien nog 1 belg is die een aflevering heeft gemist…

Tags:
televisie,
belgie
kwaliteit,
ranking

Microsoft heeft gisteren via een persbericht meegedeeld dat ze een duidelijke wereldwijde steun hadden gekregen voor de OpenXML standaard. De waarheid is echter een beetje genuanceerder, zoals terecht opgemerkt wordt door Alec in zijn blog vandaag.

Microsoft heeft inderdaad doorheen de laatste weken verdere steun gevonden voor haar voorstel om haar open document formaat te standardiseren. Echter, onvoldoende om de standaard ook te laten goedkeuren door de internationale gemeenschap.De mededeling dat nu het pad geeffend is om op termijn toch naar een positieve stemming (en dus standardisering) over te gaan, blijkt ook wat te optimistisch. Microsoft, en met haar vele anderen in de technologie-wereld, hadden gehoopt om met Open XML een tweede open standaard te kunnen hebben, naast het ODF, dat voornamelijk door de open source wereld wordt gevolgd. Pittig detail, dit ODF heeft haar ISO standardisering al even op zak.

Tags:
technology,
Microsoft,
Open Standard,
OpenXML,
fud,
ISO

Het is niet de beste dag voor De Standaard. Het vastlopen van de onderhandelingen voor een nieuwe regering hadden eerder al voor een nieuwe DT-regel gezorgd, maar nu is men op de economie-redactie aan het sukkelen bij het omzetten van breuken naar percenten:

Niet alleen resiagentschappen (herinneren jullie je deze en deze nog?) hebben last van d/dt/ddt verschijnselen… Ook onze bijzonder gerespecteerde Standaard ziet het niet meer zitten:

We kunnen er uiteraard maar van dromen dat we langer mogen blijven, maar als het van de Portugese bagagebehandelaars af mag hangen zullen we iets later thuis zijn

Last week, I discussed here an article of Bart, to create a device to use our touchpad as a drawing pad. And see: Datanews announced yesterday the invention of the touch pad pencil. Unfortunately, no source was mentioned

Oh yes, life can be hard sometimes. After my two last days of work in the big apple, the time had come to fly back to Brussels. One working day there kept me away from the start of our holidays. But it turned out to be some of the more stressed moments we encountered…

Murphy’s law of bad weather

In the night before we had scheduled to depart from New York, a severe thunderstorm woke us up in the early morning. We didn’t payed attention to it any more, till our driver picked us up at the hotel to head to JFK. Even if we had like three and a half hour before the plane would leave, he started to give us excuses while it could be that he would not make it to the airport in time. To give his words a little more prove, he turned on the radio, were we heard indeed that New York’s traffic was not just jammed but that the city was (as the New York Times said it) “brought to its knees“. The driver managed to get us out of the city in under 45 minutes, and by using small roads in Queens where I never was before, we made it to the airport in less than one and a half hour. Most people we met at the airport had travelled over two hours and a half from Manhattan to JFK.

Mispacking luggage

(Koen’s misreading)

So, after we landed (later than expected) in Brussels, I rearranged my schedule to accommodate as much meetings as possible, without jeopardising the chances of (re-)packing luggage to get ready for Madeira. So when it all (hmm … read on) was packed, I looked at those tickets. 20 kilo seemed to be the luggage limit… Great, but that was a little (!) over the weight of my case at that time. So a repackaging effort started, while I left a lot of the more heavy stuff aside, to add it later. This heavy stuff, including my books, is still at home. I’ll have to take a few days off when I get back, so I can read all those books I hoped to get trough here…

The stories at Zaventem airport will be subject of the blog tomorrow or so. Stay tuned for another new low in services-industry performance!

But, right now we are enjoying a stay at this great island in the middle of the ocean. I’ll post pictures on the website and I’ll blog some more stories in the next days. In the meanwhile, we’ll be swimming in the ocean, picking up golf again after months of inactivity, and enjoying the mild climate here: all what’s needed to recuperate from the 36 stressfull hours of travel

When I finished the Half Marathon today, it was time to rejoin my greatest fan, who at that time was back in bed in the hotel, suffering from a combination of jetlag, flue,etc… So I started looking for the best way to get back to Times Square. TheNew York Subway seemed like a great way to get back fast

So I went to the first subway station I could think about, the one next to Battery PLace. I had understood that Line 1 would bring me back, but I had no other information. So I asked two gentlemen, who appeared to be runners as well, in the subway. One of them turned out to be heading in the same direction as myself. So we started a longer than expected journey, visiting metro stations where we could not enter, as we had no card, metro station that were closed and finally a subway station tht had a train to bring us back and a ticket veding machine… (after 100 attempts to slide my card in the right pace, it finally accepted my 2 dollar…

So our journey gave us a little time to talk about running, about travelling and, about blogging. Where we would have exchanged e-mail-addresses a year or so ago, we now exchanged blog-urls

So now, while blogging my sucess in reaching the finish today, I typed in the URL and found the blog of a loving father that is running in an effort to raise funds for research on autism.As some of you know, my brother Johan had a specific form of autism as well. So, dear readers of my blog, if you feel this to be a right cause, support Rafael in its effort to raise 50 000 dollar this year. Read the blog and/or go immediately to the fund raising page

Success with the rest of your 10half marathons this year, Rafael!

Koen

Update: Continued here