Double Sided Boarding Passes Work

W00t! My double sided boarding pass mistake worked wonders today. In the morning it was folded to show the flight to London. When I arrived there I folded it so it would open on the way back to Amsterdam.

Scanning the bar code was no problem, as they didn't overlap and cause issues with the bar code on the other side shining thru. Nobody complained (not sure whether they evar noticed, have a policy that allows this or have already seen other passengers doing this too).

Next challenge would be to print both on one side and see if the let me board, just because we can, although I think they may have a problem with that (passes are shrunk, more difficult to read, bar code may not scan, it's just plain weird to do something like that, etc.).

As promised two (blurry for authenticity's sake ;-) pictures of the double sided boarding pass (notice "BOARDING PASS" in mirror shining through in the second one):

Double Sided Boarding Pass

Nowadays aircraft carriers allow you to print your own boarding passes. Tomorrow I have to fly someplace and back the same day. I checked in on the carriers website and opened the PDF document with the two boarding passes, page one to and page two back.

I hardly ever print. When I do, I print double sided. Saves a bunch of trees. I forgot to turn that off printing the boarding passes tho, so I ended up with both to and back on the same piece of paper. To on the one side, back on the other. A double sided boarding pass so to say ;-)

Now that made me wonder: will they allow me to use that single piece of paper with the two boarding passes, one on each side? Why not give it a try. The bar codes on each side don't overlap, so that should not be a problem when scanning! I'll just have to make sure that I show the right side for the right flight!

I'll let you know if it worked out or not! And post some pictures of the double sided boarding pass as well! If it works, I'll be doing this more often. Heck!! I'm even gonna try to print both passes on a single side and see if I can get away with that!!

"Why?", you might ask: just because I can ;-)

Open Source SWIFT Parser in Java

I have more than once in the past tried to find an open source SWIFT message parser. There are some defunct/ idle projects (one MT94X parser, jSWIFT, SWIFT Message Parser in Java) and some import/ export components that are part of larger projects (e.g. gnucash). I have now stumbled upon a proper stand alone and open source (LGPL) SWIFT message parser called WIFE.

WIFE is written in Java and sports parsing all message categories and service messages into a message model (message, blocks, tags). This model can be written to a SWIFT message. WIFE also supports converting to and from a (albeit non-standard) XML format and persisting messages using Hibernate. Interesting find! Might come in handy for some projects.