Mink Machine

Entries of year 2005

The big easy is not so easy anymore

Reine, in Travel.

The hurricane Katrina has finally arrived at the mainland of Louisiana and hit Mississippi like a ton of bricks. Many streets in New Orleans are flooded by two meters with reports of sharks, alligators and snakes swimming around. Debris everywhere, boats are floating up the streets and about ten thousand people have sought refuge inside the Superdome. The still water will likely bring diseases, and I suspect that a lot of insects will soon be attracted to the area. It’s a war zone down there.

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Ajax debunked

Reine, in Ajax.

After having seen a couple of months with the word Ajax buzzing everywhere, I believe it’s time to clear a few things out. Ajax is a term coined by Jesse James Garrett at San Francisco-based company Adaptive Path in February 2005. It is commonly described as “asynchronous Javascript and XML”. I would rather say it’s a shorter way of writing “asynchronous JavaScript using XMLHttpRequest with CSS and DOM”.

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Cover of the angel

Reine, in Music.

Here we go again. Each time Depeche Mode releases a new album I go on a rant about either the cover art or the first single, both of which can be quite awful. It’s been quiet since the release of Exciter five years ago, but as the new album cover for eagerly awaited Playing The Angel was released today I cannot let it pass. As some would put it, the sweetest perfection.

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IE7 Beta has landed

Reine, in Browsers.

Yesterday, Microsoft released a beta of the Vista OS (previously known as Longhorn), and with it came something perhaps even more interesting: the first public beta version of IE7. Since the success story known as Firefox began to roam and roll over the territories once owned by landlord Microsoft, the guys at Redmond woke up and started to mention tidbits such as tabs, RSS and increased CSS support for the upcoming version. Now that it’s here, let’s have a look.

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Burt Reynolds for king

Reine, in Movies.

Uwe Boll is back with another computer game movie adaption. Maybe some of you remember the fairly decent game Dungeon Siege, a sword-and-sorcery tale with the usual ingredients. Currently in pre-production, it will start shooting next week with the new title In the Name of the King.

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The web of tomorrow

Reine, in Web industry.

It’s quite fascinating, really. The last ten years has seen the web transform from a geek amusement to vital channel for public service. At that time almost no one knew what a web page was, let alone had one. I remember searching for Jean Michel Jarre links for my humble personal site about eleven years ago. The search result was about ten, containing sparse discography information in plain text format.

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Browsing in Visual Studio.NET

Reine, in ASP.NET.

There is a lot of talk right now about the new tab functionality in IE7, and the fact that tabbed browsing actually is available in IE6 as well by means of a plugin. However, there is another Microsoft tool that can be used for tabbed browsing: Visual Studio .NET 2003. It’s all very simple:

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The secrets of Archimedes

Reine, in Space and science.

Archimedes was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. In the 3rd century B.C. he discovered such fundamental things as pi and calculus. Today, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore holds a lot of manuscripts and rare books for study and conservation. One of them is the so called Archimedes Palimpsest, the only remains of unknown works by Archimedes himself. Or should I say previously unknown?

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