Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
Scott Guthrie, one of the Microsoft "Atlas" guys, announced the "Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap stating that: Another nice thing in Scott's post is the following: Things will get even better next year with Visual Studio “Orcas” where we are adding rich JavaScript intellisense, debugging and WYSIWYG designer support for the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions within Visual Studio and many other great features to take advantage of.
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Seems like Google updated satellite maps
Sometimes, I take a look at Google maps to check if Belgium is finally mapped and photographed with more detail. When I checked today, I found out some regions near Antwerp and Brussels now are much more detailed. On my house picture, before really blurry, I can see the snapshots were taken during the summer: our new umbrella (is parasol correct English?) is open on the terrace. Looking for evidence of this update, I found an unofficial article on Tweakers.net stating that also the Netherlands have had a major imagery update. The article also states that some military bases are totally blurred out. Seems like I work on a military base? (which is not)
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Buying books...
Seems like Proxis is offering a 10% discount when you order 2 computer books before the end of september! And I saw 2 nice PHP books… “Php5 Objects, Patterns, Practice” and “Php 5 Power Programming”. Anyone knows if I should give them a try? If you have other great titles on topics like PHP, C# and ASP.NET, please comment this post with title and ISBN number
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Simple SAX parser for PHP
Yesterday, I was working on PRAjax. The UpdatePanel did not work completely as I wanted it to work: in the background, the whole page was still fetched and updated. A cleaner way would be to just fetch updated content and not the whole page. In my search for a PHP HTML parsing class, I found a lot of libraries, but all with disadvantages: one was too big in file size, another only parsed XHTML, ... Luckily, I stumbled on SAX parser! So if you ever want to parse HTML and read out specific tags and attributes, try this one.
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Internet Explorer 7 RC1 available
When I opened my RSS reader this morning, I saw good news: Internet Explorer 7 RC1 has just been released! You can download it here or install it as stand-alone version (unofficial!). Many people will like the new UI features, like tabbed browsing, tab preview, easier interface, less toolbars, ... The features I like are the better CSS support and other tech enhancements. For example, this blog uses several IE-specific CSS hacks to get everything (almost) in place. Now let's hope IE7 does not get confused by those hacks. But I fear too: my PRAjax project relies on several browser specific objects, like XMLHttpRequest. I had to make some adaptations for IE7 beta 1, some adaptations for IE7 beta 2, so now I hope everything keeps working like a charm on IE7 RC1...
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Google Analytics open for everyone!
Almost a year ago, Google acquired Urchin, a company specialised in providing web site statistics. They renamed Urchin's project to Google Analytics and started a beta for some. Today, it seems Google has opened Analytics for everyone. Get it while it's hot, they really provide in-depth statistics about what's happening on your website. I tried it out for a few days on my website Holidayhome.be, and experienced all possibilities. Currently, I use Statcounter there, which also provides detailed statistics, but only for the last 100 visits.
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JavaScript URI parameter encoding
When creating a HTTP request in JavaScript, I always used encode() and decode() to pass data between client and server. I also used this approach in PRAjax, my open-source Ajax helper library for PHP. A developer working with PRAjax on his site reported to me last week that Swedish characters like å, ä, ö, ... were not passed corerctly to and from the server. My first reaction was: add a UTF-8 header on the server side, and it should work. Characters from other character sets are always displayed correctly when doing that. Except when using JavaScript, it seemed when I tried entering Swedish...
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Goggles, a flight sim on Google Maps
You have probably already seen over a hundred uses for Google Maps. Today, I received a link of a new use: Goggles. Goggles allows you to fly a plane over a city, to climb and descent, to shoot at the scenery (I tried this over Amsterdam but didn't hear anything on the news. It's safe!). You even can crash. A while ago I thought on developing a game on Google Maps too. No action-game, no flight simulator, but more a strategic game. Imagine a sort of Risk or Transport Tycoon on satellite imagery. Unfortunately, I didn't find the time to even think about a nice game concept. Maybe once!
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Kurkdroog
I regularly drink a glass of beer (I prefer the Belgian Trappists) or a glass of wine. While surfing, I stumbled upon a handy link for all Belgian people who love to drink wine too: Kurkdroog Kurkdroog is a website that acts as a hitlist of wines. You can select a price class, a supermarket, a country and a wine type (red, white, rosé, ...), and the site returns a list of wines matching your criteria, with the price and a short review next to it. Perfect stuff!
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Age of Pirates
A few weeks ago, I discovered a nice online multi-player game: Age of Pirates. AoP is in a certain way similar to one of my favourite games Age of Empires, available as an offline game. In AoP, you have an island on which you have to gather resources in order to improve your economy and military activity. When you have a certain grade, it's possible to create ships and to colonize other islands. There, you can crop cacao, hemp and other goods which you can trade with other players for money. Also, you can attack other player's islands and plunder their resources. And if your fleet is large enough, you can even takeover the island and incorporate it in your empire.