fuzzymargins

Outside of work hours while engaged on personal projects I tend to keep things running in a certain order and only feel comfortable if programs lined up in the same order each time in the taskbar (this is on a Windows machine, I guess this varies with Macs or Linux), so Eclipse would be first then Explorer then FireFox, IE, maybe Visual Paradigm, MySQl query browser, Photoshop, Word Excel Google Docs, UltraEdit (to keep some files out of Eclipse I open them with a separate editor). Then coming home from work I can pick up the threads and feel in control without having to spend loads of time getting in the groove again. Is this sort of behaviour common, is it more common with programmers? My wife is an academic and she has piles upon piles of folders on her desk filled with papers, yet she knows exactly where to find stuff, personally that would drive me absolutely bonkers as I would never find anything. I know what I am doing is slightly odd, so in Eclipse I always have the CSS file in the first tab, then the file I am working on, then maybe include files and so on.

Uploaded Images ‘Blurry’ with WordPress

Being new to WordPress I have been using the standard image upload facilities.  After upgrading to WordPress version 2.7 the Flash uploader stopped working so I resorted to using the browser based version. This was annoying but not annoying enough to make me do something about it. Then I noticed that images which were fine when captured looked fuzzy when viewing the published article, specially when using Internet Explorer.

So what was going on? Well, for one selecting anything other than full size meant the images were being re-sized by the uploader and that reduced the image quality, you notice the difference in quality compared to re-sizing the images yourself in Photoshop.

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Data Modelling relationships between tables

The thing that got me writing this article was a question posted on Stack Overflow about data design, asking whether it’s better to use one big table or to arrange the data using multiple related tables.  Having spent many years working with relational databases this seems obvious, it’s easy to forget this is not common knowledge and assume everyone knows this stuff.

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How to install Visual Paradigm community edition

While writing an article on implementing Many to Many Relationships in databases the need for a diagramming tool became clear.  At  work Visual Paradigm is the tool for all UML and data modelling requirements, so it was good to read there is a free community edition that can be downloaded for personal use. The Community Edition page has a link on the left hand-side to download Visual Paradigm.

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How do you test your pages to ensure they don’t look awful on another platform?

How do you make sure your carefully crafted pages don’t fall to pieces when viewed with Safari on Mac OS or collapse in a heap under MSIE 5.0 for Windows?

You can maintain multiple operating systems and perhaps run emulations or virtual machines but it all can be very time consuming and troublesome.
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