There would be no guarantee that the navigation or the main content would be taller than the screen so I needed to fix the layout to the height of the browser. I also wanted it to be cross browser compatible and sizeable by the user if it was used as a popup.

Lots of Google searches uncovered various different ways of getting a similar result to what I wanted, but most made use of the %100 heigh method. As I needed it to work in IE6/7/8 none of these solutions seemed to work.

Anyway, a lot of playing and a complete re-write later I think I have a pretty good solution that works in:

• IE
• Safari
• FireFox

Take a look at an example here.

This should give you the idea of what I was after. So because I could not find what I needed here is a template for anyone else who needs something like it.

I have the ClickToFlash Safari plugin installed which helps prevent a lot of these issues, but obviously if you want to watch a YouTube view you have to succumb to the evil of Flash right? Wrong!

YouTube for a while have been encoding their videos in the MP4 format using the h.264 compression standard. What this means is you can watch a video that is not encoded in Flash. Great but how do I access it I hear you ask. Well if you have ClickToFlash you can set it to load this version of the video by default:

Take a look at the different in Activity monitor between Flash and MP4.

First Flash:

Next MP4 using h.264 compression:

There is a massive difference in CPU usage. No wonder my laptop was getting hot while watching Flash video.

So my example is a bit unrealistic, but just go with it. You have a Customers table and an Orders table. Currently you link your customers to orders by customer name. Now this is not good because it is not unique and if you want to update the name you have to do it in both tables not just the customer table, the usual stuff.

So to improve the situation you want to add the customer IDs to their existing orders and then get rid of the customer name column from the orders table. This is done with the UPDATE statmet, but there are a few options as to how you use it. In this example I will use a join.

To test my theory lets write a SELECT statment that will mimic what the UPDATE will do:

SELECT
    Customers.ID,
    Customers.Name,
    Orders.ID,
    Orders.Item,
    Orders.CustomerName,
    Orders.CustomerID
FROM
    Customers
    RIGHT JOIN Orders
    ON Customers.Name = Order.CustomerName

This will give us all of the orders with the customer who made each order:

As you can see Greg is missing because he has not made any orders and Dave is there twice because he has made two. By joining the table like this it also means that we have access to the ID from the customers table that matched the name in the orders table. Adding the ID to the orders table can be done like this:

UPDATE
    Orders
SET
    Orders.CustomerID = Customers.ID
FROM
    Customers
    RIGHT JOIN Orders
    ON Customers.Name = Order.CustomerName

Following this update the orders table looks like:

All we have to do to finish this off is delete the CustomerName column and thats it:

I want to find the homepage for Beanstalk (Version control with a human face), so I type “beanstalk” into Google and Bing.

• Google: First result Beanstalk. Just what I wanted.
• Bing: The site I want is not even on the first page of results. (it’s second from bottom on page 2).

Open Terminal.app and type:

mdutil -E /

It has been a while since I’ve splashed out on any new gadgets, so I convinced myself that what I needed was an AirPort Express to wirelessly stream music to some speakers I have in my living room. Sadly however it was not quite so simple.

First up I will give you a bit of background on me so you know where I am coming from. I am a computer science grad and work as a developer, as such I would class myself above the average user. I am not scared to get my hands dirty working out the odd computer problem. I also use a MacBook Pro as my primary home computer and have a Siemens Gigaset-SE587 router that my broadband provider (tiscali) supplied.

Picture from the apple website

The Airport Express (AE), a little white box of glory that according to apple will provide a utopian wireless paradise where you can stream audio from iTunes all over the place. The reality for me however is that all I seem to see is this: (picture taken from iTunes)

Great no? NO.

So what did I do to deserve this? Well, I plugged it in, followed the instruction in the box. Ran through the setup wizard and got a green light. Great. Went into iTunes and enabled airtunes and then the option for the AE popped up at the bottom of the iTunes window. Selected it and then tried to play a song. Then the error.

Looking on Google it seems that I am not the only one to have this error. Also there does not seem to be any real fix. The best I could find was to wait until the moon was in its 7th phase and then sacrifice a lamb. Sadly as I did not have a lamb to hand I had to try other options like fiddling with all the settings for the AE.

After no luck I decided that I wanted to know if iTunes could actually see the AE rather than just display its name, so I set a password on it for music. iTunes dutifully asked me for the password. I entered it, clicked a song and would you believe it, sound started emanating from the other side of the room. Fantastic. I took the password setting off an it still worked.

Now the really strange thing is that after I closed and reopened iTunes I got the error again. Setting the password did not fix it either. Taking the password off however did. Then the following morning I turned on my computer and decided to give airtunes another go and got the error again. This time messing with passwords made no difference. At this point I was about ready to take it back. I had spent about 6 hours and it still seemed unstable.

After a bit more reading on a forum about other people with similar problems I came across Airfoil by Rouge Amoeba. I installed the trial version and started playing a song in iTunes and used Airfoil to connect to the AE and it worked.

Now it is not all good news as I have had errors with Airfoil as well although it does provide more info on the error and has worked about 8 out of 10 times so far. iTunes has worked 1 time out of 10. From the error message airfoil provided it seems there is an issue with the server running on the AE or something like that.

So will I take the AE back to the shop…at the moment no. I will give it a couple of weeks to see if it is usable with airfoil and if so then great. I will say this though, I am a self confessed Apple fan and this was not a typical experience I would associate with the brand. I realise that for some it works right out of the box and there is no issue, for others though it is a total pain. I also realise that in the world of wireless networks there are so many hardware variables that it is impossible to guarantee a seamless experience. I am skeptical however that my problems would be solved even if I were using an airport extreme base station instead of the router my broadband provider supplied.

In OS X 1.5 all app help menus have a text box to type in the thing you want help about. You can also type something like “save” and it will search the menus of the application that is currently active.

If you are in Safari and type in “amazon” it will search your history for items matching it. This is great as it saves me trawling through the history menu.

This is probably already a well documented thing, but I have only just found it after having Leopard for about a year.

Perhaps touch each corner of the screen simultaneously making it the multi touch equivalent of a 7-10 split.