puttin’ on my work hat
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For those of you who are still using pixels, it’s about time you made the switch to ems or points. It allows users who have a hard time reading small type to enlarge the font. Here is a little trick that will help you so you don’t have to remember the chart above.
body { font-size: 62.5% }
This will make 1.0 em the same as 10px. So if you wanted 12 px. would be 1.2em, nice and easy. Hopefully this will help you out, I know I use it all the time. Enjoy.
Tags: CSS
Mobile use is one of the biggest challenges now facing many websites. Its also important for some intranets, particularly in companies with many traveling employees.
via Mobile Usability Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.
The challenge has been around since the PalmPilot + application specific tools.
I suspect the success rate for doing “phone” tasks or “address book” tasks is much higher than the “web” tasks.
A custom application (which is all that a “Mobile Site” is, really) is going to provide a better experience.
Simple example? Google Maps – can’t use it on a “mobile” browser. The custom application for my phone works quite well.
MySQL :: MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2:
Amazon EC2 is a web service that allows organizations to right size their computing capacity on demand using Amazon’s proven computing environment. Using MySQL Enterprise for Amazon EC2, developers can cost-effectively deliver web-scale database applications in the “cloud”, fully backed by the database experts at MySQL. Amazon EC2 and MySQL are a great fit for organizations that want to reduce the capital expenditures and operating costs required to build out and run their IT infrastructure. The benefits of MySQL Enterprise for Amazon for EC2 include:
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun are now fueling the growing fire around the database-as-a-service and cloud database markets, but what’s the difference between these offerings and what’s the appeal? Database guru Don Feinberg defines terms and raises important questions about reliability and security.
How to Kill Your Book Sales | Carsten’s Random Ramblings
I believe the first time I heard about using publically-available Flightstats database for teaching databases was when Jeremy Cole suggested using it in the MySQL training program to demonstrate working with large data sets. I’m not sure it ever got used for that purpose, but others have followed up on the same idea in other contexts. The Flightstats database contains 10 years of US airline flight information, consisting of several Gigabytes of data in a fairly wide table, and so is excellent for talking about optimizations and search strategies.
The article is about book sales, but it really talks about sample databases for demonstration purposes.
For a given value of “natively”… | Carsten’s Random Ramblings
A quick (but somewhat simplistic) way to test performance of different methodologies is to turn off the query cache and use the BENCHMARK function. BENCHMARK loops over an expression a given number of times, and always returns 0, which is in itself quite uninteresting. But we can then look at the execution time to see how long things took.
I love it when the verbose expressions turn out wicked fast.
IntelligentEnterprise : Kimball University: Should You Use An ETL Tool?
You can still hand-code an extract, transform and load system, but in most cases the self-documentation, structured development path and extensibility of an ETL tool is well worth the cost. Here’s a close look at the pros and cons of buying rather than building.
Typical Programmer – Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases:
Complaining about relational databases is a staple theme of programmer blogs. Why are so many programmers irritated and frustrated with relational databases? Why do the perceived intricacies of SQL and the “object-relational impedance mismatch” launch so many rants? Why are DBAs more hated than managers? I have some ideas.
Data warehouse appliances have to have specialized hardware. Fiction. Indeed, most contenders except Teradata and Netezza — for example, DATAllegro, Vertica, ParAccel, Greenplum, and Infobright — offer Type 2 appliances. (Dataupia is another exception.)