MS Access: Restarting and compacting the database programmatically

In my previous article about changing the MS Access colour scheme I had the need to allow the user to restart the database after the colour scheme was changed. (__Article and Code Updated 13FEB2009.__) Being able to cleanly restart and compact the application is also useful in other instances: * Changes made to the environment... » read more

MediaWiki: Formating and colouring Code

MediaWiki is the wiki software behind WikiPedia. The issue, when using it as a software development tool, is formatting code in a pretty way. As we did with WordPress before, here are some details to make dp.SyntaxHighlighter work fairly seamlessly with MediaWiki. ###Install the client-side highlighter### Download dp.SyntaxHighlighter. Uncompress its content under a new `/skins/common/SyntaxHighlighter`... » read more

Chosing a development platform

[LAMP][1], Zend, .Net, [Struts][2], [Ruby on Rails][3], [Catalyst][4], and a hundred other development platforms all compete for you attention, all pretending to be the only thing you’ll ever need to satisfy your every needs in web or UI development. Making a decision is really hard: you want the best for your new project and want... » read more

WordPress: Formating and colouring Code

WordPress is pretty good, but it comes with no code formatting tool, yet colouring facilities. I like the simplicity of dp.SyntaxHighlighter for displaying source code in web pages: it works with major browsers and degrades fairly well. Its particularity is that is does its painting magic on the client side. This can be a drawback... » read more

WordPress: Fixing PNG transparency issues in IE

technology01.png I'm using WordPress to blog this. I usually prefer to use PNG images over GIF for their ability to have variable alpha-channel transparency that makes them look good over any background. PNGs are a much greater improvement over the old GIF's single-colour transparency mask.