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There are many tools out there to make your web design job easier, and this includes creating charts and diagrams. I have listed below a nice selection of chart creators, graph makers, flowcart builders, and software to create diagrams. Enjoy and feel free to comment about tools / software that I might have missed.Read more

^{(By Amy Chia. Reprinted from Wall Street Journal)}

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:Read more

I have a friend, I’m going to call Gary. He’s going to read this, so I’ll be very diplomatic – Gary is an idiot who has been thinking and talking about the same startup idea for the past 4 years.

Gary also has lived in the same apartment for the past four years, he’s been working the same job for the past four years, and his last four holidays have been the the Mediterranean sea.

Also, Gary’s computer is filled with notes about things, TV shows he’s been collecting for the past four years, half-completed projects that he occasionally works on. He does a lot of PHP, Ruby On Rails and uses Eclipse, just like he has for the past four years. His music has not changed in years.Read more

I run a CentOS server that contains a complete mirror of the CentOS repositories that we use for all our servers at work. This saves a lot of time/bandwidth as the local mirror syncs itself with the outside world once a day (around midnight) and all the local servers point at the local mirror for installs or updates.  Well, we also have a lot of Ubuntu desktops so I wanted to use the same machine to also create a local Ubuntu repository. The tool of choice for this job is apt-mirror. I couldn’t find an RPM (and my initial attempt at downloading the source and building was missing some prerequisites and had issues) so I figured, why not use Ubuntu to create an Ubuntu repository. I didn’t want to have a machine dedicated to this purpose, so in comes my favorite tool for Debian/Ubuntu systems: debootstrap. Fortunately, there is an RPM for debootstrap for FC10, but since it only relies on Python it can be downloaded and installed directly into CentOS 5.2.  So to get a base Ubuntu install created do the following steps (at this time the highest release in Fedora’s RPM is intrepid, but that will work for our purposes):Read more

One of the best improvements offered in ExtJS 3.0 over previous versions is the new CSS structure. JC Bize (an ExtJS Development Team member) had an excellent presentation at the 2009 Ext Conference discussing what had changed and offered some tips on how to build your own themes. I recently migrated my application from 2.x to 3.0, and I’d like to share my experience with creating a new theme.Read more

We’ll see here how you can automate the addition of SVN keywords to your newly added or imported file in your Subversion repository.

Changes are being made on the client computer, NOT the repository. It means you need to apply the following to every computer accessing the SVN repository.

For files already in the repository, you will need to manually set the keywords this way :
svn propset svn:keywords "Id" file.sh

To set scripts as executable :
svn propset svn:executable ON file.sh

1. Enabling auto properties

Edit ~/.subversion/config

Under the miscellany section, set enable-auto-props to yesRead more

Sometimes it’s just amazing to see, which level of usability, legibility and visual appeal can be achieved using some basic design techniques. In fact, some talented web-developers manage to deliver powerful, functional and gorgeous web-design in “look-and-feel”-style, which is easy to use and nice to see.

The User experience has dramatically improved over the past few years, resulting in rich and responsive user interface. AJAX^?, javascript and CSS are widely used to offer users the dynamic interaction that they have come to expect from advanced, sophisticated, professional solutions.Read more

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