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I’ve been very quiet recently due to two things, firstly I had been working pretty much ever spare hour my new project (more details to come soon) and then 3 almost weeks ago I got the keys to my first house. It’s needed quite a bit of work (OK it didn’t need it, but it really was the best time to do it) so I’ve spent pretty much every spare hour in the house - I hadn’t been near a computer for the first 8 days of getting the keys for my house.
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Every time I start a new project I’m always trying to do things better than I did on the last project, it’s the way for all developers.

One thing that has always bugged me is trying to get the base text size the same across all browsers, but now I’ve totally dropped the idea of supporting IE 5.5 ever again I thought it might be easier now.
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I’m a big fan of trying to use a common vocabulary to describe things, especially when working with different departments, companies etc. - the more people you have involved the more important I believe that becomes.

So I was wondering how designers (I’m talking about visual designs here, UI etc.) refer to designs, I’ve heard some of the following being used within my time (mostly with my current company):

• Design
• Design candidate
• Mock-up
• Concept

I’d like to know how do you refer to designs, especially if you work in a design shop etc.

I’ve come across this problem before, where I want to hide the overflow of an element, this works fine in all browsers except IE - however it’s never been a problem in anything that I’ve progressed far enough with to worry about fixing it for IE.

Well this evening I came across the problem again, and found the solution - IE (I’m just looking at 6 here - not sure if 7 does the same) doesn’t like it when you have a position: relative; on the child (or possibly children) of an element which you have declared overflow: hidden;.

So in my case swapping that out for position: absolute; on the child and overflow: hidden; position: relative; on the parent worked a charm. Now IE 6 plays nicely like its other browser friends.

I’m currently in the very early stages of a new personal project that we’re really excited about. It came out of an idea I had a couple of days ago when I got frustrated with a situation I was faced with in work.

Now we’re on the short road to getting something designed and built and I’m really excited. There’s not much to tell right now as it would all just be pie in the sky, but I shall be sharing as much as I can as and when things progress.

Disclaimer: I understand that this post is kind of pointless and lacking of any real substance for you, but I’m just a little giddy about this idea.

I had the following date string from a data dump file 11-APR-07, without looking at the Coldfusion documentation I pass the string to lsParseDateTime() and dump the output to see if it parses the string correctly, which results in {ts ‘2007-04-11 00:00:00′}.

Great it worked! So I move on to writing my test case (yes, yes I know it should have been the other way around).
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Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now is to create a couple of back end implementations for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI (I really need to come up with a snazzy name for that) - obviously that hasn’t happened.

I have noticed a couple of implementations appear in the comments, we are now using it at work and I have been emailed about at least one more, but I would like to formalise this a little bit to share these implementations with other users; hence my solicitation.
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I and a small team have been writing a small application in PHP using CakePHP, which we all have an ongoing love-hate relationship with.

However we have been thinking that to really get things moving forward quicker we might move to Coldfusion. We currently have a dedicated server which runs my family of sites which is a LAMP box running.
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I was called over to Stu’s desk earlier today when he asked me "Dude, have you heard of Ralio?" (which is a Java Coldfusion - CFML - interpreter or engine).

"Yes I have", I replied.

"Just imagine for a second you didn’t know about it and take a look at this", he said pointing to the Railo website open on his screen.
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A very, very generous donation I received yesterday for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Martin Laine quite a while ago during an instant messenger conversation when we both happened to get donations for our separate coding projects (him for his fantastic Audio Player Wordpress plugin and me for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI - again) at the same time.

That conversation, I feel, gives quite a concise view of what donations mean to people like me and Martin (and possibly everyone else who asks for donations to support their free projects) so I thought I would share it here to give you the view from the other side of the PayPal account.
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