CorelDRAW – a 19-year-old problem transformed

Friday, February 11th, 2011

I’m sure that everyone has the odd infuriating niggle with the software that they use most regularly, but I’m delighted to say that I’ve just found the solution to a problem with CorelDRAW that has been driving me mad for almost 19 years.

That’s how long I’ve been producing a regular quarterly publication based on charts that I tidy up ready for print. Key to this is the ability to resize whole series of elements in the same way. No problem you might think; simply use CorelDRAW’s Transformations palette.

The problem is that this treats the selection as a group. I need to be able to change each object’s scale independently, without changing its positioning, and that’s just not possible automatically. Instead I’ve been forced to apply the transformation to a single object then select all the others in turn (Tab is useful here) and then repeat the last command (Ctrl+R). Trust me, after a hundred or so times, the attraction soon fades.

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Gay marriage and the Y2Gay bug

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Unsurprisingly, Holland was the first country to legalise gay marriage, all the way back in 2001. Since then, another six countries have taken the plunge, and there are plenty more sitting on the fence (but at least facing the right way) by allowing “civil partnerships”, or some other stupidly-named approximation of holy matrimony.

Sure, there have been some backward steps, too – such as the outrageous display of bigotry that was California’s Proposition 8 – but on the whole, things are getting better. Personally, the prospect of marriage in any form is terrifying, but if it’s available at all, then it should be available to all.

Besides narrow-minded folk, there is another group of people that may have a problem with the whole thing: database designers. I don’t mean to imply that they’re homophobic (although I can’t guarantee that some aren’t), but only that gay marriage is going to cause them a lot of headaches. (more…)

Mozilla team hit roadblock

Friday, August 1st, 2008

The Mozilla team has filed a worrying bug report that could potentially delay the release of Firefox 3.0.2; they’re all trapped in a hotel.

A rock slide has blocked off a road between Vancouver and Whistler, the latter of which was holding a Mozilla conference at the time. Those developers who got there early are trapped in, and those who were late are trapped outside. Either way, development is taking a hit.

Ever the resourceful bunch, one developer has thought up a solution.

“Hasham has proposed that we ride bears to Vancouver as a workaround for this bug. Bears can run up to 48 kilometers per hour and Whistler to Vancouver is about 300 kilometers. It would take approximately six hours and fixteen minutes if the bear ridden is running at top speed at all times. Realistically, the time needed is about eight hours. A bear can carry two to three people on average. There are approximately 220 people attending the Summit who flew. This gives us the need of about 74 bears should we boldly estimate that a bear can carry three people. The earliest departure time should be Thursday night.”

That’s the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that grabs market share from Microsoft.