Hanging out in the #mysql channel on Freenode the other night, some members were talking about database normalization. I wasn’t sure what that term meant, so I followed the links that were pasted to find out more.  What I discovered was that these ‘normalization rules’ are very practical guidelines for schema creation that I’ve been using for years without knowing what they were called!

In the following article I start looking at the actual rules, and why they can be helpful!

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I’ve been looking into DNSSEC since reading an article on Slashdot about irs.gov beginning to support the protocol.  Surfing around this morning I stumbled upon an excellent article over at the Matasano Security Blog.  Great reading!

Anyway, the blog uses a service called Disqus to let you log in and leave comments, so obviously, being a bit of a nut for blogs and blog related services, I signed up.  And let me tell you, they have one of the best designed signup pages/processes I’ve ever seen!  I just had to share it.

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We’ve all seen countless web based color pickers… most simply let you pick a color and then calculate corresponding colors that contrast well.

I looked for one just now to help get some colors for a new design I’m working on, and found one thats really quite interesting!

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php

This tool lets you input a search phrase, which it then sends to yahoo and gets some image results back for.  The images are scanned to identify the 5 or 6 most common colours.  These are then presented to you as your color scheme!  Cool!