Auto-arranging multiple application windows in Vista

If you're taking notes or eyeballing a couple of documents at once on screen, you might tile your application windows so that they are arranged side by side and fill up the screen. In Working with windows, Arranging windows automatically, the Vista desktop provides two commands for tiling your windows: Show Windows Stacked and Show Windows Side by Side. (If you Cascade Windows, your windows are stacked one on top of another and you can only see the contents of the top one.) This posting digs a little deeper into how this feature works and explains its limitations.

To use these commands, press the right-mouse-button (RMB) over the task bar and select the appropriate item from the context menu. The Windows desktop should automatically tile all application windows. If you want to restrict automatic tiling to specific windows, hold down the CTRL key and select the window icons in the task bar first, then press RMB and select the required menu item. A gotcha I noticed is that you can undo automatic tiling if you tiled all the windows at once, but you can't undo the last command if you tiled specific windows.

When you have selected only two or three windows, Show Windows Stacked tiles your windows one over the other vertically, like this:

+--------+
|        |
+--------+
+--------+
|        |
+--------+
+--------+
|        |
+--------+

As you would expect, Show Windows Side by Side tiles your windows horizontally:

+---++---++---+
|   ||   ||   |
|   ||   ||   |
|   ||   ||   |
|   ||   ||   |
+---++---++---+

If you select four or more windows, then it doesn't matter which of the two auto-tiling commands you choose because the windows are tiled in the same manner:

+---++---+
|   ||   |
+---++---+
+---++---+
|   ||   |
+---++---+

+---++---+
|   ||   |
|   |+---+
+---+|   |
|   |+---+
|   ||   |
+---++---+

The commands tile the selected windows based on the windows' titles, in reverse alphabetical order, as below. You can't make windows appear in a particular order by changing the windows' initial positions in the desktop or picking window icons in a particular sequence.

+---++---+
| E || C |
|   |+---+
+---+| B |
| D |+---+
|   || A |
+---++---+

Floating IFRAMEs in Blogger

In my other blog, I wanted to show images to one side of the text, like this:

XXXXXX +--------+
XXXXXX | iframe |
XXXXXX +--------+
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The images, generated by Amazon, are within an iframe element. After some false starts, I found that the simplest solution was to wrap the iframe elements in a div element, and float the div:

<div style="float:right">
<iframe>
...
</iframe>
</div>
<p>
...
</p>

Microsoft Access 2003 finding the minimum and maximum column values using a VBA function

If you may have to write a query in MS-Access 2003 to get the maximum or minimum of the values of two columns, you could use the iif() expression like this:iif(n1 > n2, n1, n2) or iif(n1 < n2, n1, n2) to obtain the maximum or minimum, respectively. The expression becomes more complicated when you have to compare three columns:

IIf(n1>n2,
  IIf(n1>n3,n1,n3),
  IIf(n2>n3,n2,n3))

Such expressions are hard to get right, and let's not even consider writing one to compare four columns! (In case you were wondering, we can't use Access' max() and min() aggregate functions because they operate on rows.)

Access allows you to call VBA functions in queries, so we can replace the long and cumbersome iif() expression with a call to a custom VBA function. In the rest of this article, we will:

1. Define a custom VBA function.
2. Calling a customer VBA function.

Define a custom VBA function

Here's a simple VBA function one to find the maximum of a list of values (just change the name and reverse the comparison to find the minimum):

Function max_value(ParamArray n() As Variant)
  Dim i As Integer
  Dim ret As Variant
  ret = n(0)
  For i = 1 To (UBound(n))
    If ret < n(i) Then ret = n(i)
  Next i
  max_value = ret
End Function

The ParamArray declares n() as a variable argument list (or varargs in C). Using ParamArray means that the function is not restricted to a pre-defined number of parameters, and using a Variant means that the function will work for different types of data, such as numbers and dates.

The body of the function just loops through all the values in the argument list and returns the largest value.

Calling a custom VBA function

If you have a table called Number with fields n1, n2, n3, n4, n5, you can call this function in a query, just like any other built-in function, like this:

SELECT max_value(n1, n2, n3, n4, n5) as max_value, n1, n2, n3, n4, n5 FROM [Number];

Google Reader and Firefox's maximum popup limit

If you browse using Firefox and use the Google Reader keyboard v shortcut that I wrote in an earlier post, you may find that Firefox will eventually generate this message, Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window, although you have added www.google.com to the Allowed Sites - Pop-ups dialog. This behaviour occurs because Firefox prevents any site from automatically opening too many popups.

According to Lifehacker's Increase Firefox's Maximum Pop-up Count, the number of pop-up windows a site is allowed to show is controlled by the dom.popup_maximum variable. By default, it is set to 20, so to avoid hitting the limit, I increased this value. Of course, now my browser is more vulnerable to a pop-up window attack or runaway script from all sites listed in the Allowed Sites.

Perhaps a better solution is to have a per-site limit?