Change text size in Notes pane of PowerPoint

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In one of my PowerPoint slide decks, the Notes pane at the bottom in the Normal View showed the presenter notes in a very large font. When looking at the font size however, nothing seems to be wrong: it was 10.5 points, which seems to be the default.

It took quite some googl’ing until I finally figured out that somehow the Zoom factor of the Notes text was changed.

To reset it to the default size:

  1. Click in the Notes pane
  2. In the Ribbon, in the View tab, click Zoom
  3. Set to 100%
  4. Click OK.

You can also change the size of the Notes pane text  by holding the CTRL key and use the scroll wheel of your mouse, while hovering over the Notes pane.

Force DROP TABLE in MySQL with foreign key constraint

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When trying to update a local copy of one of my MySQL databases, I got the error
Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails
when issuing the command

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `table_a`;

As I immediately recreate the tables with the necessary foreign key constraints, I wanted to temporarily remove the constraints. After some Googl’ing, I learned that it is as simple as

SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `table_a`;
SET foreign_key_checks = 1;

 

 

PHP setlocale depends on underlying system (XAMPP on Windows)

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I’m maintaining a few websites, so I have a local webserver running to do testing and debugging. Until recently, I was using IIS on my Windows laptop. However, I ditched IIS a while ago, replacing it with XAMPP. This is much closer to the environment that’s running the websites (e.g. I can use .htaccess directly, rather than converting it to a web.config file).

This all worked fine, except for setlocale in PHP. I wanted to use Dutch (Belgian), but I could not get
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nl_BE');
to work on my local machine.

I searched the web, but did not find any useful information. So I looked at the PHP setlocale helpinfo again, and noticed the Tip in the Notes: Windows users will find useful information about locale strings at Microsoft’s MSDN website.

After checking, it turned out that Microsoft decided to go for another “standard”, so ‘nl_BE’ was not recognized. To use Dutch on Windows, I needed
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'nld_nld');

Oh well…