This problem has come up a couple of times for me in the past. I shruged it off the last time, but this time I decided to do some research. What I found - as to the best of my knowledge, is that you can't. The problem is this:
I have a horizontal column that is centered in the middle of the window in my design, sort of like this. But what if the content is too short to fill up the entire screen? The bottom of the column abruptly ends and you end up with a discontinuity. There's no good way of fixing this that I am aware of. I've concluded the best way is just to use a background image at the bottom of the column to soften it's ending. Another thing I've done is to use the min-height hack to make short pages not so short. And in actuality you can use the min-height hack to make sure it always extends beyond the max of the screen, but I don't think it makes sense to create that much empty space at the bottom.