BigBlueHat

If you enjoy meeting people, sharing ideas, and discussing the South Carolina business horizons, you might check out the following networking events:

• Upstate Entrepreneur’s Forum - The Warehouse Theatre on Augusta road in downtown Greenville began hosting the UEF meetings earlier this month. Our last meeting was excellent. We discussed making the Upstate more entrepreneurial: how to attract more entrepreneurs, what could be done to increase innovation, what was needed from the city and community to increase entrepreneurial ventures. Paul Savas, our host, was very gracious to let us use the space. More information about our last meeting is available at the Upstate Entrepreneur’s Forum web site.
• Networking Underground - Hosted at Greenville downtown’s Coffee Underground, Networking Underground meets monthly and centers around free and friendly networking. The last meeting was the 18th, and I enjoyed meeting a couple sales reps, a youth worker, and a financial strategist. Next month’s meeting (August 22nd at 7:30 am) will be the fourth in the series, and should prove to have an even larger gathering.

Do you attend networking events in upstate South Carolina? If so, which ones?

There are several web development environments available and twice as many heated debates about which is the best. Here at BigBlueHat we’ve thrown our lot in with the Eclipse crowd.

Eclipse was original developed by IBM primarily as a Java development Integrated Development Environment (IDE). A good amount of forethought went into the building of Eclipse, and it has grown far beyond merely a Java IDE. Eclipse can be extended via plugins and with the proper plugins in place Eclipse can become anything from a business reporting tool, a project management system, or a multi-language IDE.

The plugins we use most:

• PDT (PHP Development Tools or phpEclipse
• WTP (Web Tools Platform)
  
• Subclipse
• MyNotes

Plugins we’re dabbling with or considering using in the near future:

• Mylyn
• BIRT

Two other notable, Eclipse related projects that have our interest:

• Aptana
• haystack

What IDE’s or Eclipse plugins do you use?

Okay, so the words “fun” and “GIMP” might not belong in the same sentence, but here’s a tip for those working with a GIMP or Photoshop file with transparent layers that need to be exported as transparent GIFs for a website. Granted, life would be easier if we could just export PNGs and use them on our web pages, but then again life would be easier if we didn’t have Internet Explorer 6 to worry ourselves over. But fear not! On that fateful day when pigs learn to fly, we won’t have to worry anymore.

Of course you know this whole rigamarole isn’t necessary if your GIF rests on a solid color background. If it does, why use transparency? In my case, the background is a gradient, so here’s the procedure. Highlight the layer in GIMP that you need to export (my layer was complicated by the fact that it was semi-transparent to start with even though the opacity for the layer was 100%—long story). Now select a background color, which will be used as a transparency mask—the general color of your web page’s background. You have a bit of leeway here and may need to repeat the step later. Now for the magic step: from the menu select Layer > Transparency > Semi-Flatten. After doing this your image should still look relatively the same. If not, undo this action and select a different background color. I found that a light foreground on a dark background is harder to get right, so trial and error may be the order of the day.

Once you are incredibly stoked with your decision, go ahead and crop the image to the desired portion and remove the visibility from the background layer(s). Save this as a GIF (accept the prompts to merge layers and index the colors), and you should be good to go. But as we all know, in the wacky world of web design, your CSS masterpiece may not match up perfectly with what you saw in your GIMP or Photoshop file. This was the case for me on a couple of my attempts. The first image was dark on a light background, and I got it right the first time. The second was light on dark, and it took four or five tries to get it right. All you need to do is undo the appropriate number of actions in GIMP, select a different background color, and try again. You may also need to use the burn tool to lighten up your layer before exporting. Hey, I wish I could tell you how to do this perfectly in one try, but if I could do that, I’d probably be President of the United States and spending my valuable time jogging around the White House 200 times per day, not doling out image-editing advice free of charge.

I’ve been fascinated with the REST architectural style for a while. REST leverages the HTTP protocol to its full potential by putting emphasis on the concept of resources and using HTTP methods, status codes, and headers to build a complete programming architecture.

Our copy of this book should be here early next week. We’ll let you know how we like it once we read it.