Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for September, 2004
Who is on your Must-Know List?
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=197828#comments
In the above blog, gilbertglee asks about the types of people a web designer should contact in order to have a powerful network of contacts.
That’s an important question. Every web designer/developer should have a constantly updated “must-know” list. These are 10-15 people that you want to meet in order to expand your network and reach people who know people.
In the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), the author introduces the concept of “Connectors.” Connectors are people who know lots of people.
One of your top marketing priorities should be to identify the connectors in your area and build relationships with them.
So, which connectors should you seek out?
Well, it depends on your target market. If you focus on your geographic community, then find people who are community leaders: banking executives, members of boards of local non-profits, religious leaders, political leaders, executives at the Chamber of Commerce, and the people you see mentioned in the newspaper over and over again.
If you focus on a specific industry, then find people who know people in that industry: association executives, journalists for trade magazines specializing in that industry, successful non-competitive salespeople marketing to your industry, and people …
Express Manager Demo
This week was the week my PhD ramped up a notch. Presentations to give, proposals to write, references to seek. 13 hour days don’t leave much time for the .NET blog, but fear not!
Sundays are the day of rest, and as such, its nice to watch a movie instead of reading blocks of text.
Check out http://www.sqlservermobile.com/sqlexpress/dat307.wmv for a great demo of the forthcoming SQL Express Manager, as well as a good run through of what has to be, my favourite Microsoft product for years.
ScriptServer 0.2
Just released it here.
Nothing too major in terms of new functionality but fixed the potential security hole (I hope ;)) and it should handle multibyte characters now. Also “layered” the way errors are handled.
Probably the biggest update is the documentation - written with Lyx and converted to XHTML with TeX4ht. Been investigating Lyx as a WSYIYWG tool for docbook - seems promising - another story for some time.
more @ php|works
Jason: Documenting PHP Applications (raved about here) and PHP Development with Oracle.
Derick: Multi-lingual development (PDF) and Xdebug (PDF)
George: Profile PHP Applications (PDF)
Chris: PHP Session Security
Imitation 3D Graphics
SitePoint just posted the second article in my “vector graphics” series, Create Imitation 3D Graphics in Illustrator and Freehand. It goes over how to create some easy, basic “fake” 3D vector shapes.
Enjoy!
W3C’s Jigsaw Web Server
Unknown to many a web developer is an experimental but robust and evolving alternative web server form the W3 — Jigsaw.
The project was started in 1996 and remains active and expanding with the release of version 2.2.4 this year. Jigsaw is a Java-based, platform neutral web server capable of running on just about any system that supports Java.
Jigsaw’s main mission is to demonstrate new protocol features, according to the W3 (i.e. HTTP/1.1). Thus — this is not necessarily the next Apache. However, the philosophy behind its architecture should be fascinating to any web admin. It is a bit like starting over as the approach to web sites, content and other facets of a typical web site is quite different from those of us used to Apache, Sun or Microsoft web servers.
True to the W3’s usability philosophy, a nice tool called JigAdmin is available for administration and configuration tasks - also Java driven.
Most interesting is that it supports SSL, can be run in a chroot jail and is also very extensible, with tutorials for programmers to add functionality to the application.
For those who groaned at the thought of a Java web server - the W3 benchmarked it and found …
A network/sphere of influence to aspire towards
I’ve had the priviledge of interviewing 4 rainmakers these past couple of days. It immediately becomes clear why they are successful: Their sphere of influence is broad, deep, and strong. As you read the summary of their network, think about steps you can take to broaden and strengthen yours:
- One knows 75 CIOs in various US Government agencies, with a special focus on intelligence and defense. He has served on committees advising the government about technology, been in the intelligence field, and led engagements for major technology companies specializing in government services. Imagine having a network of contacts such that 75 CIOs in the largest government agencies will take your call!
- One knows top CEOs, CIOs and COOs in e-healthcare ventures, including one healthcare portal that gets a majority of traffic in the industry. He turned around a division of an e-health portal in the 1990s, and has also started his own healthcare company (which he grew to $150 mm).
- One spent the majority of his career at one of the top international courier companies (e.g. Fedex, DHL, UPS). As a result, he is able to get on the phone with the CEOs of just about any supply chain or …
Hue Blending Mode in Photoshop
The Hue Blend mode is pretty straightforward:
Hue Mode: Creates a result color with the luminance and saturation of the base color and the hue of the blend color.
So essentially, the top blend layer, set to Hue, will “color” the layers below with whatever color you put on the blend layer, and adjust the color to take on the brightness and saturation of the layers beneath.
For example, let’s start with my standard rose image:
I’ll put a solid blue layer over it and set it to “Hue” mode. The rose layer will be “colorized” — kind of — with the blue (but note that the areas around the rose have a bit more grey than blue in them because it adjusts the saturation of the color as well).
So, here’s yet another way to turn a color image into black and white: Add a black — or white — layer and set it to “Hue” mode:
Setting a new, blank layer to “Hue” means that you can “paint over” any part of your image and change the color. As a kind of extreme example, I made a selection of just the rose and then filled it with …
Couple-O-Links
…both via Keith;
PHP/SWF Charts - very impressive. Make sure you donate if you use it, especially for something commercial.
Backwards compatible cloning from PHP5 to 4. At some point gonna post some experiences with BC in more detail. There’s a few grey areas to be resolved, like that zend.ze1-compatibility-mode (off by default) setting which, right now, is candidate for renaming, based on my experiences. Something like;
# mystery_bug_mode = On
In fact it’s seems generally possible to live without zend.ze1-compatibility-mode and still preserve BC, depending on what your code was doing.
Note there’s Adam Trachtenberg’s Upgrading to PHP5 if you’re looking for help.
Wez on PHP5 COM support
Wez “Evil” Furlong has published his php|works slides: PHP & COM (.ppt) - best walk through of PHP / COM interop I’ve seen…
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- Can be used to transition from ASP to PHP
In other words stuff you need to know when clients require you support legacy technologies like ASP and Windows ;)
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