Recipe for 45 gallons of Oktoberfest. Brewed 12/05/09 with Rick, Andrew, and Klaus.

I Googled for an example and was surprised not to find one.  Here’s what I came up with:

Change {your_app_name} to the name of your app.

“MinneDemo is the Twin Cities’ premier technology demo and networking event.”

Coming up May 7, 2009.

Primarily, a Twin Cities tech heads show-and-tell, networking event.  My company, max4G, will be demo-ing our new product, max4G pitchR.  Should be fun!

“Big screen display and control of PowerPoint and OpenOffice.org presentations from your smartphone.”

It definitely has that “WOW” factor.

Recipe for 45 gallons of Czech Pils.  I brewed this with my brew buddies Rick and Andrew, Jan 2, 2009.  Right now, it’s very tasty!

In his “240 chords in 6 minutes” video, he teaches what took me 25 years to figure out on my own.  For a lot of guitar players trying to figure out chords on the guitar, this brings about that epiphanal “Aha!!” moment.  Just look his YouTube comments.

Part 2, “ii-V-I”, shows how to apply chords from part 1.

Part 3, “1200 chords”, completes the trilogy giving a complete, systematic approach for playing all the fundamental chord types (major, minor, dominant, etc) using all possible string sets for drop-2 and drop-3 voicings over the entire fretboard.  Forget those “chord bible” books.  Who can remember that many chords.  You have to know how to derive them and that’s what Rolly shows you, clear and simple.

Lock And Arch HDR

Originally uploaded by mvalentiner

I’m playing around integrating Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, Delicious, and Facebook. I’m blogging this photo from Flickr.

1) We will build it form source, so you need a C compiler.  Download and install the Apple Developer tools from developer.apple.com/mac.  You will need to register (free) if you don’t have an account, log in, download, and install Xcode.  This will install Xcode, gcc, and the Mac SDK.

2) Download and install MacPorts.  MacPorts is the open-source way to install and run open-source software on Mac OSX.

3) You can check that MacPorts installed correctly.  Once installed, open a shell window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).  You should be able to type ‘port version’ or ‘port help’ and get a response.

4) Install Tomcat by typing ‘sudo port install tomcat6′.  Replace ‘tomcat6′ with ‘tomcat5′, if that is the version you are after.  To see all versions of Tomcat available for install from MacPort, type ‘port list | grep tomcat’.

5) Once installed, you need to make a few tweeks to get it to run.  The first is to set up the tomcat-users.xml file in tomcat6/conf.  Edit the contents to look like:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>

<tomcat-users>

<role rolename="tomcat"/>

<role rolename="manager"/>

<role rolename="admin"/>

<user username="tomcat" password="password" roles="tomcat,admin,manager"/>

<user username="mike" password="password" roles="tomcat,admin,manager"/> </tomcat-users>


Username “mike” can be any username of your choosing, it doesn’t need to be me ;->

6) The second tweek is to “fix” the file permissions on a number of files.  In your shell window, cd to the tomcat6/bin directory and set all the .sh files so they are readable and executable:

sudo chmod 755 *.sh


7) The final tweek is to set the tomcat6 log files so they are writeable by tomcat.  cd to the logs directory and change file permissions:
sudo chmod 777 catalina.*

That should be it.  Start Tomcat be cd’ing to the bin directory and running:
sudo ./startup.sh

You can verify Tomcat is up and running by browsing to http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

To begin, I assume you use a color managed workflow and you’ve made all your edits and color corrections to your image. Before bringing up the Save For Web dialog, do the following:

1. Scale the image to the exact size you want the web image to be:
   • Image>Image Size…,
   • Make sure Constrain Proportions is selected (assuming you want to preserve the image aspect ratio, which is almost always the case),
   • Make sure Resample Image is selected,
   • Set Resolution to 96 pixel/inch (the “assumed” screen resolution on Windows),
   • Set the scaling method to Bicubic Sharper or Bicubic,
   • Lastly, type in the Width and Height (in pixels) of the final image, and 
   • Click OK.
2. Sharpen your image using your favorite sharpening method.  I prefer either:
   • Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen…  or
   • Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask…
3. Make sure your image is in 8-bit/Channel, RGB mode:
   • Image>Mode>RGB Color,
   • Image>Mode>8-bit/Channel.
4. (Important!) Convert your image to use the sRGB color profile:
   • Edit>Convert to Profile…,
   • Set the Destination Space is set to “sRGB IEC61966-2.1″,
   • Set the Intent to whatever looks good to you (usually Relative Colormetric or Perceptual),
   • Click OK.

You might be asking, why did we resize and sharpen the image when we can do it in Save For Web.  We can make these changes in Save For Web, but

• we have more control in Photoshop to sharpen the image and sharpening should be done after downsizing the image not before,
• if our image was more than 8 bits/channel, we want to make these changes before converting to 8-bit, and
• if we have a larger image, we can avoid loading all that data into Save For Web allowing it to run a bit faster.

Now we’re ready for the Save For Web dialog:

1. Bring up the Save For Web dialog:
   • File>Save For Web & Devices…
2. Select one of the tabs at the top so it is either 2-Up or 4-Up and one of the image panes (usually the upper, left most) is set to Original.  You do this by clicking in the pane so it is select and setting the Preset menu to Original.
3. Quite often, the display of the image in the Original pane doesn’t match the image back in the Photoshop document window and users can’t figure out why.  Here’s what’s going on.  Above the right, upper most image pane is a small circle with a triangle in it.  This is the easily overlooked Preview Menu.  Click on the circle to get the drop down menu and select Use Document Color Profile. This makes the display of the Original image pane use the same sRGB color profile we set before bringing up the Save For Web dialog.
4. Click on an image pane other than Original.
5. Go to the Preview Menu, click on the circle to get the drop down menu, and select Use Document Color Profile so that this pane will also use the sRGB profile.
6. To the right of the Preset menu, is the Optimize fly-out menu.  Click on the small circle to get the menu to drop down and make sure Convert to sRGB is UN-CHECKED.  In CS3, this is hopeless broken if the image has not been converted to sRGB and only serves to make previewing do the wrong thing.  Fortunately, it seems to have no effect if we start out in sRGB.
7. Now we’ll set the image format we will export to.  I only use two of these formats anymore, JPEG or PNG-8.
   • JPEG is good for full color images like those from a digital camera,
   • PNG-8 is good for illustrations and images with a limited color palette and gray scale images,
   • GIF is proprietary format that is slowly becoming replaced by PNG-8, which often gives better compression,
   • PNG-24 is good for full color images with transparency, but is not handled correctly by Internet Explorer prior to version 7 (ugh!),
   • WBMP is a black and white, 1-bit format for mobile devices.
8. For JPEG, the key settings are
   • Quality – which I set to anywhere from 80 to 100 depending and
   • ICC Profile – check so the image will display with sRGB profile in most web browsers. This is handled inconsistently in web browsers, but this is the best option to get images to display correctly in most browsers.
9. For PNG-8, the key settings are
   • Color Reduction Algorithm – set to Perceptual, Selective, or Adaptive, which ever looks best,
   • Dither Algorithm – set to whatever looks best, usually Dither or Noise,
   • Colors – set to whatever looks best, usually 256
10. Tweek the settings and view the results in the image pane you’ve selected.  Once you’re satisfied with the image quality and file size, click Ok and save your image.

Yes, there are more features, dialogs, and settings, but that’s all I ever use.