2012 - Page 2 of 2 - Michael Bianco

JPEG + PNG Color Management Strategies for the Web

The first step in the design process of any website is to mockup the design in Photoshop. One of the most frustrating parts of the design process can be converting your mockup into image slices whose colors mix well with native CSS styles. Mark Edwards, over at Bjango, has a great writeup on color profile management and UI design. The basic tenants are: don’t color manage, use native monitor color profile, use RGB, and do not attach color profiles to JPG or PNG images. However, in my senario, I often work with graphics that have been designed by people who work in print and don’t understand web image generation in the slightest. Often I’ll receive unoptimized PNGs, JPGs in CMYK, images with color profiles, etc…

Introduction to VOIP Telephony: Setting up a Business Phone System with Asterisk and Polycom

I was recently charged with picking out a new telephone system for a new office the company I work for was moving into. We were previously using a 3Com NBX 100. Inbound and outbound call volume for this company is relatively low…

Copy Path / Directory to Clipboard OS X Lion Service

Someone at work recently wanted an easy way to get the path of a file in a format he could paste into an IM or an email. I wrote up a quick applescript and bundled it into a service which enables a user to easily copy the path of a file to the clipboard. The package also includes a service that copies the directory path of a given file to the clipboard. The biggest use case for this service is for an office environment where many people are connected to the same drive externally via VPN or internally via ethernet. It is challenging to easily point a colleague to a specific file if your shared drive is badly organized (which, odds are, it probably is). This tool mitigates most of that issue and works consistently across machines.

Setting Up QuickBooks on Windows XP Professional for Multi-user Environment

Recently I was involved in a project moving a company’s files from a old 2003 windows exchange server to a mac mini server setup. The first setup was to move from Exchange’s email and calendaring to Google Apps. After that step was complete we moved the shared files drive over to thunderbolt RAID 5 storage attached to a mac mini server device. The transition was pretty smooth, however there was one problem which wasted a significant amount of time. The accountant’s in the organization use QuickBooks 2010 for all accounting purposes. Moving to a hosted solution was not an option, and they needed multi-user access to the file (2-3 people could be working on the same quickbooks file at any given moment)…

Migrating Rules From Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Recently I was part of transitioning the email system of a 20+ employee business off of a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server to Google Apps. Moving close to half a million emails to a new email service was a big decision. The transition tools that Google has in place are pretty good, albeit slow for that many emails, Google throttles email transfer to one each second after the first 500. However, the one piece that was missing was a good tool to transition outlook server rules. Many employees used those rules extensively and many had 50-100 rules. Outlook does not have any method in place for extracting those rules…

Year: 2012