Archive for June, 2013

Installing Ruby on Rails and Redmine with XAMPP on Windows 7

I like Xampp. It sets up a full Apache/MySQL/PHP development environment with very little hassle, which means it’s installed on just about every computer I use on a regular basis. I recently had a need to look into Ruby on Rails (specifically so that I could use the Redmine project management web app) and figured it would be easy to integrate it into my existing dev environment. It kind of… wasn’t.

Peeling an image off a white background

A lot of times, I need to remove the background from an image in Photoshop as part of a layout. Until recently, I was using Photoshop’s magic wand tool, which, as I’m sure anyone who’s familiar with Photoshop is aware, is kind of hit or miss. Sometimes the result looks great… other times you end up with jagged edges or halos around the image. As it turns out there’s a much cleaner (though more complex) way of doing this.

Nikki Blight – Web/PHP Developer