We rocked up at registration to collect our name badges and took a wander around the venue to get an understanding of where the workshops were being held, the location of the coffee and the theatre. We grabbed ourselves a seat in preparation for Richard Farleigh to take the keynote. His talk was great, far more down to earth than I was expecting. Starting out with his back-story and his childhood, realising that he could hustle people playing chess at the age of 14! Including his list of failures and successes. I was struck by his explanation “you may tick all the boxes but this does not guarantee success.”

I had a great chat to Sharon Vickery who explained her experience of dealing with website agencies and how frustrated she felt when dealing with inept companies and the lack of communication that caused her so much grief.

Then we grabbed a coffee and had a chat to GlobusHR about their questionnaires and the technology behind their website. Then we went to the first workshop of the day on social media marketing followed by a great talk from Liz Jackson.

Another few workshops – How to save TAX in 100 different ways – Top tips for branding – Using your website to grow your business.

Then on to the speed networking event. We decided to attend at the last minute as we thought by this time we’d be a bit cream-crackered, so we were rather unprepared.. Rule number one. Have a butt load of business cards.! Rule number two. Talk about yourself constantly until the bell rings! It’s an odd environment, but there’s not many opportunities in the real world to present to 30 people in the space of an hour, so I’ll definitely go again but I’ll ensure that I’m better prepared next time.

At the end of the networking session we were asked to drop our business card into a hat and one person was drawn out for a prize of a bottle of wine.. Guess what! yup, I won the wine

Ben had a theory on why I won “It’s because your business card is so crap and lightweight that it floated to the top of the pile.” I think he’s probably right, I really need to get some business cards sorted.

All in all, a great day. Everyone there was welcoming, which was great for us as new faces in the crowd. Best of all, I bumped into a number of old colleagues. Because of this, I felt even more relaxed and will be happy to go to future events of this type.

Thanks to all at BeInspired 09.

Last year I attended BathCamp which was a superb event. I got a lot from it and hopefully gave a little to the other attendees too with our ‘double act’ talk on Stu’s sfImageTransformPlugin for Symfony.

As with most barcampers (the ones that don’t do public speaking), it’s a struggle to think of a topic for your own talk. At this point in time my main idea is to discuss with a group in an open forum style about freelancing, titled “How do YOU freelance?”.

Hopefully it will be popular enough as I’d like to have a few well established freelancers and a bunch of people thinking about taking the plunge and going freelance to ask questions and discuss answers.

The Wellington Inn

A great finish to the week mainly spend hauled up in the office taking product photographs for the new Bytemart website.

A simple to use and flexible image manipulation symfony plugin. The plugin allows you to perform “transforms” on an image. A transform maybe simple like a resizing or mirroring or more complex like overlays and pixelizing. The transforms can be chained together or applied individually. New transforms can be simple created by extending the sfImageTranform abstract class.

Download

http://plugins.symfony-project.org/sfImageTransformPlugin

Plugin page

http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfImageTransformPlugin

Examples

Starting with the original image:-

Here is an example of a transform that:-

• scales ‘logo.png’ by 50%

public function executeDemo1()
{
 $img = new sfImage(sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir') . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'logo.png', 'image/png');
 $response = $this->getResponse();
 $response->setContentType($img->getMIMEType());

 $img->scale(0.5);

 $response->setContent($img);

 return sfView::NONE;
}

Result:-

Here is an example of a transform that:-

• flood fill’s ‘logo.png’ at ‘x100,y170′ with #000000
• scales by 50%
• rotate by 120%
• draw a rectancle of 5 pixels around edge and colour it #00FF00
• write the text “bathcamp 2008″ at ‘x10,y10′ 10px Verdana coloured #FF9900

public function executeDemo5()
{
 $img = new sfImage(sfConfig::get('sf_upload_dir') . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'logo.png', 'image/png');
 $response = $this->getResponse();
 $response->setContentType($img->getMIMEType());

 $img->fill(100,170)->scale(0.5)->rotate(120)->rectangle(1, 1, $img->getWidth() - 1, $img->getHeight() - 5, 5, '#00FF00')->text('bathcamp 2008', 10, 10, 10, 'Verdana', '#FF9900');

 $response->setContent($img);

 return sfView::NONE;
}

Result

Stunami has provided a collection of transforms for the GD and ImageMagick libraries.

Take a look at the full presentation:-
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df7cvq3s_1hgchr6f2
Published on 7 September 2008 12:50

or, simply take a look at the mini presentation: