If you have to insert a comment on several lines do you do manually insert the comment character in every line? Stop. Vim is a good editor and has a nice feature to accomplish this quickly. Here are the steps: Enter visual blocking mode by pressing CTRL V (CTRL key and the lowercase v). Make your selection using motion keys(jklm, etc.). Press I(uppercase I) to enter block insert mode. Press #, the comment character.

Moving around You can use the arrow keys on keyboard to move around in the command line. Bash also provides convenient keyboard shortcuts to navigate effectively. Try them out and see for yourself. To become a Bash pro user you have to get yourself familiar with the keyboard shortcuts. Once you do, you’ll find yourself productive. Shortcut Description CTRL+b move backward one character CTRL+f move forward one character ESC+b move one word backward ESC+f move one word forward CTRL+a move to beginning of line CTRL+e move to end of line CTRL+p move to previous line CTRL+n move to next line ESC+< move to first line of history list ESC+> move to last line of history list Moving around words using ESC+f and ESC+b are my favourites in this list.

Last Saturday, the Bangalore PHP User Group conducted a meeting. The venue was same as the last time, Microsoft office, Bangalore! The topic of the meeting was Framework Shootout. The frameworks represented were: Zend Framework CakePHP Symfony WordPress I was glad to get an opportunity to represent the Zend Framework. The slides I presented with Ganesh H S can be downloaded or viewed online at SlideShare. I liked all the presentations.

Today, the Bangalore PHP User Group had a meeting. The meetup.com site reports that sixty eight people attended the meeting. The venue was at Microsoft. The increasing participation of Microsoft in PHP conferences and meetings have taken many by surprise. Microsoft were kind enough to offer free Pizza for all the attendees. They have given me a copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate which expires on June 1, 2010. If time permits, I will sure try to install it as a virtual guest.

As per the Wikipedia “alpha compositing is the process of combining an image with a background to create the appearance of partial transparency”. To remove the transparency or the alpha channel: Fire up GIMP Open the image for which the alpha channel has to be removed Click the Image menu on the image window Click Flatten Image from the pull down menu Save In short, remember to flatten the image when you want to remove the alpha channel.