Once more, I've made a minor adjustment to the CSS for buzzword; there seems ro have been a bug with the way the last one rendered the body text layer that made it looked clipped at the bottom. Can we fix it? Yes we can! (Sorry, too much toddler exposure).
As expected, my column in the January issue of Baseline did not go over well with some folks at Sun Microsystems. Maybe it was the headline. In any case, Sun sent me the PR love note I've posted below. I've put it here on my blog for the purpose of extending this conversation between Sun and me out to you–does Sun's response reflect how you perceive them?
From: “Sabrina Guttman”
Date: Mon Feb 3, 2003 2:33:25 PM US/Eastern
To: sean@dendro.com
Subject: Comments on “Partial Eclipse of the Sun…”
Hi Sean –
I am writing to you in response to your recent article in the January issue of Baseline entitled “Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Intel and Linux Have Driven Sun to Switch Strategies. Should You Buy it?” In your article, you claim Sun is being forced to switch strategies away from “proprietary” hardware platforms in the face of increased pressure from Intel and Linux. I would like to point out that Sun is a *systems* company which means we sell the best hardware and software solutions to meet our customers' needs at every level of their IT infrastructure.
To your point that Sun's hardware is “proprietary,” the UltraSPARC family of processors are one of the industry's ONLY open systems processors as they are designed on the open architecture and standards set by SPARC International, Inc.[tm] — an independent, non-profit organization. Unlike Intel, Sun builds compatibility into its entire line of server products. This means ISVs can port their applications onto different generations of UltraSPARC without having to recompile them and customers can mix and match processor speeds for the best investment protection in the industry.
Furthermore, might I remind you that UNIX, like Linux, is based on the X/Open 1170 Standard and our Solaris Operating Environment is the best implementation of that standard in the INDUSTRY. The reason our competitors are flocking to Linux is that they failed in creating the robust operating environment we have been offering our customers for years.
Sun is all about open choice and open standards and that's why over 12,000 business applications are currently readily available on our SPARC/Solaris platform. Can Lintel manufacturers say as much? Sun is also about innovation and providing value to our customers and that's why we are now offering Solaris and Linux on x86 architectures at the edge of the network where it makes the most sense.
Please let me know if you would like to speak with us further about any of these points or just generally about Sun's strategy.
Regards,
Sabrina Guttman
*************************************
Sabrina Guttman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Public Relations | PNP | N1|
The Register reports that Opera, the Norwegian web browser company, has found Microsoft's MSN site sends screwy CSS code *just* to users of Opera's browser, making it look like the browser is broken. Is it deliberate? Or just bad style coding for that particular browser detection? Hmmmmm.
Wired News reports that Ideo has built a prototype cell phone that shock their users if they are being annoying. It's one of five “social” cell phone prototypes designed to raise cell etiquette conciousness.
I prefer the rubber darts with “stupid” flags approach myself.
I've given the templates on buzzword-compliant a bit of a tuneup, courtesy of Dreamweaver. They're still a work in progress, but they're a damn sight better than the butt-ugly table-based template I built in PageMill two years ago.
As part of my review of the latest version of Macromedia's Studio MX, I've been working with Dreamweaver MX to fix some of the really crappy CSS I had hand-coded, and generating some graphics with the beta of Freehand MX. I am, thus far, friggin' ecstatic. Of course, since the last pseudo-WYSIWYG web tool I worked with was GoLive 5.0, that's not a hard state to put me in.
Still, I'm really impressed thus far with the CSS editing capabilities of Dreamweaver. It makes me all that more nervous about the rumors that Microsoft is planning to acquire Macromedia.
A more fully fleshed-out review is pending; watch for a link here.
Since I've been consolidating hosting of some of my domains, I ran into a little bit of a problem; I had three domain names pointed at the same host, and I wanted each of the domains to have its own home page. So, 10 minutes of PHP coding later, my problem was solved.
I inserted a simple redirector based on the $HTTP_HOST and $REQUEST_URI server variables in PHP, which capture the URL that the user has requested. The rest is just sending standard HTTP redirect headers, so that the user will be forwarded to the page they've come looking for.
I reused a code-snip from an earlier project that creates a string variable that stores the fully-expressed URL of the site, just in case I decide to add some other options later.
The switch uses the stringsearch function “strstr” to find the text for which domain the incoming request is pointed at, then sends back a header to redirect users to the corresponding directory for the homepage of that site. Extending this, I can now on a single host maintain as many domains as the provider will let me point at the site, and as storage will allow.
To build a home page that redirects based on the incoming URL, (if your site supports PHP), use this code and substitute your own domain names. If you've got more than three, just repeat the “if” statements as many times as you need to. (It's not pretty, but it works.)
<html>
<head>
<?php
$url = sprintf("%s%s%s"," http://",$HTTP_HOST,,br>
$REQUEST_URI );
if (strstr($url, "INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE")) {
?>
<title>Forwarding to INSERT DOMAIN NAME #1 HERE</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://DOMAINNAME#1.com/DIRECTORYOFHOMEPAGE/">
<?
}
if (strstr($url, "INSERT 2ND DOMAIN NAME HERE"))
{
?> <title>Forwarding to 2ND DOMAIN NAME Home</title> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.2NDDOMAINNAME.com/DIRECTORYOF2NDHOMEPAGE/">
<?
}
else { ?>
<title>Forwarding to 3RD DOMAIN homepage</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.3RDDOMAIN.com/index2.html">
<?}
</head>