Oracle to Acquire BEA, Sun to Acquire MySQL, and MacBook Air
This week a lot of things happened. Oracle plans to acquire BEA for US$ 8.5 billion in cash. This deal will position Oracle well to compete with IBM in high-end of the middleware market. BEA compliments Oracle products nicely with WebLogic Java Server, enterprise service business technology via its AquaLogic, and virtualization via its JRockit Java Virtual Machine.
While Oracle acquires BEA, Sun Microsystems announced to acquire MySQL for US$ 1 billion. Sun says it will pay $800 million in cash and $200 for stock option. This acquisition will position Sun well in open source arena from operating system, messaging server, Java enterprise server, and database server. A clever move, I would say. Sun will gain by offering Solaris and technical support to MySQL customer base.
Last but not least, Apple announced MacBook Air. A super thin laptop that fits in a manila envelop. With measurement of 0.16 to 0.76 inches thick by 12.8 inches wide by 8.94 inches deep, and weighs 3 pounds, no doubt it is the thinnest laptop ever. It is powered with new Intel mini core duo and 80GB hard disk with an optional 64GB solid-state drive.
Video: Steve Ballmer pitches Windows 1.0
Check out this vintage video Steve Ballmer’s pitch for Windows 1.0!
Web 2.0 Color
I came across Miles Burke’s blog yesterday. I must admit that his blog is entertaining and he shares a lot of knowledge to his reader.
He came out with Web 2.0 color palette in 2006 and 2007 version. You can use it as handy reference for the current Web 2.0 color.
Click here to go to his blog and download the color palette in JPG, PNG, and Photoshop version.
Screen Capture Using FireFox
How do you usually capture a web page? The usual way is to capture a web page by pressing Print-Scrn button, then paste it into your favorite image editor (Gimp, Photoshop, Fireworks, etc.). The painful part is when the web page is longer than your screen size. You might need to capture the screen a few times and resemble them back into one image.
Andy Mutton has come out with a brilliant FireFox add-ons to grab any web page. It can capture the entire web page as PNG or JPEG file. It can also capture only the visible portion of the web page or capture a selected portion of the screen.
Click here to download and install the ScreenGrab.
How Easily Search Engine Spider Your Web Page
Besides having good content and search engine optimization (SEO), your web site also must have a good spiderability.
In other words, your web page must be able to be read, interpreted, and indexed by search engine effectively.
SpiderTest is a free web tool to test how easily search engine spiders can spider the content of your web page. I found SpiderTest is useful to crawl all your web pages and it checks if your HTML is valid and if links point to existing pages. To test your web page:
- Go to SpiderTest.
- Enter your web address and click Check.
- SpiderTest will read your web page and run tests on it to tell you what you need to do to improve its spiderability, such as meta tag content, file robots.txt, stylesheet and javascript, top 20 most common words, etc.
SitePoint’s Ruby on Rails Book is FREE to Download
Good news for Ruby on Rails fans!
You can get Patrick Lenz’s incredible book for free in PDF format. Yes, it is free started from 2nd October 2007 for the next 60 days only.
Click here to claim your copy now.
26 Best Ways to Implement AJAX, CSS and Javascript-based Tabs
Nowadays, it is common to see tabs for menu and selection in any web site. Tabs is useful when you want to present different categories in neat way.
This is a compilation of 26 best collections of CSS-based tab using AJAX and non-AJAX.
How Fast Your Web Page Loaded
Pingdom Tools is a free web tool to measure the speed of a web page loaded from a browser.
It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser by loading a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). The load time of all objects will be shown visually with time bars.
How to Survive 100,000 Visitors
Do you think your site can survive Digg-effect if it is hosted on Virtual Private Server with 256 MB RAM?
If you think it is not possible, then you’d better read this article.
Web Tool to Create Rounded Corner
Cornershop is a free web tool to generate rounded corner boxes.
When you click Create Graphics, you will get four images, CSS code, and HTML code that you can use to make your own rounded-corner boxes.
