Winning The CSS Battle

I recently completed a complex page layout using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to accomplish the presentation. I was assigned the task of creating an XHTML and CSS version of a comp that had been worked up by the staff at Southern Living magazine for the Encyclopedia of Alabama. I have spent quite a lot of time over the past few months reading many books on CSS and Web Standards. I have read several authors including Eric Meyer, Dan Shea, Molly Holzschlag. Web Standards is so the way to create web pages today. The code can be so efficient and eloquent. CSS can be frustrating at first, but web sites like www.csszengarden.com continue to insire me to learn more. Thanks to the CSS community for the many helpful techniques that have been developed and publicized over the past couple of years.

George Will Graduate From Columbus State University

Youngest son George will graduate on Saturday from Columbus State University. He will be receiving a bachelor of Business Administration degree with a major in Computer Information Systems. I am so proud of George because he has worked long and hard to earn this degree. I hope that he will use it to help him reach the career goals to which he aspires. I will be watching the graduation from the Fine Arts buildings since tickets are in short supply. I will be so happy to see this wonderful young man in his cap and gown!

TSYS Is Now The Largest

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported this morning that the local credit card processor, TSYS has reached an agreement to add 50 million accounts from Capital One to its portfolio. This will bring the total to about 420 million which is a few million larger than the second largest processor, First Data. Go TSYS!

Plum Is Just Peachy!

I've spent some time over the past week working with the new ColdFusion Methodology, IDE, Framework, and all around Wizard. This free (with a small ad) software can be downloaded at www.productivityenhancement.com. The software is written by the father/son team of Adam and David Churvis. These guys have put together over the past several years, a labor of love for the ColdFusion community. Can you imagine having a working application up and running in a matter of hours rather than weeks? It can be done in Plum. Plum creates all of the add, edit, search, list, and delete forms that your application will use in a matter of minutes. Add to this, client and server-side validation with no additional work! Plum also handles authentication and authorization with a custom tag called . The Plum feature list is huge! I found that I could easily modify the header.cfm and footer.cfm files along with the baseline stylesheet to create completely different look and feels with no problem. The custom tags that makeup the product encapsulates code so that you can just add a couple of lines of code that will call 50 lines of code. This product is a real timesaver. Thanks to Adam and David!

Shuffle at Microsoft

I read today on www.wired.com that Microsoft management is becoming a little miffed at the number of corporate staffers sporting the telltale white ear phones of Shuffle and IPod. The Apple products seem to be in use by up to sixty percent of the Redmond, WA based software company. Though Microsoft creates products for Apple, (and has for more than twenty years) the companies remain great rivals. Bill Gates has never had much respect for Steven Jobs, a non-programmer. Jobs, on the over hand, is not a Bill Gates fan.

Adobe to Purchase Macromedia

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they would purchase Macromedia. Adobe is the maker of Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere and a number of other publishing tools. Macromedia makes the web site design tool, Dreamweaver and Flash, the animation tool.
As a user of a number of these tools, I have a great deal of interest in the ultimate outcome of this purchase. I have used Dreamweaver since version 3 and ColdFusion since version 4.5.
Your guess is as good as mine as to the success of this purchase from a financial perspective. Adobe paid 3.4 billion dollars for Macromedia.
I'm hoping that Adobe will continue developing Fireworks. I have used it since version 3 and find that its intergration with Dreamweaver really saves me time.
I'm also hoping that Adobe will promote ColdFusion even more than has Macromedia. Macromedia purchased ColdFusion from Allaire back about 2002. Under Macromedia's ownership, ColdFusion has been re-written in Java and recently release version 7. The more I learn about .NET, the more I appreciate the ease in which web applications can be written with ColdFusion.