Everyone has heard by now, some still stare in dumbfounded disbelief. But what does this ‘acquisition’ mean for us the consumers and perhaps more importantly the employees of these two monolithic companies? I think the best way to get educated is to find out straight from the source and perhaps a number of personal points of view to spice it up so here’s a bit of linkage about this historical event. The press release from Adobe… Adobe and Macromedia and Macromedia… Adobe/Macromedia Big ups to David D for sharing this link, it would be more funny if it weren’t so true… Adobe Translation Also check out the Ultra Comprehensive article by Jason Kottke… Adobe Macromedia Acquisition Roundup I am very interested to hear what you all think about it too, so why not drop a comment eh?

I got a call for a print production job that has to deal with POS printers and figuring out processes for putting image onto paper. Suburbs. They need somone for about 80 hours, ( 9-5 for 2 weeks), and I think you could bill a decent rate. Contact me if you are interested & I’ll give out the info. kvnr@kevinrieg.com

I never would have seen this coming…

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe’s and Macromedia’s closing prices on Friday April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock. The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools – and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems. By combining the passion and creativity of two leading-edge companies, we will continue driving innovations that are changing the ways people everywhere are experiencing and interacting with information.

http://gallery.theopalgroup.com/selectoracle/ Ran across this surfing this morning. Really nice since you can send it URL to some insane stylesheet, and it’ll break it down for you.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates announced at the RSA Conference in San Francisco that Microsoft will deliver Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 for Windows XP Service Pack 2 customers. The 7.0 release, which will go to beta this summer, will add new anti-phishing, anti-spyware and anti-virus safeguards, according to company officials. From Microsoft.com…

Building on those advancements, Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.

That’s all well and good but what are they doing to compete against the ever-rising Firefox? Will they add tabbed browsing, RSS aggregation, and those countless other neat features that many (including myself) have come to rely on? Even if they do, it’d only seem like they’re copying what someone else did first. The only good thing I think could come out of this is that IE will finally support the CSS 2.0 standard, but that might be asking a lot.

I just picked up a great tip to stop the spam bots from finding your email addresses on your websites. If you replace the @ with the ascii value of & #64 ; (minus the spaces) most bots will not recognize it as an email address. Just one more way to fight the onslaught of spam…

I feel so stupid for NOT knowing these sooner, it would have made troubleshooting much easier in the past. Magic constants are predefined constants usable just about anywhere. Here are the main 5 that I saw…

Name	Description
__LINE__	The current line number of the file.
__FILE__	The full path and filename of the file. If used inside an include, the name of the included file is returned.
__FUNCTION__	The function name. (Added in PHP 4.3.0) As of PHP 5 this constant returns the function name as it was declared (case-sensitive). In PHP 4 its value is always lowercased.
__CLASS__	The class name. (Added in PHP 4.3.0) As of PHP 5 this constant returns the class name as it was declared (case-sensitive). In PHP 4 its value is always lowercased.
__METHOD__	The class method name. (Added in PHP 5.0.0) The method name is returned as it was declared (case-sensitive).

LINE and FILE are the two major ones i’m definitely going to use when troubleshooting. In a well placed error message they’d provide you with the exact line of code and file you’re having trouble with. A quick note about these constants is that they can’t be included in a quoted string E.G. echo "This is the filename: __FILE__"; will return exactly what’s typed above. echo "This is the filename: {__FILE__}"; will also return what’s typed above. The only way to get magic constants to parse in strings is to concatenate them into strings: echo "This is the filename: ".__FILE__; I figured someone out there might also find this bit useful!

I recently had a need for a dropdown in a layout and dreaded using the ol’ javascript method. After a bunch of searching I got to this excellent article by the peeps at A List Apart that explained how to get a pixel perfect dropdown with CSS. Check out the article and the results!

Awesome web design company called Big Spaceship, they’ve done countless Movie websites including “War of the Worlds” and “Alexander”