November 2003 Archives

I'm not really sure what I think of the news I read at Information Week that Novell has announced that it will aquire SuSE Linux for $210 million.

Novell was an early alternative to Microsoft on LAN servers. I've heard good things about the SuSE distribution, and bettter things from my friends who can read some German.

(n.b. I got a whole different impression when I went to the SuSE site to get the URL for this article than the last time I looked at it several years ago. I will be looking more closely at this distro for a possible future review in AdvisorBits. Anyone with more recent experiences with SuSE is invited to share them with us, either make a comment or send us an email.)

I hope this works out for Novell, but mostly because I am a Linux advocate who like to see these things succeed.

In the continuing quest for standards compliance and clean code, a "rollover" that doesn't require client side JavaScript is not only cool as cats pajamas, but it does somethings a lot better too.

For instance, Dreamweaver has been known to miss the "OnMouseOver" images when moving files and adjusting links. (Forget about using wget, it does not interpret JavaScript so it never gets all the images.)

This idea is lifted straight from the master, Eric Meyer. He has a complete explanation of the technique at the O'Reilly Network.

Internet Explorer (version 6 point whatever is current today) kind of flashes the images when changing them a bit, but the effect is not too bad. Opera 7 handles the hover event smoothly. You can see my sketch of this idea at http://www.chathamselfstorage.com/rates.html