jake olsen

I am joining Insite as Technical Director.

I have had the pleasure of working with Paul Irving (Founder/President) and Kristin Beadle (UX/Design) over the years and have experienced their dedication and professionalism firsthand. This is a good fit that I am excited about.

I’ll be providing the same devotion I’ve had in my work to Insite and our clients, bringing new services and technology online for a wide variety of industries.

In my spare time, I’ll be providing consultation to numerous friends and colleagues in the startup realm.

Cheers.

–jake

I don’t normally paste code up here. I don’t know why. If people find it interesting, maybe I’ll post more.

At the sake of alienating my 4 readers, I wanted to post this so anyone else encountering this ridiculous bug in Mac Firefox regarding CSS opacity with Flash transparency could find some help.

I encountered this bug in the specific case of embedding a transparent Flash SWF (wmode=”transparent”) in a lightbox within an IFRAME. The lightbox code creates a full page div which shades the page, and brings the lightbox into focus.

Calling CSS opacity on this div works for all other browsers, except Mac Firefox. The hack means bypassing CSS opacity in favor of a transparent png used for the shade effect.

Here’s the code.

First, we need to detect Mac Firefox,

function detectMacXFF() {
  var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
  if (userAgent.indexOf('mac') != -1 && userAgent.indexOf('firefox')!=-1) {
    return true;
  }
}

UPDATE: Joe Aston points out this is fixed in Firefox 3. Here’s a new detect script which will detect the version. Make sure the code below points to detectMacXFF2.

function detectMacXFF2() {
  var userAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
  if (/firefox[\/\s](\d+\.\d+)/.test(userAgent)) {
    var ffversion = new Number(RegExp.$1);
    if (ffversion < 3 && userAgent.indexOf('mac') != -1) {
      return true;
    }
  }
}

Then, where your lightbox opacity is set, do this. (note this is not the complete code, but rather what needs to happen). You’ll need a grey (#666) PNG set to 65% opaque in this case.

…

  var yourShade = document.getElementById('yourShadeDiv');
  var d = detectMacXFF(); //note new detectMacXFF2 script above
  if (d) {
    //osx ff css opacity + flash wmode transparent doesn't work
    yourShade.style.backgroundImage= "url(/path_to/opaque_grey.png)";
    yourShade.style.backgroundRepeat="repeat";
  } else {
    yourShade.style.backgroundColor = "#666";
    yourShade.style.MozOpacity = .65;
    yourShade.style.opacity = .65;
    yourShade.style.filter = "alpha(opacity=65)";
  }

…

I hope this helps anyone that stumbles upon it!

–jake

Steve Jobs:

“You don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t want your phone to be an open platform,” said Jobs, referring to the concept of any phone owner writing applications for it. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

What is Cingular’s network built on? Duct tape and fishing line?

With open source phones starting to spring up, Apple has a big opportunity here they are going to miss. This closed source approach is why Apple stinks IMHO. DRM is another issue, but that discussion is for another day.

Anselm Hook:

to me the cellphone space still look like a witches brew of free agents competing over scraps without any real awareness of a bigger opportunity… if they could get their act together over the basic idea of making those 64 bits of information free… we’d all tra la la through flowery fields of bliss i am sure.

playing in somebody elses sandbox, with their image of prescribed activities is not fun…

For further reading, walled gardens and the iPhone are a hot topic in this months Geowankers discussion.

–jake

I’m back from Where 2.0 and thinking through all the ideas and projects presented. Google’s Geo Developer Day was fun, but the interesting bits came out in the conference and some BOF’s.

I was most enthused about the launch of MetaCarta Labs and specifically, their GeoParser API, which we, at Platial, will be integrating soon as we’re fortunate enough to share wonder kid developer, Chris Schmidt.

–jake

(modified) Oh yeah, I won this phone after the Pixie (Scavenger) Hunt (photo by Hive and Chris Schmidt):

I met with Monica Garcia from the PSU Vanguard last Sunday about Platial.
This is what she wrote:

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/01/25/43d75552305c8

The only correction I have to make is my DJ name is Kola, not Koala, and sorry to all those “marketing monkeys” I may have offended.

–jake

You have users, they can also be customers, co-workers, friends, and family, but first, they were called people.

The phrase “user generated content” takes the stigma off generalizes what this content actually is. Emotions, fears, desires, resentments. The very personal nature of this content screams for respect, and needs to be treated in a different manner by organizations wishing to capitalize on “user generated content”.

When I replace the term user with a friends actual name, it puts a much different (literal) face on the phrase:

“Matt generated content”

Huh? It makes no sense to dehumanize Matt. I’m talking about his feelings, his thoughts. Not his “generated content”. Aren’t we generating content all the time? Instead couldn’t we call it:

“(insert corporation here) captured content”?

It all comes down to people, and the relationships I have with those people. Do they trust me? Do I honestly respect their feelings, thoughts, emotions, and actions? I guess that all depends on the human I am.

Watch my actions first, and then my words.

–jake

Microsoft opens APIs. Good for them, not as late to the game as their entrance into the INTERNET, but still on the heels of some very important development.

They must improve their goodwill with Web developers. Do they still market Frontpage?

Full text

In the geosphere:

Also next week, the company will announce a free commercial license to use a JavaScript “control” to display data from its Virtual Earth mapping service.

–jake