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

In follow-up to my old post about switching to Ubuntu full-time, I did the deed last April.

Here’s how it went:

1) Switched to Vista Ultimate. Found that key software such as firewall and antivirus didn’t work.
2) Got scared about not running firewall and antivirus.
3) Went back to XP.
4) Two weeks…
5) Feisty is released April 19th, let’s give it a shot. Edgy blew.

I’ve been pretty happy with this release. Minor hiccups included getting the graphics subsystem to display properly (Envy helped). Major hiccups included a corrupt LUKS partition.

Regarding dmcrypt/LUKS encryption:

This guy went through a similar problem, but basically, there is a single point of failure in LUKS. The dreaded LUKS header. Back it up! Luckily I had a not-so-old backup of my data.

I was a little naive in my selection of software, here’s what I finally ended up using.

command line svn for Tortoise SVN
Pidgin for Trillian Pro
KeePassX for KeePass
rsync for WinSCP
Komodo for IDE

There is a place for every OS, and I use them all. But working with community maintained software has it’s own benefits and I’m enthused to see how far Linux has come.

–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

With Windows Vista released, I’ve been wondering if I would upgrade.

I’m quite satisfied with my Ubuntu install on my laptop, and the idea of embracing a FOSS operating system on my dev box makes me feel good. I am running FreeBSD, Linux, and all other sorts of open source software on my servers, but am I ready to use it ALL THE TIME…. AS A USER???

There are a few apps on Windows which are very nice, which I always run, or that I’m simply familiar with:

• Tortoise SVN client rules any GUI I’ve seen for SVN on other OS’es.
• Trillian Pro is excellent for all chat + IRC.
• KeePass password safe, neat little open source app for password management.
• WinSCP, using directory sync makes development painless.
• Internet Explorer, just to see what 80% of the world is looking at.
• Windows Media Player, hahah! Not.
• Ultramon, for multi-monitor setup.
• All the Office applications I have come to rely on, though I’ve been getting by with Open Office another machine.
• Outlook, meh, yeah, I know. Been using it for 10 years, so I’m used to it.

And that’s it. The replacements I’m looking at are:

• gSVN RapidSVN for Tortoise.
• Gaim for Trillian Pro.
• Revelation for KeePass.
• rsync + rsyncd for WinSCP.
• Multiple monitors, this will be a little harder.
• Open Office for Microsoft Office.
• Thunderbird for Outlook.

I have a friend who’s made the switch from Ubuntu to Mac… he said he “just needed it to work.” I’ve heard this from many a Mac user. I don’t know what their PC experience is, but I can tell you, most of my systems have always “just worked.”

Also, there is a MacBook sitting right next to me. I only use it to test sites in Safari. You Mac folks will cry “BLASHPHEMY, THE ANSWER IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE!”

But, IMHO, the Kool-Aid is way too strong.

–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 switched to Ubuntu on my laptop, leaving Windows and passing OSX.

My first experience with Linux was in 1997 when I was managing a Windows NT network and wanted to move DHCP off my servers (DHCP and WINS were flaky as hell). Routers were not a commodity at that time, so I took an old 486, loaded Red Hat, setup IPCHAINS and masquerading, and had a DSL connection shared throughout the office in a couple of hours. The last time I tried to run Linux at home was in 2002 with Mandrake, now Mandriva, which worked for about a month, then I realized I actually needed to work (and occasionally game) and not spend so much time tinkering.

Ubuntu has a pretty slick installation, rivals Windows with only ONE massive software update post-install. Synaptic and apt are great for installing/removing software, and the feeling I get for support open source software is pretty good.

I tried AIXGL & Compiz (video here), but it was way too slow on the poor Intel chipset.

Connecting to WPA2 was a pain in the ass until I realized network-manager (nm-applet) helped with this.

We’ll see how much I miss Windows, so far, so good, but my laptop is not my main development machine.

–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