We created an application which is the thing I have been dreaming of since the thought of Urbanverb in 1999. Urbanverb was never built, but Platial was, and so now is Platial Nearby. It’s the version of Platial to use while you are out in the real world away from the confines of your computer.

There are still some bugs which we are madly fixing, but if you have an iPhone, try it out.

–jake

Manny got a mix on XLR8R.

–jake

Our beautiful daughter Quinn has been with us for 5 months now almost.

Launched this.

Doing a lot of work with Solr and EC2.

I’ll try to update more regularly.

–jake

Dept. of Skateboarding

Today, they make the front page of Digg.

Nice job guys.

–jake

Phones are legal to unlock, as granted by the DMCA exemptions last year. Therefore, it makes complete sense that my iPhone is running on T-Mobile, rather than sketchy AT&T. Hack yours by following these instructions.

What a fun experience watching these guys go at it on IRC, a good summary is here.

–jake

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

Credit to my father who made this observation.

My surprise tonight when I noticed NYT had hijacked my double clicks to open their reference search, which is powered by Answers.com, and is mostly useless and non-contextual.

Which is how I was taught that Gibson only means Mel Gibson.

Guess they need the pageviews.

UPDATE: It actually looks like they are trying to be contextual, as the double click on “Gibson” from this article passes “say, Fender and Gibson” onto Answers.

–jake

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