A short update on some friends of mine.

First of all, Patrick F. Riley - I worked with him on some projects when I was visiting the UC Berkeley, one of which was a predecessor to his latest thing: LiveDash. It's really cool: it allows you to search almost in realtime in TV feeds. It also live-indexes Twitter, blogs, news sources etc.

Secondly, HoneyWish (currently only available in German) is a service for a "honeymoon travel gift list" thing. It works like the traditional gift lists, except that instead of putting all kind of household stuff on it, there are all the parts of the honeymoon trip on the gift list. This makes much more sense these days: people tend to get married later; they might even be sharing a house for some time before getting married. So they don't need much silverware anymore, but they for sure will enjoy their honeymoon trip - so what could be a better gift for them?

Third, Amiando a web-based ticketing and event management service. Founded already some years ago by some friends, it has been growing and coming along nicely. Every now and then, it won some award, many of them in the "top startup" category.

There are of course many more projects of friends I'd like to point out, but these three definitely are highlights.

If you are doing a complex web layout (such as my Swing and the City layout which features alpha-transparent fixed layers), and want to embed Flash (e.g. on the Was ist Swing? page - German: What is Swing), make sure you add the attribute wmode="transparent" to your embed tag, and <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param> to your object. Otherwise, a layer - in particular popup menus - might end up below the flash.

This includes you, YouTube. In HD view, the user popup menu only has the top 3.5 entries out of 5 accessible for me.

The following XSLT stylesheet can be used to find such embeds in a bunch of XHTML files using the command line xsltproc findNoWmode.xslt $( find -iname '*.html' )

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:call-template name="t"/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template name="t">
  <xsl:copy-of select="//html:embed[not(@wmode) and (count(param[@name='wmode']) = 0)]"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

You can of course also write a XSLT stylesheet to insert the wmode statements whenever there is none, to make transparent your default.

[Update: I've received comments that this comes at qutie a performance cost for Flash, and that this might be the reason why YouTube doesn't use it - in particular for the HD videos. Also it isn't supported by WebKit based Browsers so far (so Safari neither?) and nor does it seem to be working in Gnash, an opensource flash plugin. So you have to choose between multiple evils if you are using Flash...]