Things that made me happy this morning:

• Rey Bango of Mozilla improving his JavaScript experience and pimping my book
• TweetEffect being business news in Japan
• AMC showing ‘The Prisoner’ for free on the web – but not in the UK (or via VPN)!
• Finally a good guide to Database development
• A free Science Fiction Audio book Singularity – does not feature Aral Balkan though
• An online petition to stop the cruelty towards trouts on IRC – this has to stop Khaled!
• A Dumpster-sized generator that turns trash into power – roads? where we’re going we don’t need any roads!
• An awesome concept snow mobile from 1924 reminds me of the antarctic snow cruiser that I mentioned at my talk at the Ajax Experience.
• Mark Wubben musing about oAuth and client-side widgets

There are so many things in my daily feed that made me happy today, I had to categorise them:

Work and colleagues – education + accessibility

• Inspiring University students to have a go at hacking and using APIs to build apps that make a change in their lives
• Friend and associate Dirk Ginader publishing his blog post on the YDN blog about Making the Yahoo Currency Converter Screen Reader accessible

That new fella in the white house

• Bush street in San Francisco renamed to Obama Street – I love this city and its people
• Finding out that the new whitehouse.gov is licensed Creative Commons
  bq. Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Geek stuff

• The elecronic playground is a web site dedicated to listing cameos of arcade machines and consoles in film and TV
• YouTube Street Fighter – another YouTube annotations game/hack. Let’s hope this one stays up, not like the Laserdisc Dragon’s Lair walkthrough.

Open source good news and things

• Mozilla Labs going on with Test Pilot – a usability testing platform in Mozilla that will analyze user’s behaviours and publish the findings. No matter how this works out the logo is full of win and I had a great time at the last Mozilla Labs monthly meetup. If you are in the Valley, make sure to visit them!
• Crowbar – a powerful screen scraping library based on Mozilla used for rendering output before converting it (and a cool bar in Tottenham Court Road in London)

Misc

• The State of Georgia’s Department of Revenue asking people to download Adobe Reader in a PDF file – to be fair, it might be that version 8 is needed – still not the best place to ask
• Jay’s friends – a way to announce friends that got made redundant and get them a new job.
• How to learn any language in three months – domo arregato

I’m just enjoying the complimentary wireless on the National Express train from Newcastle to London and uploaded the presentation I’ve given at Sunderland University to start the Hack Challenge they are giving their students. Together with Yahoo Developer Network Sunderland Uni is asking their student to spend a month to build a web application using Yahoo services and mashing them up. The hacks will be judged by Yahoo for prices and graded by the professors as a part of the course deliveries.

My presentation was meant to inspire the students to find good hack ideas and realize that innovation is not something you are paid or told to do, but something that everyone can be part of by concentrating on what you want to make better and finding the right tools and people.

[slideshare id=937827&doc=hackingforinnovation-1232551242755069-2&w=425]

The initial hack ideas of the students were very encouraging and I am looking forward to the next video conference where they’ll pitch the ideas in detail and show the technological decisions they’ve made to build their apps. It is great to be able to partner with universities to see what potential is there.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The UK Policy Hub have released a comprehensive document of transport statistics – a shame that it is a PDF, not XML or CSV but it looks like interesting mashup fodder
• Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics is Danah Boyd’s dissertation on social networks and the American teen – she interviewed and observed hundreds of teens across 16 states, tracking the rise of Myspace and Facebook in the process
• Danny Stack got permission to reprint an interview with Joss Whedon containing his top 10 script writing tips – if you haven’t seen Firefly, Dr.Horrible’s singalong blog or even Buffy yet, go and do it!
• A nice R2D2 Chorus Line makes me want to have one. Cause I don’t have space in my flat for it :-/
• 4000 more visitors on TweetEffect as Tim O’Reilly liked it.

Things that made me happy this morning (and I tell you about in the afternoon):

• I spent the morning chatting with JGP about a job portal for job seekers with disabilities – this will be massive!
• Obamiconme is a Flash app that allows you to vectorize your photo into one that looks like Obama’s HOPE poster (or well, close) – via Emily Lewis
• The $300m button is a nice case study that shows that making a form more usable can have quite a monetary impact
• Robert Nyman explains how to extend browsers with your own scripts – beyond GreaseMonkey
• My own little hack TweetEffect, showing you changes in your follower numbers went nuts (2000 visits in 30 minutes) after Guy Kawasaki twittered about it
• Inspired by Bhasker V Kode’s comment on Jonathan Trevor’s blog I found a real use case for the Microformats data table in YQL: Getting microformats information from Wikipedia as JSON – in this case I did a mashup showing meteor craters on earth