Things that made me happy this morning:

• Andy Helms’ Dude-A-Day illustrations – Skill! (via Ethan Marcotte)
• Detailed information about the Twitter admin interface hack – “happiness” is not a good password
• Bruce Lawson giving me words of his very personal wisdom for an upcoming press interview
• Crazy Little Fingers is a keyboard locking tool that rewards your kids for playing with the keyboard – catch them young!
• An awesome industrial design hack involving pigs!
• Obama+Unicorn is an awesome Google image search term
• ...and a wonderful definition of irony

Last September I was very happy to be able to pull off Scripting Enabled, an accessibility hacking event in London, England. Over two days the speakers, around 150 attendees and 40 hackers educated and learnt about accessibility barriers on the web and – in the case of the hackers – removed some of them.

The event was only possible by partnering with the right people, in this case the Metropolitan University in London, BBC backstage, the Opera Developer Network, JustGiving.com, Channel4 and last but so not the least the Yahoo Developer Network.

The presentation slides of the conference have been available and on SlideShare for quite a while now, and I am proud to announce that the Yahoo Developer Network now hosts all the videos of the talks. Opera provided the full transcriptions of the videos and I will now start publishing them one by one on Scripting Enabled.

The first video is Denise Stephens on Multiple Sclerosis and inclusive Design. Denise talks about the he effects of MS and what it means for web design. She also explains her own project, Enabled By Design which tries to bridge the gap between the design and accessibility world much like Scripting Enabled tries to bridge the gap between the developer and the accessibility world.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Dr. Dre’Ice Cube’s (damn you, sil!) It was a good day as a flow chart
• Denise Stephens talking about MS and design going live
• The idea of first writing the manual and then building the interface
• Being able to fix my twitter user detection script with an inofficial API mentioned by the API developer of twitter on a discussion group!
• My esteemed colleague Ted Drake releasing Insider Food
• A cool tutorial on integrating Django and BOSS
• Andrew Dupont going apeshit about pagination

Wouldn’t it be cool (and somehow creepy) to greet your visitors by their twitter name, and maybe ask them to tweet a post? It can be really easily done.

Check it out yourself: Hello Twitter Demo
Update: this is not working any longer. Twitter have discontinued this functionality because of the phishing opportunities it posed.

This page should show you your avatar, name, location and latest update when you are logged into twitter. If nothing show up you either are not logged in or already exceeded your API limit for the hour (if you have twhirl running, like me, that can happen fast)

This is actually very easy to do as a logged-in twitter user can be detected with a simple API call in a script node:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=1&callback=yourcallback

All you need to do is provide a callback function that gets the data provided by the API and get the right information out. The demo does this by assembling a string:

Trying to think of a cool use for this that is not spooky :)

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Wallace and Gromit’s “A matter of loaf and death” (for the Brits available on iPlayer for others on bittorrent) – I just love the amount of detail the people at Aardman put into their work. Check for example that the cardoor claims “dough to door delivery” and “flour to the people” , the car license plate is “doh nut5” , Piella’s shoes are real Poochi’s and there’s a TankTopMan shop: . All the details are listed on Wikipedia. If you have that much fun with your work, you’ve done something right!
• Braille is 200 years old – let’s celebrate accessibility
• The Videos of Scripting Enabled are ready and uploaded – I am now putting together video pages with the transcriptions and all
• A backup strategy full of win
• CSS Super Scrub a tool that analyzes CSS and removes redundant selectors
• Uncoverr is a pretty cool site uncovering all the other media around a certain book – interviews, videos and such. Doesn’t find me though, maybe it is time for another book.
• Wulffmorgenthaler showing the first ever Bimbo
• I didn’t make the list of sexiest geeks what’s with that?
• Guidedogs are just the start The NYT reports about helper monkeys, miniature horses and parrots!
• Ticket sales for UX London have started. The new event by the dconstruct team.