• How to make a lot more money with Google AdSense the easy way
• A good example of car customisation going very wrong
• Amazing exhibition of balloon sculptures – some of them looking like rude bits
• The German Elektrischer Reporter explains Nerds (in German of course)
• A good article on communication skills being a something that sets you apart as an excellent developer: Coder your days are numbered
• The Bible, re-enacted with Playmobile
• A great Arduino solution for a bakery that will twitter when there is new fresh bread
• If your URLs are just not big enough, use Huge URL – also notice their contact email
• There’s a new format for JPG that allows for packing it – zipping up JPG images is more or less pointless in terms of saving bytes.
• A clever trick to analyze your browser history to determine your gender – I am 100% male.
• Awesome things people put on their resume – my faves are “Married, eight children. Prefer frequent travel.” and “Never been fired, although it could happen anytime now.”

I’ve just finished watching Nate Koechley’s talk on professional Front-End Engineering on the YDN Theater:

You can download the m4v for your ipod and read the transcription on Eric Miraglia’s blog.

I’ve seen Nate give this talk before in a shorter version at @media in London, but this version has the whole story from what frontend engineering is, over technologies and methodologies to use and avoid up to a very compelling argument why it all matters.

So if you can spare an hour and a half (or chunk it over two workout sessions in the gym like I did) go and watch this video before you start flaming on mailing lists, forums or flat out tell people that it doesn’t matter when something is incomprehensible or works by magic – as long as it works.

Thanks Nate for a great encapsulation of the whole frontend matter in one video.

Here’s an idea to help those people in your office move away from IE6 to realmore modern browsers.

1. Install FireFox or Opera on their machine
2. Remove the Internet Explorer icon
3. Replace the Opera or Firefox icon with the appropriate following ones
4. Tell them when there’s any confusion that “Microsoft updated their browser, it looks different now!”

Who’s with me?

Things that made me happy this morning:

Let’s start with filthy anti-propagandaa cool comic about macs:

• IE6 gets more bashings with code to crash ie
  and a lovely IE6 voodoo doll. I don’t approve of using the crash code, but it shows how messed up the rendering engine really is!
• In the future we will get our energy from hamster wheels – I knew it!
• Some stunning earth hour photos – large cities cutting down on energy for an hour, click the photos to see the transition
• There’s now a wiki on hacker spaces – co location offices for working on personal products
• Coding horror has a good article on how we can advocate for English documentation of code without being ugly american coders – I agree, I am sure my career is partly based on me not waiting for translated docs and using the English ones – sometimes with a dictionary by my side
• Someone discovered an unofficial Yahoo stocks API an “documented” it.
• A very truthful comparison of Pixar vs. Dreamworks
• Being a very busy traveller and hating pointless airport security measurements The Onion’s report on Prague’s Franz Kafka airport tickled me pink
• Wrong Tomorrow allows us to track which predictions turned out to be hokum.
• I know that a lot of people love bacon, but you can take it too far. Serioulsy, Bacon Lube ?

Today the rate limitations of Yahoo APIs has been made much easier

The access allowance to the APIs is determined by your IP. Say you have the IP of 10.37.129.255 then you calculate your access like this:

• Take the IP and remove all the dots, so 10.37.129.255 becomes 1037129255.
• Divide the result by 2009
• Divide this result by 4
• Divide this result by 1 (this is to make it round up nicely, some computers have bugs when you don’t do this!)

To make this even easier, I’ve written a calculator API:

You can use this to wrap it around the functionality you want to build: