TTMHHTM: Uni Hack Day, accessibility wins, out with the Bush and Testpilot

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

Tags: accessibility, bush, education, hackday, obama, scraping, testing, university, usabilty