I am right now at the open hack day in Bangalore, India and just finished giving the keynote presentation showing people what hacking means and how to present at a hack day:

The slides

What the hack?

The resources I talked about:

• Yahoo Developer Network for everything about Yahoo offers
• Google Visualisation API for displaying data in an interesting way
• Programmable Web for APIs
• AppEngine for your app hosting
• GitHub for code hosting
• Heroku for Ruby Hosting
• Yahoo YAP for apps running on Yahoo
• YQL Geo for all your Geo needs in JavaScript
• CSS Grids Builder for creating layouts that work across browsers
• YUI for building interactive web apps
• YQL for mixing and matching the web

The Audio recording

The audio of the recording is available on archive.org:

• Download the MP3 (35 MB)

And the demos:

• GooHooBi uses Google, Bing and Yahoo at the same time for a search query
• The screencast of building GooHooBi shows live how I used YQL to build it
• Keywordfinder.org finds keywords related to a keyword using Yahoo BOSS
• UK house prices uses government data to compare house prices in the UK. It uses the CSS Bar Charts API
• Around You finds you on the planet and shows you Wikipedia content around you
• Warwickshire Hack shows you all the cool things to see in Warwickshire. (source on GitHub, Screencast on YouTube)
• Flickr Collector allows you to find and collect flickr photos. (source on GitHub, Screencast on YouTube)
• FIFA 2010 visualisation
• GeoThis and the hack presentation:

I’ve just started playing with Google Chrome Extensions heavily inspired by Mark Wubben’s talk at SWDC and of course the first thing I build is something to do with geographical locations.

Geo This! adds a little Earth icon to Chrome that, when pressed, analyses the page and shows a map of the locations it found in the text. If you highlight a part of the page first you only get the locations in this section. Click the screenshot below to go to the download site:

You can also see the extension in action in the following screencast:

Under the hood the extension is more or less a port of my addmap.js hack which in turn works most of its magic by using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL. The source code of the extension is available on GitHub.

Things that will come in future versions are:

• Fixing the problem that Google Maps only numbers the first 10 markers on the static maps APIv1.0
• More details on the found locationsv1.0
• Ability to save the map and locations as an image
• Better icons (anyone can paint me one?) – right now I am using one of the Project Icons by Mihaiciuc Bogdan and cruelly resized it in Skitch

What do you think?

Paypal together with some other partners are currently hosting a developer competition with prizes of over $160,000. For more information check out the Paypal X challenge web site.

To give you more information about the challenge and to introduce you to the Paypal and Yahoo APIs to be used in your submissions we invite developers to join us for a developer evening on Tuesday, the 20th of July at 6.30 in the newly opened Techhub in Old Street.

TechHub London
76-80 City Rd
EC1Y 2BJ London
United Kingdom

John Lunn from Paypal and Christian Heilmann of the Yahoo Developer Network will walk you through the APIs and answer your questions.

This is your chance to learn tricks of the trade and to get well on the way to be the winner of some great cash prizes and build the future of online payments. Following the presentations we organised food and drinks to aid the mingling.

Get your free ticket now and see you on Tuesday!

Breaking news: The Guardian once again involved in committing a data awesome! As before, the UK newspaper graced developers with a really cool piece of information published on the web: all the World Cup 2010 statistics as an Excel Sheet.

Now, the easiest way to play with this data is to use YQL, so I simply took a copy of the information and shared it as a CSV document on Google Docs. That way I can use it in YQL:

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&
output=csv" and columns="surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves"

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using YQL to filter and sort this, you can do some interesting searches on that information. For example:

What were the German mid field Players?

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&
output=csv" and columns="surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves"
and team="Germany" and position="Midfielder"

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using sort() and reverse() you can do rankings. For example:

Who was the goalkeeper with the most saves?

(Neuner of Germany, Kingson of Ghana and Enyeama of Nigeria in case you wonder)

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&
output=csv" and
columns="surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves"
and position="Goalkeeper" | sort(field="saves") | reverse()

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Which was the player that spent most time on the pitch?

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&
output=csv" and
columns="surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves"
| sort(field="time") | reverse()

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Who were the players who were the least on the pitch in the German and Brazilian teams?

select * from csv where url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?
key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&
output=csv" and columns="surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves"
and team in ("Germany","Brazil") | sort(field="time")

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using the CSV output and YQL you can do all kind of cool things with that data – as YQL also releases it as JSON it makes it easy to create interactive interfaces and visualizations, too – why don’t you have a go?

When my esteemed colleague Ara Pehlivanian told me that he plans to set up a web development lifestyle magazine called http://webstylemag.com and asked me for participation I was reluctant at first as it seems a bit inbred. However, Ara had done such a nice job and I remember having had such good feedback to my Chris’ travel tips – Japan post here that I thought I have a go at sharing my wealth of experiences in traveling to conferences world-wide in the last year and set up a series of posts on webstylemag that give tips how to survive a mental travel schedule like mine. I’ve cut it up into 6 parts:

• Part 1: “So what did I forget to bring?” tells you about how to pack, what to take with you and how to get to the airport
• Part 2: “Dealing with discomfort and public humiliation” covers your experiences at airports
• Part 3: “God I wished I had packed tranquilliser blow darts” covers the journey in the air
• Part 4: “Parlez-vous Anglais?” – travel from the airport to the hotel
• Part 5: “Checkout at 11” – going to the conference and back to the hotel
• Part 6: “Here’s my business card” – travel back and conference follow-up

The first part dealing with packing your bags and getting to the airport is now online for your reading pleasure.

Hope you like it.

Cheers,
Chris