Hi just a quick reminder that if you are in London, England this Thursday and you want to learn a lot about exceptional performance and how to make your web sites faster and how to really measure your success come to the Yahoo Developer Network evening with Philip Tellis at Wallacespace in Covent Garden this Thursday.

Philip is a person inside Yahoo I got boatloads of respect for. He is currently the main performance engineer in the company and has over the years proven to be an interesting and very knowledgeable developer on almost any topic I can think of. It can be scary at times.

So, bring yourself to Wallacespace on Thursday and before that, get your free ticket at: http://measuringwebperformance.eventbrite.com/.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The iPad can be used as an affordable communication device for people with disabilities – more apps like these please.
• The Swinger is a python script that turns any song into a Swing version by elongating the first half of a beat and shortening the second – make sure to check out the Sweet Child of Mine version
• 3D Pixel Playground is an editor for small 3D pixel icons
• You can hide fun things in text when you use the :selected pseudo selector and background colour in this case a NSFW picture with naked breasts.
• Make the smiley pixely guy happy by moving the cursor close
• Did you know that the ghosts in PacMan don’t only have names but also artificial intelligence?
• Mini Polls is a terribly easy way to embed some polls into your web site.
• Finger works – the company Apple bought for the multitouch features of their product originally built software to help motor disabilities and RSI
• Witness the power of open: Just one day after Google released WebM and open sourced VP8 somebody released a streaming server for WebM
• Fiverr is a web site where people can offer their services for five dollars – much like Mechancal Turk but simpler to use.
• Darkroom is an HTML5 based image editor
• Bodycounters is a list of the killing count in various movies.

I’ve been annoyed with the plethora of articles lately showing off HTML5 vs. Flash and building actually worse solutions using open technology. Therefore I thought I’ll have a go at it myself, too.

Instant rimshot is a fun site that has a button that plays a rimshot (the “babumm-tish” after a bad gag at a comedy club) when you press a large red button. I thought this is a good target to convert to CSS and HTML5 and I give you HTML5 instant rimshot.

In essence this was fun, although Remy had beaten me to it some time ago.

As the background for my work I used HTML5Doctor’s Audio in the browser article and Robert Nyman’s CSS gradient example and I have to say a few things about this:

• There are not many HTML5 audio tutorials out there – if you Google for HTML5 audio you get video examples – and a lot of them not working.
• HTML5 articles do not seem to get many fixes – the audio one above for example has a bug in the detection code (mentioned in the comments)
• I had a hard time making the button work with the sound playing from start to end when you click the button. If you try the “version that loads the audio once and then calls the play() method onclick”:http://isithackday.com/html5-rimshot/rimshot.html you will find that the second time you hit the button it plays the “badumm” twice in Firefox – why I don’t know. Therefore I needed to create a new audio object every time you click the button – which in Safari means it keeps loading the MP3.
• The necessary browser support forking and the repetition of the file in MP3 and OGG format is simply annoying – if there is a new technology we should demand from browser makers to bloody well do it right and not as a repetition of the late 90ies madness. I guess the latest announcement on I/O solves that issue – but Safari would still need a plugin to play.
• The same applies to CSS gradients – progressively enhancing the button (on Firefox < 3.6 and on Opera it gets a plain colour) was another annoyance. Westciv’s gradient generator was a good helper for that.
• Another interesting bug I found was that you cannot position things absolutely inside a BUTTON element in Firefox. Originally I had the button link as a button but gave up soon enough – see the example here.

All in all I love the idea of the open web and HTML5 leading the way into the future but I am seeing us wasting a lot of time trying to make things work cross-browser and if the final result for the end user is not much better then it will be hard to convince our bosses that the effort is worth the time and money.

What we need for that first and foremost are good examples and not “look what we can do” tutorials that neither use HTML5 nor CSS3 but jQuery to simulate the lot whilst we still call it “HTML5 solutions”.

Damn, life is good as a developer right now.

• The Guardian opened their data platform to the world and also built a nice explorer for the information
• Google IO brought us a boatload of goodies:

** We finally have an open video format with WebM which is a container based on Matroska with VP8 as the video and Vorbis for audio. It is backed by Opera, Mozilla and Google amongst other huge players. IE9 says it will support it with a plugin and Safari seems to be supporting it via a Quicktime plugin.

** Google released a library to make it easier to embed web fonts and also host quite a bunch of fonts for easy embedding – preliminary reports by friends of mine state that they look amazing on Mac but very bac on PC - can you verify this?

** Google Latitude now has an API but it also shows some problems

** Google also released BigQuery which is a REST API to analyse data in Google Storage. One of the uses they showed is the Prediction API which does natural language analysis and could become a contender for Open Calais.

** AppEngine got some good updates including a Comet API

** Android got a major update – it now runs the superfast V8 engine, you will have access to accelerometer and camera with a JavaScript API and you can send applications to the phone from computers via the cloud. Makes me want to kill the guy who dropped my Nexus One and hope HTC will be quick in repairing it.

• Divya Manian has a great post pointing out some of the hypocrisy in the web development conference world when it comes to diversity. We complain about not enough female speakers but where are the speakers that are not from English speaking or influenced countries?
• Etsy lets us peek under the hood of their code deployment practices – save the princess
• Jo Walsh has some good info on Using Ordnance Survey Open Data

When I went to California last I was lucky enough to meet some friends from Google for lunch at their office and as a surprise on the way out I got a Nexus One as a present:

I loved it immediately. It is a very slick phone with a real “developer touch”. This means:

• To get data on or off it I connect it to a USB port and copy the stuff – no need to fire up some “Media Explorer” or iTunes.
• The handling was wonderful – even though I never had a touch phone before I had no issues with it at all (except when I tried to type German SMS with the English dictionary on)
• The geolocation stuff, Google Goggles, Google Maps, Point by Point navigation and all the other stuff that only runs on this platform beat the pants off the iPhone (at least for me)
• The camera is amazing and the display is crisp as can be

That is until yesterday night. When I gave the phone to someone at the Future of Web Design after party to have a look at it he dropped it. I didn’t check and just pocketed it and this morning I found the display to look like this:

It has a bit of a Eastman Colour vibe to it but makes it impossible to use. Funnily enough the touch stuff still works perfectly but outside of artificial light you cannot see anything on it any longer.

Now I am busted:

• Where can I get a free Nexus One repaired in the UK? This is a no contract phone.
• What can I do about my Jewels and Layar addiction?

It is a great example how being a very, very early adopter can bite you in the bum if something as simple as gravity messes with you :(.