Monday I was in Madrid for a developer evening at ETSI Telecomunicacion. The hosting university had a very cool auditorium, but what really amazed me was that it is in part a museum for telecommunication which means the whole building was full of old comms hardware – something I really dig.

Anyways, my talk for the developer evening was a deep-dive into Yahoo Placemaker, YQL and YUI. Here are the slides:

You can also listen to the audio recording of the talk hosted on archive.org.

If you want to see the video of the talk (which uses Isabel, the university’s conferencing system) you can check the recording on the university web site.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Google’s Alex Russel released Chrome Frame, a way to embed Google Chrome into any Internet Explorer 6 as a plugin without having to uninstall the old browser. As explained in the more technical details article it is implemented as a Browser Helper Object, uses IE’s cookies, history and password-remembering, includes the WebKit developer tools and appends ‘chromeframe’ to the regular IE user agent string. All in all the feedback from the tech scene is very positive but there are also accessbility concerns about the solution.
• The latest nightlies of Safari and Firefox now include WebGL and that will mean there’s some cool 3D browser apps ahead. Check out the video showing a Spore creature inside the browser.
• MixCloud is a service that could become the YouTube for radio, shame there’s no API yet
• Vitamin D is an interesting technology to automatically recognise objects in videos. Check the report for details.
• JSNES is a JavaScript simulator for NES roms – oldschool gaming overload.
• Majx-JS is trying to become a JavaScript library to inject accessibility enhancements into jQuery and other libraries
• The FCC wants your help to understand and forge the internet of the future at Open Internet .gov
• Here’s quite a detailed Internet Explorer 6 bug fixing cheat sheet.
• Brad Neuberg released quite a cool Video introduction to HTML 5
• Six revisions has some very interesting infographics about the web.
• Steve Smith has a fix for Safari’s fat text rendering in Snow Leopard
• PostBin is a shorturl provider that logs POST requests to the URL to allow you to debug webhooks.
• Luke Wroblewski wrote a nice write-up about the design process and methodology at Facebook.
• Marco Zehe asks for participation in a fact finding exercise about the current state of Firefox accessibility on Mac

Avast! Saturday is the annual talk like a pirate day and my colleague Tom Croucher has done a tremendous job to create a YQL solution for translation of English to Pirate

In essence he used YQL to store a translation data set and allows us to alter it using the update and storage parts of YQL. He has come up with a few great things to use for talk like a pirate day:

A script to include into any page that will automatically convert it to pirate speak:

A bookmarklet to translate any web site: piratize (drag it to your links toolbar).

An open YQL table to add to the pirate dictionary.

Using this, I built the following interfaces:

• The Pirate Dictionary add-to form
• The ARRPI – an API to translate from English to Pirate
• The Pirate Translator form with tweet button

Have a great talk like a pirate day! Sadly enough I’ll be Aarrr-ing down from a plane as I am flying back to the UK on that date.

I am currently at the Ajax Experience conference in Boston, MA and yesterday I had my hour of fame giving my talk about “JavaScript and Web Services”. Here are the slides and the audio recording of my talk.

You can also check the audio recording of the talk at archive.org

In the talk I covered the change from the old web of documents and pages to a web of data, how we should liberate ourselves from browser restrictions when playing with technology and how YQL allows you to easily remix the web and use JavaScript on the command line with all kind of fancy options that you don’t have in browsers.

Resources mentioned are:

• The W3C widget spec
• PPK’s simple introduction to W3C widgets
• Yahoo’s Browser Plus
• YQL
• Using YUI widgets to display YQL data
• Displaying geolocated photos with pure JavaScript
• The YQL console
• How to turn a list of content on the web into a small page widget
• The YQL open table repository on github
• Google’s Ajax Translation API
• My competition winning translation W3C widget (needs Opera) and it’s source code on GitHub – this URL is wrong in the slides, DOH!
• Vodafone/betavine’s Widget development kit
• YQL’s open table specification
• Insert, Update and Delete in YQL
• JavaScript execute in YQL open tables
• Netflix’s open table showcasing oAuth in JavaScript

I just came back from a quick holiday (4 days offline, 810 emails and endless stuff in Google reader) so please bear with me if you sent me a message the last few days. Tomorrow I am off to the US again to go to Boston:

The actual reason of course is the Ajax Experience and I tacked a few days after the conference on to be able to visit our Yahoo offices in Cambridge and maybe come around to your company to give a brownbag session. So if you are in the area comment here, or ping me on Twitter – I am @codepo8. Tomorrow I will be in the air but from them on I am in the hotel of the conference.

Yay for east coast!

Chris