I just got pinged by Dan Morris of the BBC on Facebook (yeah it is up again) about a really cool event in London on the 22nd of August:

YOUNG REWIRED STATE
Hack the Government, 22-23 August @ Google.

THE SKINNY

Young Rewired State is a free two-day hackday for young people work in
small teams to create software hacks using open Government data.

Government will be there and listening to what you have to say and
show. Groups will present at the end of the event to press, web &
business judges, and representatives from Government – There will be
prizes!

WHEN & WHERE

22-23 August at the Google offices in London.

If you want, you can bring your parent along with you, we’ll promise
to keep them busy while you hack. Support is available for travel and
overnight stay for you if you need it.

The date is getting close now so please signup now if you’re
interested in attending!

HOW GEEKY?

We’re expecting a mix of technical ability, so chances are you’ll fit
in just fine. So, whether you just dabble with HTML or dream in
machine code, this event is for definitely for you!

We have the largest set of open Government data going, all available
for you to use. Experienced hacker mentors will be assigned to groups,
and can help as much or as little as you need.

INFO & SIGNUP

http://rewiredstate.org/young

Pass it on!

Chris

In case you wondered why there is a bit of a lull from me on the internets right now (even before the Twitter DDOS), I am right now in Sunnyvale, California where I attended the iPhoneDevCamp and now got bogged down in team meetings and internal trainings. I feel that I am much less effective in the US because a) I am driving in a car and not in public transport where I can use a laptop and b) cubicles stop people talking to each other – I hate these things.

I am flying back across the pond tomorrow to go to Frankfurt to attend a Web Brunch and speak about mashups and YQL at the WebMontag. I then get a day to go to London, switch suitcases and fly off to Toronto, Canada to speak at the Domain Convergence.

There are some more things in the making, so bear with me :)

Chris

This morning I found this wonderful blog post that shows what happens when you run the “never gonna give you up” aka. RickRoll lyrics through an automated translation tool and back into English.

This has been a classic time waster using Babelfish in the past for me and I thought we could knock it up a notch and used YQL and the Google Translation API to automate this process.

Check out Rickrollwhisper to see the results.

Google Translate is one of the Open Data Tables built by the outside community for YQL and you can use it simply by providing a source text and the language to translate to:

select * from google.translate where q="this is a test" and target="de";

Try it out for yourself or see it in the console.

The result is the text as a translatedText element:

true



185
178
2426


Dies ist ein Test

Using this, I simply took an array of supported languages and took a random one each time I translated the lyrics:

$lyrics = "We're no strangers to love,
[…]
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling,
Gotta make you understand";

$target = getlanguage();
$t = getstuff($lyrics,$target);
$trans1 = '
'.$t.'
'.
'
Language: '.$target.'
';
$target2 = $target;
while($target2 == $target){
$target2 = getlanguage();
}
$t = getstuff($t,$target2);
$trans2 = '
'.$t.'
'.
'
Language: '.$target2.'
';
$result = getstuff($t,'en');

function getlanguage(){
$languages = array('it','nl','fr','de','sv','pl','ro');
return $languages[rand(0,sizeof($languages)-1)];
}

function getstuff($text,$target){
$root = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?env='.
'http%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltables.env&format=json&q=';
$yql = 'select * from google.translate where q="'.$text.'"'.
' and target="'.$target.'"';
$url = $root.urlencode($yql);
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer)){
return 'Error retrieving data, please try later.';
} else {
$json = json_decode($buffer);
$result = $json->query->results->translatedText;
return $result;
}
}

Maybe I find the time to create the multitranslate as an open table to make this more generic.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• I finished a new chapter for the Developer Evangelism Handbook – dealing with your own company
• Google has a safe browsing API that allows you to tap into their malware and spyware database. Sadly enough there is no search or match function – only load a full list of MD5 hashes – and the docs are not the easiest to understand.
• At a recent State Department Town Hall Meeting, one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers asked why IE6 was still mandated. Attagirl, more of this – challenge the laziness.
• You can browse WordNet – the database that Google’s AdSense content matching was based on
• Simon Whatley has 10 commandments of social media
• A nice explanation of rounded corners with CSS3 although it is more of a “here’s how to do it in Firefox and Safari”.
• Apparently you can milk hamsters – there is even a book about it.
• A splendid Wall-E/Star Wars photo mashup from Worth1000
• Space War is a cute little game for the iPhone in CSS/JS/HTML/
• Another nice colourblindness simulator – please, do not add another badge, even if you succeed the test.
• OER commons is a great resource for free teaching and learning content
• Some very sweet Eco friendly packaging concepts

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Save BOSS shows that a good community fights for its survival.
• Smashing magazine has a very short and concise introduction to JavaScript scope – I am missing module patterns though – would have been more useful than explaining how libraries do it.
• A great video of Bobby McFerrin showing at the world science festival that the pentatonic scale is innate knowledge to people – regardless of their cultural background.
• En-code is a very cool online tool to encode code and mask invalid characters.
• A collection of nice JavaScript driven animations and tutorials how to do them
• Vermont Scientists are trying to measure happiness using blogs and twitter as sources. They’re building a device to do so called a “Hedonometer”. Well, I am doing my bit
• A good geek explanation of Chinese characters
• Apparently you can create an online shop with Google checkout in 5 minutes haven’t tried that yet, but let’s give it a go
• Fontplore is an interface to walk through different fonts with a minority report feel to it.
• Give a geek WiiFit and he’ll try to game it, not game with it – check out what happens if you alternately play a Wii Fit character with two people with a weight difference of 100 pounds
• It is now easier to making image overlays in Google Maps with GGroundOverlay and GGeoXML
• The HTML5 group of the W3C has an interesting Web Database Draft for HTML5 – it is a SQL interface to data sources on the web, much like YQL but without the intermediate server.