Here’s an idea to help those people in your office move away from IE6 to realmore modern browsers.

1. Install FireFox or Opera on their machine
2. Remove the Internet Explorer icon
3. Replace the Opera or Firefox icon with the appropriate following ones
4. Tell them when there’s any confusion that “Microsoft updated their browser, it looks different now!”

Who’s with me?

Things that made me happy this morning:

Let’s start with filthy anti-propagandaa cool comic about macs:

• IE6 gets more bashings with code to crash ie
  and a lovely IE6 voodoo doll. I don’t approve of using the crash code, but it shows how messed up the rendering engine really is!
• In the future we will get our energy from hamster wheels – I knew it!
• Some stunning earth hour photos – large cities cutting down on energy for an hour, click the photos to see the transition
• There’s now a wiki on hacker spaces – co location offices for working on personal products
• Coding horror has a good article on how we can advocate for English documentation of code without being ugly american coders – I agree, I am sure my career is partly based on me not waiting for translated docs and using the English ones – sometimes with a dictionary by my side
• Someone discovered an unofficial Yahoo stocks API an “documented” it.
• A very truthful comparison of Pixar vs. Dreamworks
• Being a very busy traveller and hating pointless airport security measurements The Onion’s report on Prague’s Franz Kafka airport tickled me pink
• Wrong Tomorrow allows us to track which predictions turned out to be hokum.
• I know that a lot of people love bacon, but you can take it too far. Serioulsy, Bacon Lube ?

Today the rate limitations of Yahoo APIs has been made much easier

The access allowance to the APIs is determined by your IP. Say you have the IP of 10.37.129.255 then you calculate your access like this:

• Take the IP and remove all the dots, so 10.37.129.255 becomes 1037129255.
• Divide the result by 2009
• Divide this result by 4
• Divide this result by 1 (this is to make it round up nicely, some computers have bugs when you don’t do this!)

To make this even easier, I’ve written a calculator API:

You can use this to wrap it around the functionality you want to build:

Things that made me happy this morning:

First up a definition of design:

Design is 70% dealing with people, 3% the idea, 2% selling the idea, 2% the brief, 2% being pig headed, 1% printing, 3% eye for detail, .6% invoices, 2% coffee, .7% tracking, .1% warm glow, .6% panic, 1% 4am, .6% staring, .2% checking, 1% letting go, .8% keeping hold, .7% estimates, .3% checking, .4% proofs, .1% colour, .9% understanding, .4% marketing, 1% checking, .8% beach ball, .5% mice, .3% keynotes, .4% persuasion, .2% bragging, .5% smiling, 2% knowing when to stop.

• Cheer up the chatbot is an Eliza style experiment to simulate human intelligence. Or is it? Play with it a bit and you find there is a difference. Then click the ????
• Vodaphone have a hero shot on their homepage that shows the same idea as my geek tattoo
• The future of web apps 2009 UK tour schedule is out – I will be speaking about YQL in Cambridge
• My Little Pony gets a hollywood makeover, I find the Princess Leia Pony especially disturbing.
• eCSStender is a scripting solution by Aaron Gustafson that promises to fix CSS support and allow us to extend CSS. I will have a play with that
• People are now using Twitter to share recipes who’d have thought you can do that in 140 characters?
• URIPlay is an interesting idea to make playing, finding and annotating media on the web much easier
• You can now make paper from wombat poo.
• Malwarebytes has some good information how to keep your OS challenged computer clean – think conficker
• I want one of those awesome wine cellars in my floor – and maybe turn it into a missile silo

Last week I’ve been to Frankfurt to take part in the “European Accessibility Forum” in Frankfurt. I was one of the members of a panel discussing accessible web applications. Here are the slides which also have audio:

[slideshare id=1208652&doc=1208652]

There’s also a video of the panel available, here’s my part:

Christian Heilmann: Accessible Web Applications from Martin Kliehm on Vimeo.

Funnily enough, I can also be seen dubbed in German:

Christian Heilmann: Barrierefreie Web-Anwendungen from Martin Kliehm on Vimeo.

They’ve done a tremendous job translating what I am saying live, but I have to say that seeing me with a different German voice does my head in :)

You can watch all the conference videos coming in one by one by tracking the eafra tag on vimeo.