I’m right now in Atlanta, Georgia and Georgia Tech for University Hack Day. Yesterday night I kicked off the one week event as my colleagues from California were delayed because of the snow situation in the US.

The presentation covers the history of hack in Yahoo, what makes a good and interesting hack and goes into explaining some of the technologies that people can use.

[slideshare id=1097476&doc=1097476]

Some people complained that the PDF is not readable on a PC, so here’s a powerpoint version of the same talk.

Things that made me happy this morning (Atlanta, GA, 6am – jetlag anyone?)

• Cracked.com has an amazingly sane 5 things you think will make you happy but won’t going through, fame, wealth and beauty amongst other things. It is true, I have an abundance of each one of them and still I have to find other things to fill this list.
• A good picture of god’s control buttons reminds me of the Farside “god at his computer”.
• There’s a good new overview site out on
• Sam” title=”“>how he brought the National Maritime Museum data into YQL using Open Tables Pullara has two cool video using Origami paper art

  
  Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.

• People found a pink dolphin – I always knew dolphin’s were gay sharks.


• Three of my ex-colleagues got together and release a lot of good things on Project Fondue including a Unix Permissions Calculator and a 40 web developers to follow according to Thinkvitamin – right now about 150 new followers came from that.
• Adding a “bleep* to songs does not only make naughty songs radio-proof, no it can also make innocent songs sound naughty. Check out the count from Sesame Street and what he bleeps all day long

• Flickr now has video for all users and video in HD – long photos win!

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Venturebeat release the ugly truth about your favourite social networks
• Matthew Somerville has a great ideas generator to use in your next pitch
• Apparently sleepwalking dogs and walls don’t mix
• An awesome mashup of crayons and pixel art
• A list of incredible conceptual designs you wish existed
• We seem to be finally getting closer to getting wireless electricity – no more carrying of lots of cables and connectors with Inductive Coupling
• Both JSONView and JSONovich display JSON nicely in Firefox – shouldn’t that be a native feature?

I just came across a mind-boggling “ghost in the machine” style problem in Firefox: if you use window.sun or function sun() in JavaScript you effectively start the Java VM. As explained in this article on doctype

There are a few “magic” properties on Mozilla’s DOMWindow interface for supporting LiveConnect that will initialize the Java plugin and all the baggage that comes with it (which, with modern Java plugins, means launching java.exe as a subprocess). Looking up these properties on the window object is all it takes.

Other properties to avoid are:

• java
• Packages
• netscape
• sun
• JavaClass
• JavaArray
• JavaMember

So if you want to make sure that the performance of your webapp doesn’t go down the tubes makes sure you avoid any of these.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Working for Lego is every kid’s dream. If you look at their ‘business cards’ you know why
• Matt Snider has information about an Apache Ant script to consolidate CSS and JavaScript in a build process – seems to be loosely connected with the work Julien Lecomte has done on the same subject
• When Mitch Haile builds his own office he doesn’t do things half-way. His office setup is impressive and bordering on the mental.
• Jane Finette of Mozilla released their community marketing guide
• The Nosh brothers have great etiquette advice what to do when someone dies during your dinner
• shlomo has a sobering thought about our lives being both empowering and pitiful