Things that made me happy this morning

• OmniDazzle is a tool for Mac that allows you to show a visual clue where your mouse pointer is. Great for live presentations of systems.
• Opera released JavaScript best practices my final article for the Opera Web Standards curriculum JavaScript section
• Seth Godin explains the two elements of a great presenter, respect from the audience and love for the audience
• The Guardian newspaper in the UK has some cool data to mash-up available for us
• The Mime on twitter – well if you haven’t got anything to say…
• Dasher is an interesting concept of an interface to quickly enter text without using a keyboard:

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used – for example, when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse; when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker); on a palmtop computer; on a wearable computer.
The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting – 29 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute.
Dasher can be used to write efficiently in any language.

Things that made me happy this morning

• A nice IP to geo location API by Rasmus Lerdorf, also check source, the docs are part of the XSLT - pretty clever idea.
• Tweetmeme released an API
• Codetalks is an awesome resource on ARIA
• Interesting images of pulp fiction characters popping out of books
• A Twitter to radio conversion hack that is interesting but I don’t quite buy the “use for blind people” angle.
• The difference of men and women explained on craigslist – warning contains the word sex!
• Urban Camouflage is a way to hide in any IKEA

To my shame I have to say that I hadn’t had time to give Mozilla’s code editor in the cloud Bespin much of an, err, spin yet.

Bespin is built by fellow Ajaxians Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith and uses all fancy new JavaScript and Canvas tricks to make editing files in a browser environment run as smoothly as possible. Fans of TextMate should have a look.
Both will come to London on Tuesday, the 10th of March to give a detailed talk about Bespin and what else is brewing in the Mozilla Developer Tools Group. The venue is not quite clear yet but I heard it’ll be in North London. To join the fun, just RSVP for the event at upcoming.

I’ll be freshly back from the US so I will be tired while I am there, but it still should be good fun.

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!