Sometimes you come across web services that are so amazingly useful, you wonder why nobody has done it before. One of those is Is my computer on? sent to me this morning by Tomas Caspers.

While the usefulness of the service is indisputable the lack of RSS feed or API is actually annoying (let’s not discuss the HTML quality of the site, I am sure this is because of performance reasons as it is the case with other big players). Likeminded web dwellers like Dion Almaer bemoaned the same fact which is why I’ve taken matters into my own hand and used YQL to turn this service into a JSON API:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fismycomputeron.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fcenter%2Ffont%2Ftext()'&format=json&callback=isiton

This version wraps the resulting data (in my case “yes”) in a JSON object and calls the isiton() method. You can try it out for yourself.

If you want to change this simply rename isiton at the end of the url to your function name of choice. If you use alert() as the function name you could even turn this into a useful bookmarklet.

Of course you should never forget to support the library followers if you have a system like that and Mattias Hising came quickly to the rescue and built the system as a jQuery plugin.

I hate having to enter all my details when I fill forms – especially when I know for a fact that I’ve entered them before. Looking at Smashing Magazine’s Twitter Avatar WordPress Plugin I got to play with the show API of twitter, which gives you user information.

For example to get my information in Twitter you can just call http://twitter.com/users/show/codepo8.xml and get all I entered. This is also available in JSON and with a callback parameter. You can also do a lookup by email, by calling http://twitter.com/users/show/show.xml?email=you@yourserver.com. Using both of these together, I thought it’d be a good idea to use this API to automatically fill forms.

I’ve created a quick proof of concept: automatically filling forms with twitter data . If you want to use the script yourself (twitterfill.js), simply add it to the page with your form and give it the right parameters in the init method. For the demo page this is:

The parameters are label, which is the text of the button, loading, which is the loading message, mailfield, which is the ID of the email field (the button will be inserted after it), and name,location and url which are the IDs of the form fields you want to fill.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• A Game that shows you your chances of winning the lottery
• A very sensible and good suggestion for public transport in London (make sure to read the reason why it was denied)
• Tetris found to be very effective in fighting trauma – I knew it still is a game full of win.
• the 7 inch vinyl is 60 years old – I still have a few at home, including the original pressing of “the message” :)
• A collection of cool billboard ads
• Remy Sharp’s HTML 5 script reminds me of IE7.js – it teaches IE HTML5
• The cool physics simulation Crayon Physics is now available as a full version – sadly enough only PC. Do want Mac Version (or maybe my HTC touch will run it?)
• Joe Clark explains the difference between captions and subtitles
• So Sari about your washing machine has some good accounts of how not to enter the India market

Somebody had to. It is life in a nutshell: you get switched on, you play and then you stop.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Andy Helms’ Dude-A-Day illustrations – Skill! (via Ethan Marcotte)
• Detailed information about the Twitter admin interface hack – “happiness” is not a good password
• Bruce Lawson giving me words of his very personal wisdom for an upcoming press interview
• Crazy Little Fingers is a keyboard locking tool that rewards your kids for playing with the keyboard – catch them young!
• An awesome industrial design hack involving pigs!
• Obama+Unicorn is an awesome Google image search term
• ...and a wonderful definition of irony