Things that made me happy this morning

• I’m working on a handbook for developer evangelists (the outline is here) and I am 7000 words in – after 2 days of writing.
• Billboard have released an API which gets you access to all kind of music charts. I’d love to mash that up with the Spotify API, but I won’t buy a premium account just to do some hacking.
• EtherPad is a very cool tool for collaborative text editing. Much like SubEthaEdit for the web – or like Bespin of course
• Vanish is an solution to create web content that self destructs after a certain time (much like these messages in the spy movies).
• Hey IT is a campaign to tell your IT department just how much IE6 makes kitty cry.
• phMagick is not a skin conditioner, but a pretty cool PHP wrapper for imageMagick to convert images, add drop shadows and so on. CSS3 for all browsers!
• JSON Formatter is a validation and pretty printing tool for JSON.
• There is a pretty sweet isometric timeline animation of the international space station at USA Today (you know, the newspaper you always stumble over when you leave hotel rooms)
• Fancy Fast Food shows you how you can turn fast food into very pretty meals
• 10 historical software bugs with disastrous consequences teaches us to fix our code.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The source code of the moon landing control programs has been released as open source. Now get soldering and build the hardware in Arduino. I also checked the code and could not find a fake call!
• MapQuest released their driving directions web service
• AnythingZoomer is a jQuery script that provides you with a little lens to zoom parts of the screen. Nothing new, but potentially useful.
• Open a banana like a monkey is one of those videos that makes you go “why did I do it wrong my whole life?”
• Apparently rounded corners are all the rage in remedy packages – Apple has a lot to answer for, but I like it.
• Moddims is an Apache module that uses ImageMagick to convert pictures on the fly. Great for a thumbnail API.
• Make magazine has a cool EeePC hardware notifier hack that embeds an LED into the casing which flashes in different colours depending on you getting an IM, an email or a Tweet.
• IBM has a long and detailed article on using jQuery with JSON-P
• Opera’s Hallvord shows us the most expensive line of JavaScript ever

• Annathered’s Bento tips complete with gems like how to make a radish Mario mushroom
• Klaus Komenda has another great blog post, this time explaining the transition from YUI2 to YUI3 as a developer
• Warcraft explained with Super Mario – for us older people
• Paypal started a developer outreach blog and published a very nice interview with me on the topic of accessibility – not sure why it is https though
• MIT has some very interesting research on wearable computers – soon you might me able to dial a number in your palm without the mobile
• Threadless now started to do customizable cakes (well as a contest – not overnight)
• AMEE released realtime carbon showing how much every unit of electricity in the UK currently costs us in CO₂
• A very detailed look into the etymology of computer game character names dives into hitherto unknown depths of geekdom.
• A lovely (but NSFW because of swearing) typographical animation of the famous Pulp Fiction ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like’ speech

Over the course of the weekend I finished polishing GeoMaker and uploaded the source to GitHub. So now you can use GeoMaker or its API and also host them on your own server.

The new features include:

• Embedding of Geo microformats into a text when originally you wanted to analyse a text and intermediate text display.
• Turning RSS feeds into maps (much like RSS2Map) with an intermediate filtering step
• Total re-code (includes instead of one massive chunk, configuration and labels file)
• Help and About and Developer docs

See the changes in action in the following screencast (the design of the RSS preview has changed since – more obvious now):

The next steps will be to allow for multiple map providers. Got any other ideas?

• Download GeoMaker on GitHub
• Visit GeoMaker

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Keep your meetings interesting with the Meeting Money Ticker
• The iPhone 3.0 firmware release now allows us to access the JavaScript Geolocation API
• A surprisingly thorough article on TechCrunch about the Twitter crack some time ago
• An interesting story about a husband finding the photo of his wife as a hot single in his area in a Facebook advertisement – better check how your photos are used.
• A very thorough decision chart on whether to use a Flash intro or not
• A great new web site Geekspeakr tries a very nice thing – “Connecting tech women speakers with event organisers”.
• Bedjumping is something I have thought of many a time on my travels, too
• If you want to develop for the palm pre – here are some Palm Pre PSD design stencils
• Pretty cool robots recycled from scrap metal
• Douglas Coupland is coming to London to read from Generation X.
• Runpee is a web site and now iPhone app that tells you when you can take a break in a movie to use the toilet – and tells you the plot parts you miss. Also wait for the logo animation.
• Flickery seems to be a great replacement for the Flickr uploadr.