Christian Heilmann

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TTMMHTM:Macs, IE6, hacker spaces, pixar vs. dreamworks and travel nightmares

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning:

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

Man gets electrocuted by his computer but fails to acknowledge it as it is a mac

New API limit policy for Yahoo made easier with the rate limit calculator

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

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:

API limit calculator

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




TTMMHTM: Design definition, my little pony, uriplay and a hidden wine cellar full of win

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

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

Accessible web applications – my part of the panel at the European Accessibility Forum

Monday, March 30th, 2009

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.

TTMMHTM: Reflows, real tetris, enabling design, swf checking and micnosing

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Marco Zehe, Micnosed