Things that made me happy this morning:

• WinterOlympicsMedals.com is live – I was busy this weekend creating this search interface from the open data provided by the Guardian.
• The LG logo has a hidden meaning that is full of win
• The BBC have a great little test analyzing your web behaviour. Apparently I am a web ostrich, but I also buggered the game with the chocolate bars as I was tweeting instead of reading the instructions properly.
• On March the First, there will be a funeral procession for IE6 in Mountain View, CA.
• Missing kids map and Missing Adults Map are both helping to find people who have been reported missing. Both have an API - if you call read.php with the state name you get the information as XML - for example missing kids in California
• Map Compare allows you to see different maps next to each other to compare their quality
• ProForma is a paper to create 3D models rapidly from a video recording
• Unicons is a bookmarklet to add UTF-8 characters depicting images into any text field.
• If you are building a racing site there is an awesome free Formula One API available and its design puts the commercial ones to shame.

I just got pinged by Dan Morris of the BBC on Facebook (yeah it is up again) about a really cool event in London on the 22nd of August:

YOUNG REWIRED STATE
Hack the Government, 22-23 August @ Google.

THE SKINNY

Young Rewired State is a free two-day hackday for young people work in
small teams to create software hacks using open Government data.

Government will be there and listening to what you have to say and
show. Groups will present at the end of the event to press, web &
business judges, and representatives from Government – There will be
prizes!

WHEN & WHERE

22-23 August at the Google offices in London.

If you want, you can bring your parent along with you, we’ll promise
to keep them busy while you hack. Support is available for travel and
overnight stay for you if you need it.

The date is getting close now so please signup now if you’re
interested in attending!

HOW GEEKY?

We’re expecting a mix of technical ability, so chances are you’ll fit
in just fine. So, whether you just dabble with HTML or dream in
machine code, this event is for definitely for you!

We have the largest set of open Government data going, all available
for you to use. Experienced hacker mentors will be assigned to groups,
and can help as much or as little as you need.

INFO & SIGNUP

http://rewiredstate.org/young

Pass it on!

Chris

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.

• A great flickr collection of Lego Minifig re-enactments of classic photos
• The w3c showing some very dry twitter humour
• How to fake time travel using twitter
• Gez Lemon shows how to create accessible drag and drop using ARIA.
• YQL is now not only read but also insert,update and delete.
• A great but also very graphic video and campaign about Motor Neurone Disease – MND
• The BBC finally released their JavaScript library Glow as open source.
• Slickmap is a CSS to show sitemaps in a very nice fashion.
• A proposal for Anti paparazzi clothes and accessories
• A Nice tongue-in-cheek minimal CSS framework
• A proposal by Yahoo to open source one of our Apache mods – geared for high traffic sites
• SoundAmp – an application for the iPhone turns the device into something of a hearing -aid. Whilst this does not really help the hard of hearing I love that somebody thought about using the microphone of the iPhone as an input and thought about accessibility.
• A set of Lovely social media icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s an interesting example of me being a typical developer. This morning I checked a news piece of Danger Mouse sticking it to EMI by releasing their album as a blank CDR and got an alert() on the BBC site:

As you can see the alert clearly states that it comes from the BBC site – a nice anti-phishing feature that browsers added in the last few years.

I was confused, first and foremost because the BBC has their own library “Glow” which is yet to be released as open source and secondly as there are no menus on the page that are JavaScript or Yahoo dependent. Furthermore I was amazed to see the BBC to be as unprofessional as using an alert in a live site.

As BBC JavaScript overlord Jake Archibald rightly pointed out the alert did not come from their site or is anywhere in their code. I had looked through the numerous JavaScript includes (seriously, collate on the server, folks) in the page and couldn’t find it either.

Jake’s second comment made me aware what happened. Instead of seeking the error in my own setup I immediately thought the BBC messed up (this is the typical developer bit I was talking about). The solution to the problem was easy to remember once I was aware of it.

Friday before Hack Day we had the press in the office and wanted to show them some of the hacks previously built on hack days. One of them was Dharmafly’s HackHud which is a GreaseMonkey script that injects menus at interesting keywords into the BBC site. The script was broken and Premasgar tried to quickly fix it right on the spot leaving an alert in the GM script:

My lesson learned: don’t trust alerts, even when they tell you where they come from. Your pimped browser might give you a wrong message.