Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘bbc’

TTMMHTM – BBC Web animals, two very cool APIs and there’s something about the LG logo

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Things that made me happy this morning:

Young rewired state in London on the 22nd of August – hacking for teens!

Friday, August 7th, 2009

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

TTMMHTM: Meeting ticker, iPhone JavaScript Geo API, Geekspeakr, Flickr uploadr replacement and when to pee during movies

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning:

TTMMHTM: Minifig photos, insert into web, glowing BBC, Twitter jokes, accessibility inventions

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper - Widescreen by  Balakov.

Sorry BBC, my pimped Firefox made me think you did wrong

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

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:

Failed to load Yahoo libraries cannot load menus by  you.

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:

Sorry BBC, the alert() was my mistake by  you.

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.