Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘hackday’

TTMHHTM: Uni Hack Day, accessibility wins, out with the Bush and Testpilot

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

There are so many things in my daily feed that made me happy today, I had to categorise them:

Work and colleagues – education + accessibility

That new fella in the white house

  • Bush street in San Francisco renamed to Obama Street – I love this city and its people
  • Finding out that the new whitehouse.gov is licensed Creative Commons
    bq. Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Geek stuff

  • The elecronic playground is a web site dedicated to listing cameos of arcade machines and consoles in film and TV
  • YouTube Street Fighter – another YouTube annotations game/hack. Let’s hope this one stays up, not like the Laserdisc Dragon’s Lair walkthrough.

Open source good news and things

  • Mozilla Labs going on with Test Pilot – a usability testing platform in Mozilla that will analyze user’s behaviours and publish the findings. No matter how this works out the logo is full of win and I had a great time at the last Mozilla Labs monthly meetup. If you are in the Valley, make sure to visit them!
  • Crowbar – a powerful screen scraping library based on Mozilla used for rendering output before converting it (and a cool bar in Tottenham Court Road in London)

Misc

JavaScript countdown solution

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

This is not going to be amazing, but I had to find / write a script like that for every hackday / barcamp I attended so far. Being lazy, I just wanted to create one I can re-use later on. So here you are:

You can either use the counter directly, or right-click and save it for local use. The look and feel is all in the CSS, yo u can set some of the preferences in the counter interface and there are several configuration settings you can change:


var cfg = {
displayID:’display’, // element to show the seconds
startButtonID:’c’, // start button ID
pauseButtonID:’p’, // pause button ID
finalClass:’final’, // class to add when final coutdown is reached
overClass:’over’, // class to add when the time is over
initialText:{
value:’2:00’,
label:’Initial Text’
},
seconds:{
value:2*60,
label:’Time in Seconds’
},
finalCountdown:{
value:30,
label:’Time when the warning starts’
},
pauseLabel:{
value:’pause’,
label:’Pause Text’
},
resumeLabel:{
value:’resume’,
label:’Resume Text’
}

};

Some configuration settings have values and labels, this is because of the preferences form being created from this object.

As said, nothing special, but I hope you can use it, I know I will.

It’s all about APIs these days.

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

It is quite cool to see the increase of coverage of the topic of web APIs. It is also very exciting to APIs finally evolving to work across several systems, aggregate and move from a one way stream of retrieving data to an alternative entry point for applications. How cool will it be for example to write reviews for amazon on movie or book sites? Having write APIs would allow us to leverage the knowledge of people on the web at the places they hang out rather than having to lure them into using a web app.

Anyways with this new API interest I had a triple release today: There is a podcast about APIs for .net magazine together with Jeremy Keith, Paul Hammond, Drew McLellan and hosted by Paul Boag, Ajaxian is featuring my ‘hack’ of the Slideshare RSS feed and I uploaded the presentations I gave at the University Hack Day introduction at Dundee, Scotland yesterday.

Enjoy!