Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘humour’

Another amazingly useful web site: http://ismycomputeron.com

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Sometimes you come across web services that are so amazingly useful, you wonder why nobody has done it before. One of those is Is my computer on? sent to me this morning by Tomas Caspers.

While the usefulness of the service is indisputable the lack of RSS feed or API is actually annoying (let’s not discuss the HTML quality of the site, I am sure this is because of performance reasons as it is the case with other big players). Likeminded web dwellers like Dion Almaer bemoaned the same fact which is why I’ve taken matters into my own hand and used YQL to turn this service into a JSON API:


http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fismycomputeron.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D’%2F%2Fcenter%2Ffont%2Ftext()’&format=json&callback=isiton

This version wraps the resulting data (in my case “yes”) in a JSON object and calls the isiton() method. You can try it out for yourself.

If you want to change this simply rename isiton at the end of the url to your function name of choice. If you use alert() as the function name you could even turn this into a useful bookmarklet.

Of course you should never forget to support the library followers if you have a system like that and Mattias Hising came quickly to the rescue and built the system as a jQuery plugin.

Flickr’s secret revealed!

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

Dan Coulter spilled the beans on the developer list:

On Feb 12, 2008 1:53 AM, {removed} <{also}@{removed}.com> wrote:
Can some one tell me , in which Progaming language has flickr been
developed
PHP
and can we get the clone
Highly unlikely
how can we develop the same application line this in php.......
Hire a world class team and pay them a crapload of money.

The bastard :)