Things that made me happy this morning:

• Pestering my colleagues in the US late last night made sure that we have YQL tables for Google Buzz
• In case you ever go to Bergen, Norway, beware the Scuba Divers in the street
• Mashable has a nice infographic of the state of the internet
• Safer Internet is a Europe-wide campaign to tell kids about the dangers of going online – very cool videos. I especially like the golden rules of communication (but notice the URI fail)
• Minify is PHP5 script to, err minify scripts
• Phishing with Google wave shows a potential attack vector
• 12 reasons why gay marriage should be illegal has some very logical points, like “Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.”
• Anatoly Zenkov has a cool mouse tracking utility that records what you with your mouse in the background and creates an overlay image.
• Twilio now has a SMS API

Yesterday Johan Bouveng challenged me on Facebook with another brain teaser. Johan had found a nice resource for weather forecasts for airports. The data came back in TAF or METAR formats and he already had a parser for this (thank f*** – what a mess these formats). Now, what he wanted to have is an API to get the weather forecast data from the following resources:

• http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/taf/stations/
• http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/

Using YQL and YQL execute this was pretty easy. All I had to do was to write an open table that reads the correct file.

// check if taf or metar was requested or return an error

if(datatype  'taf' || datatype  ‘metar’){

var returnobj,url;


	
// get the correct url using the airport ID and format

if(datatype==’metar’){

url = ‘http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/’ +

‘metar/stations/’ + airportid + ‘.TXT’

} else {

url = ‘http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/’+

‘taf/stations/’ + airportid +’.TXT’;

}

	
// do a REST call and get the response back

var out = y.rest(url).get().response;

	
// if there is no data returned, return an error.

if(out == ‘’){

returnobj = Airport {airportid} not found.;

	
// otherwise return the data in the TXT file

} else {

returnobj = {out};

}
	
} else{

// error condition for wrong datatype

returnobj = Datatype must be either taf or metar.;

}

	
// give back the data to YQL

response.object = returnobj;

Having done this you can now use it as a table in YQL:

use “http://isithackday.com/hacks/airportweather/airportweather.xml” as aw;

select * from aw where airportid=”AAXX” and datatype=”taf”;

As you can see, you don’t have to be a genius to build your own API :)