Today PPK came to visit in our office in Covent Garden, London to talk to us about his research into mobile browsers and testing on
mobile devices.

I took the chance to take him out to lunch afterwards and have a quick chat about his findings, what he thinks about the usage of libraries, what we can do to advocate web standards better and many other things we thought necessary to discuss. Some of the things were interesting to mull over, for example if it really makes sense to test browser performance by creating 5000 LI elements or using every JS library in a single document embedded in IFRAMES.

Here’s the half hour open interview for you to listen:

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/InterviewWithPpkAboutMobileWebDevelopment/InterviewingPpkAboutMobileResearchWebStandardsAndLibraries.mp3]

Alternatively go to the archive.org site to download the audio for your mp3 player

Sadly enough Audacity failed me and some of the interview got lost, but I thoroughly enjoyed chatting abot these topics and will continue doing these kind of quick interviews whenever someone comes over to talk.

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

Work and colleagues – education + accessibility

• Inspiring University students to have a go at hacking and using APIs to build apps that make a change in their lives
• Friend and associate Dirk Ginader publishing his blog post on the YDN blog about Making the Yahoo Currency Converter Screen Reader accessible

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

• The State of Georgia’s Department of Revenue asking people to download Adobe Reader in a PDF file – to be fair, it might be that version 8 is needed – still not the best place to ask
• Jay’s friends – a way to announce friends that got made redundant and get them a new job.
• How to learn any language in three months – domo arregato