Mr. Speaker

Oh if HTML could talk, the stories it would tell. Probably not all nice stories mind you. Through no fault of its own, poor old HTML has been the victim of many a harsh word from developers over the years.

But slowly people are learning who the real culprits are, and are using HTML to vent such frustrations.

It does feel good to vent-via-code I must say, and it certainly made me chuckle to notice a particularly nasty ID-based outburst from the coders at www.last.fm:

<div id="widget" style="display: none;">
  <input id="safariIsWank" type="hidden" value="" />
</div>

Maybe a bit harsh on ol’ Safari - but it would have been satisfying to type.

Tags: developers, HTML, Safari, Last.Fm

I’ve been running this-here blog for some years now, and I thought I’d share something interesting I’ve noticed: for a post to get 1 comment, it must first be viewed by 100 people. Pretty much EXACTLY 100. For 2 comments? 200 page views. 3 comments? You guessed it.

It’s really weird. Every post seems to average out to 100 views per comment. I dunno why.
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Yahoo! Pipes is seriously addictive. I’ve been up all night playing with it, when I should have been out drinking with friends. Social web indeed.

Anyways, this is what I’ve come up with - the Pipe takes a Last.Fm user name, grabs the recent tracks feed, does a “content analysis” on the tracks, and uses the output of this to grab a bunch of pics from Flickr. Theeeen, I use the JSON output of this new feed and fetch it in a Greasemonkey script. The Greasemonkey script fires when you visit people on Last.Fm, and adds the images below the user’s “Recent Tracks” listings. Ok?

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Today Yahoo released an intriguing service called “Pipes”. Based on the concept of unix pipes, it allows you to filter and process RSS feed data in a chain - using a very cool web graphical user interface. The result can be spit out in a variety of formats that can then be used in your RSS reader, on your blog, in a Greasemonkey script or even as the building blocks of more complex pipes.

There is still a lot of room for improvement on the tool (the wish list of functionality grows by the second!) but it’s an awesome and inspiring start. The only major complaint from people is the lack of easy-to-understand documentation. Don’t worry though - I’ll present a step-by-step guide to get you going!

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Ok, no posts since last year, better get back to it. I have a good excuse though - I’ve been gallivanting around Japan for the last 4 or so weeks. Mostly in the awesome Okinawa prefecture (as seen in the hit movie “The Karate Kid - Part II”).

Okinawa is home to some pretty impressive stuff… Awamori, Goya, and all myriad of Spam-type ham-based products. Here’s some other groovy stuff I found around:
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Nothing like a major milestone to throw you into a whirl of nostalgic self-reflection. Today I’m 30. 30 years old. There’s no doubt about it - I’ve done the maths and it adds up. I’ve tried recounting everyday since my first memory (a huge green praying-mantis in the back yard) but there are certainly a lot of holes in there.

One thing I’ve noticed to be a recurring theme in the mesmerizing drama that is/was my life is the presence of computers. If my existence were portrayed as an art flick, you’d turn to your friend 3/4 of the way through and say “What’s with all the computers?”

In case one or more of you out there wish to produce such a film, I’ll supply some background information - so you get the details right.
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