Links from 2009

"Here’s a manifesto. Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble." [this is good]

Yahoo folk providing accessibility info.

It [enables] all iPhones and iPod touches with the Remote app installed to find your iTunes Library. When those guests set your library of the source, they can then pick any song from your library to play next. If you’re at a large party with dozens of iPhones, the next song can be crowd-sourced by popular vote.

Not a bad start.

Last.fm – the Blog · Introducing Boffin: Last.fm’s music knowledge meets your local mp3 collection

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could tune into your local music like you do with Last.fm radio?” Yes. Yes it would.

A Django application that automates CSS/JavaScript compression and helps in making delivery of static media more efficient

The world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Missions might include giving someone your favorite book, inviting a friend for drinks, or buying a friend some chocolate.

Warp20 (Vote)

“Vote for your favourite ever Warp tracks here. Your top 10 (by different artists) will combine with our top 10 to make a historic album for release this Autumn.”

"The Guardian launched its 'Open Platform' with APIs for all of its content and a sets of data collected by its editors." Brave. Ace.

In 2009, I challenge you to stop using the web as just another distribution platform.

Dalston music fest, 16th & 17th April 2009.

Well done, everyone.

A temporary social space that can be setup anywhere from a club night to a squatted art space. We build the ultimate retro gaming area, working with whatever space we have from single monitor setups to multiple projected screens and full size arcade machines.

Using Flickr machine tags you can now tag your photos on Flickr to refer to specific MusicBrainz entities.

Digital had been seeping into our world for about three years and the Napster effect was apparent. Being a small company and working directly with artists, we could really hear and see what was starting to happen. It was a realization that fighting it wouldn’t work; understanding it and being able to grow it was what was going to work. It was a psychological shift for us.

Makes me wish I was a hero. "A collaborative rescue team management tool to record and analyse rescue operations. Instead of archiving information as paperwork, we act as a platform, generating real-time profiles of members, available resources, and activities. Decisions for Heroes uses this data to deliver live and intelligent information to the field."

Music by On Rails.

Direcected by flippers

Featured at Geek Pop.

You think of people who do know CSS as designers, not giving any credit to the engineering prowess required to tame the stylesheet of a multinational corporation because (self-taught as they are) most true front-end gurus don’t speak the same language as you do. Their skill appears to be a black-art, some kind of magic, or internalized instinct for browser flaws. This is your guess anyway, because you simply can’t communicate with them.

When you care about performance, or SEO (or just doing a good job as web dev) an interesting data point is the ratio of page content vs. the markup used to present this content. Or... how much crap we put in HTML in order to present what the users want to see - the content.

Object Oriented CSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front end code. It adds much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can participate in writing beautiful websites.

Automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-like experience when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch.

While a lot of Tabs-Scripts claim to be accessible it turns out, most of them are really not.

When I hear a friend talking about learning Cappucino I react as if they’ve been tricked out of their money by a con-artist on a street corner. I think they’ve been conned out of true knowledge, duped down the wrong path. “Don’t be like those schmucks learning HTML! Just take these magic beans!”.

Really don't like these grid-based frameworks but there's some useful general info on grids here.

"Use it like an egg timer or a count down timer." Clever URLs.

Bandcamp now does download codes. Ace. "Not just any download codes, mind you, but the sort you can email to your fans OR zap over to Moo for print-on-demand, great looking, and dirt cheap physical download cards."

The Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI) project was developed to provide a central information source to learn about accessibility in mobile devices.

Marinated herring on char-grilled toast, served with cucumber and mint sour cream.

A traditional Scottish soup originating from a little fishing village called Cullen on the Moray Firth in Scotland. Skink is another word for soup.

A traditional Orkadian mix of potatoes and turnips that's traditionally served with haggis.

Indulgent. Possibly dangerous.

Morphs made by fans of Tony Hart form a flash mob of tiny plasticine figures on the ground outside the Tate Modern

This is the time for business model transformation. Many product categories are not giving them the margins/volume they needed to support a growth strategy. Blueray DVDs and flat screen TVs cannot power Best Buy forward, the future is not in gadgets, it is in service innovation.

User Interface (UI) Library for Safari development on iPhone

Straw and co blocked the release of the minutes, claiming that to actually let us know what was going on would set a dangerous precedent that would harm good government. Ministers wouldn't speak frankly at cabinet meetings if they felt their discussions would be subjected to the sort of scrutiny that, say, our every waking move is.

Useful for justifying/explaining.