I'm in the process of porting keynav to Windows. I've never programmed in Visual Studio before, but I think it's going quite well considering I've never coded for this platform.

The current total lines of code is 277. I expect it to be about this number once I'm finished.

I'm writing it using Visual C++ Express, a free version of Visual Studio. Free (after free registration). From Microsoft. Very cool :)

So far I have screen splitting working correctly. My clip code is kinda borked. After I fix that, it should be completely trivial to add mouse movement calls. Since Windows doesn't typically use sloppy focus, I think I'll add extra code to figure out what window the mouse is over and give that window focus.

I followed a webclip link out of gmail today and it dropped me off at a news story on Forbes.com. I wanted to read this story. However, I was presented with something horrific. I was presented with the results of a tragic effort that I can only presume is a scheme to show as many "punch the monkey" advertisements as possible.

What is this scheme? Well. I landed on the page. This page had two average-length paragraphs. No sooner had I finished reading the first paragraph than the page reloaded and showed me another, new piece of text.

Six seconds later. A new page.

Repeat.

Turns out Forbes.com has some sort of slideshow they try to use to display stories. To make matters worse, there are advertisements everywhere. By the time I figured out what part of the page I was supposed to be looking at, it went to the next page. Sure, you can stop the slideshow, but I only found that out afterwards.

Thanks Forbes. I almost read one of your stories.

Clicky for an example article

Thumbnail screenshot of the page follows. Enjoy the massive amount of whitespace and adspace.

Where is tastydrive.py?

It was originally available through a stored posting in del.icio.us. I took the sourcecode off, because I'm not sure what kind of badness would happen should people start using it. The usage pattern it would generate is completely different from the standard usage pattern del.icio.us receives currently. I am going to confer with some Yahoo folk to see if they care.

Why? Call an ethical hacker, call me whatever. I don't feel like having del.icio.us get bombarded with this kind of activity. It's a useful service I don't want to hinder. I'll post more tomorrow when I've had a chance to talk to some Yahoo engineers..

Lee Gomes wrote an article about how I rocked the house at Yahoo! Hack Day. This article is on the front page of the Marketing section (Page B1) of the Wall Street Journal. I'm completely speechless. Lee did me quite an honor in this feature. I am so excited and happy right now. This is awesome.

One of my favorite parts is when he writes:

A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites ("flipmeat," in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.

Hackday wasn't about demo'ing your fancy "Web 2.0" startup. It was about building an idea from the ground up in 24 hours using any of the Yahoo! APIs. To those of you who showed up at hackday and showed off your startup company: Shame on you.

There were simple hacks such as Tantek (and a lady from Instructables) 's hack which was a "send this picture as a postcard" greasemonkey extension. Built that night and demoed hours later. Or, there was Mo(sp?)'s Captain Picard mouth-puppet hack, hilarious!

Link to the article:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB115992333858981955-lMyQjAxMDE2NTA5NDkwMjQzWj.html

Special thanks to Kent Brewster giving me the URL.

I noticed that this site's up on waxy.org/links. In preparation for traffic, I have moved the site to another server that can better handle the traffic load.

Let me know if there are problems.

I finally took some time after work today to write up a good description of the keyboard screen navigation system I demoed at Hack Day. With the project page is a screencast demo. Hopefully you find it useful.

Go to the keynav project page

The way Yahoo executed this event was quite clever:

Step 1: Invite hundreds of hackers to use and abuse your web-based services APIs. Entice hackers to produce with slick prizes: 32" LCD TV from Sharp, iPods, etc.

Step 2: Have the very people who wrote those APIs on-site and available for questioning. This proved extremely useful, says Tantek Celik, who consulted Yahoo Mail API developer(s) while working on his hack. In the process, Tantek's team ended up doing real testing of the API and hopefully was able to help the API dev-team improve its service.

Step 3: Profit?!

I think the attraction for both earning social merit amongst peers and possibly earning yourself a shiny new Sharp LCD TV was more than enough to help guide the brainstorming process. That is, Yahoo Mail team gave away a prize for the best hack using Yahoo Mail. Flickr did the same, as did other Yahoo groups.

Neat.