TTMMHTM:How web sites work, how many people see them, open data and lots of accessibility and “girly” stuff

I am right now sitting at Heathrow Terminal 5 in London on my way outbound to a two week stint in the Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale/Mountain View) to meet with the US team. And here are the things that made me happy this morning:

• Ian Pouncey continues to put together good thought-pieces on accessibility with Web Accessibility Myths.
• Robert O’Callahan talks Video, Freedom and Mozilla and debunks some H264 myths.
• In case you feel like beeping, there is a cool online Morse Code translator
• The back side of a Mozilla business card finally reveals the truth about how websites work – I knew that there were monkeys and gerbils involved!
• The Royal Pingdom has a good roundup of The Internet 2009 in numbers – guess where most of the Internet users are from?
• Vimeo has a new HTML5 video player and you can kick its tyres.
• Liz Danzico wrote a wonderful piece called confidence for good on how making a leap of faith in your career is sometimes very necessary.
• UK House Prices, my entry to the data.gov.uk application showcase went down really well on the day of the release and got about 5000 hits on the first day. Now to pester the UK government to do more YQL and expect less SPARQL.
• Constructing a POUR web site has some very solid advice on how to build a good web site. I am tired of people shoe-horning new acronyms though. POSH was a bad idea, so was HIJAX. Not because of what they stand for but for giving a way out. Hearing sentences like “yeah the solution is bad now, but we will go for a POSH one soon” or “this will be redesign with HIJAX in mind at a later stage” make me want to scream – an I heard both several times.
• We have a winner of most inappropriate prank in a job ad – hands-down.
• ReadWriteWeb have a good open thread on Sexy Girls, Smart Women and Tech (and I am already looking forward to the referrers linking to this link)
• How programmers of different languages view each other and How a common LISP programmer views users of other languages both have poster potential for the office.

Tags: 2009, accessibility, ad, coding, confidence, datagovuk, geeks, h264, html5, internet, job, lisp, ogg, opendata, pour, prank, sexygirls, smartwomen, statistics, ukhouseprices, video, wcag2