In preparation for my upcoming tech talk about Yahoo Placemaker I thought I have a bit more fun playing with the API. The main thing I wanted to create is a tool that makes it easy to either get geo content from some text as microformats or as a map to copy and paste without having to read lots of documentation.

Enter GeoMaker. In just three steps you can either get from URL to map or from text to map. If you add the site address to analyze as a URL parameter it even goes down to two steps :)

I’d love to get feedback and see how we can improve this. I’ll release the code on GitHub in case you want to host this yourself once I got some more iterations done on it.

• My cold is getting better (I was flat for two days, annoying that)
• There, I fixed it is what most of my flat looks like
• Teenager swaps iPod for Sony Walkman for a week and finds out amazing things like tapes not supporting shuffle.
• The Pirate Bay releases a video portal and runs the whole thing on HTML5 they are asking for help, of course
• Some wonderful analogies from high school essays – probably fake, but still very funny
• The data collected by the Hubble Telescope is available as datasets – if I ever understand any of that I will start doing some mashups
• If ever you think you are the weirdest person on the web, check out the man trying to find his goddess
• “Loose Tweets sink fleets!” – a collection of nice, updated WW2 propaganda posters
• How about animated JPEG
• Google’s best PHP practices when it comes to performance are getting quite some flak from the PHP community this is good. Especially when Google take the info and upgrade the docs quickly.
• There’s a complaint that you need to use two hands to turn on the private (porn) mode in Firefox. True, this can’t be in alignment of the use case.
• An interesting survey showing the tech industry hot spots in the US
• A pretty cool viral video by Samsung how to make a camera vanish (and the solution to the riddle)

Jakob Nielsen just posted on alertbox that we should stop password masking (you know, showing asterisks or dots instead of showing the password while the user types it in.

His argument is the following:

Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users’ shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn’t even protect fully against snoopers.
More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.

Which makes me wonder when was the last time that Mr.Nielsen left his house to communicate with the real world. As a frequent traveller I am constantly seeing people logging into web sites in hotel lobbies (when they check in for their flight for example and enter their bonus miles account details), in Internet Cafes or when they use their laptop in a public space. While it is harder to spot the keyboard (especially with fast typers) there is no problem whatsover looking over their shoulder or – using my 10x optical zoom camera – even spot what they enter on the screen from across the room.

However, password masking is not a 100% security measure but anyone working in security promising you a 100% security is nobody you should trust anyways.

I do agree though that password masking can be very annoying on a mobile device, as is entering any form (my favourite bugbear is Opera Mini Uppercasing the first word I enter in any text field – no this is my user name, not a sentence).

As I am changing my passwords every few weeks I do get confused from time to time, too, which is why I have written myself a GreaseMonkey script that adds a link to any password field that allows me to toggle its display:

This, in my book, should be a standard feature of browsers (or a convention we should start to follow when we design forms) – not showing sensitive information as readable text on a screen just because we don’t think anyone would ever watch us.

Let’s also not forget that browsers deal with an input field with the type of password differently than with one that is text. For starters browsers do not collect previously entered information and offer them as options to autofill the field – something that would be terribly dangerous for passwords.

Thinks that made me happy this morning:

• God on facebook is a wonderful parody – family friendly, too.
• A blind dog showing a sighted dog how to play catch
• My “your logic is broken” award goes to Paul Barksdale for his very confusing It’s about time Christians take a stand!” – So wait, we should abandon hate crime legislation as it counteracts freedom of speech?
• An awesome photo series of life in a Bell lab in the 60s
• Etsy has a lovely fail whale pendant
  in case you need to cement a geek relationship (also notice the fail in the name)
• GPSVisualizer has a pretty sweet geocoder interface.
• Marco Zehe has a cool report on how he used a touchscreen interface for the first time – being blind
• A californian winery are looking to hire a social media expert. My vote goes for my friend Hugh, and it would be win if you could vote for him, too
• Folding design has a great solution for making the UK power plug less awkward
• If you are going to have a baby, make it a badass baby with this Klingon cradle

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:

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.