1. Playing with Yahoo Pipes for the first time. This is the UI I’ve been dreaming of for years. The data sources are bogged down with nasty RSS/ATOM semantics, but that’s mostly irrelevant. The important things:

    • Live, context-sensitive debugging. Want to know what the data looks like at a particular point in the graph? Click there. What if I change this parameter? It updates. WHY ARE PEOPLE NOT RAVING ABOUT THIS? THIS IS HUGE!
    • All parameters are programmable, but with the ability to specify defaults
    • Everything is declarative — not only textually, but visually.
    • One-click publish and deploy, with facilities to create basic UI and pre-fill it
    • Ability to clone and reuse pipes — each pipe is a module you can use in other pipes. Take someone elses pipe and view source, change it, reuse it.

    I made a Pipe to convert h-feed/h-entry markup into RSS from scratch in about 15 mins, having never used the tool before (bear in mind also that this is not a tool built for consuming mf2 data structures): Convert Microformats to RSS. The tiny feedback loop the Pipes tool provides, both in deploying, sharing and debugging, enabled Tantek Çelik to find a bug in his site’s markup.

    Again: WHY DOES NO-ONE KNOW ABOUT THIS? If it’s because processing stodgy, outdated, DRY-violating formats is its bread and butter, fair enough. Let’s rebuild this with microformats2.

  2. v0.2.0 update to php-mf2 (BREAKING CHANGES) contains lots of goodness, including

    • support for the new, safe, consistent e-* property parsing rules
    • improved API, parsing mf2 from HTML now only requires one function call
    • PSR-0 namespace update (mf2Mf2)
    • improvements to the way classic microformats are supported
    • vastly improved documentation

    Go get it now from Packagist, or try it out at pin13.net/mf2

  3. Aaron Parecki: Here are some photos from today's @playmapattack game at #realtimeconf! http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/sets/72157636700537984/

    Aaron Parecki looks like it was a success :) Feedback after using the map creation UI: the path tool is amazing for quickly filling up maps, it would be great if it had the option to automatically insert staggered higher-point points, maybe a 20 every 5 and a 30 every 15 or 20. 50s are most fun to place by hand.

  4. Chrome users: I added installation instructions for , as Google demands payment for submission to the Web App Store and makes it difficult for you to the run software you want to run. Fortunately they’re fine with you dragging+dropping the extension in. Hopefully that makes things easier!

  5. Recorded an unnamed tune yesterday + saw for the first time today = easy tune name! Lights In The Sky:

    Want to play it? Have a peek at the sheet music.

  6. Noticed the Big Tower Of Light Pollution, then a smudgy green cloud, which turned into the northern lights. They really are astonishingly beautiful.

    Watched for 30mins from Arnarhóll. Harpa and the peace tower looked pathetic in comparison to even the weakest of the shimmering curtains.