The days are getting shorter, and I did a bunch of walking around NYC today. But as it started getting dark around 5:30PM, and with the forecast turning to rain for the next few days, I decided to squeeze in a half-ride.

The map. 31 minutes. 5.01 miles.

Up to 46th St and back.

Lots of riders, runners, bladers and pedestrians on the trail.

I need some bright clothing and lights on my bike.

Feeling gooood.

 10/11/2010; 6:24:46 PM.   .

Disclaimer: Hackathons are good, and the people who run them are great. This is not meant to reflect negatively on any of these fine events or people.

At the start of a hackathon, there's a tradition of having people get up and pitch their APIs as possible starting points for projects. These are almost always corporate APIs.

But there are lots of formats and protocols that are created in open and non-commercial ways, and there are no corporations whose mission it is to promote them. As a result they are almost never pitched at hackathons, and hacks have a distinctive corporate flavor.

This is unfortunate because usually the most fertile APIs are the ones no one owns. The ones owned by corporations tend to have big missing bits of functionality that represent the corporate hope to have a business model.

So in the future, get some community people up their pitching from passion more than profit. It'll make your event even more interesting, in my humble opinion.

Bonus: A total of 11 ideas for hacks, all building on (or creating) open non-corporate APIs.

 10/11/2010; 9:54:15 AM.   .

My JSON code is new, so there were a couple of problems.

1. I wasn't properly encoding double-quotes.

2. If a list had scalars it wasn't outputting them correctly.

Here's an example of a JSON query that caught both errors.

I've run it through JSONLint, and it says it's valid.

Thanks to Eric Kidd for both reports, perfectly documented.

 10/11/2010; 8:59:07 AM.   .