I recently became a twitter user, and I immediately got addicted. I really have the sensation that twitter is extremely powerful, even if I still don’t exactly know how. So, while I think a little more about what can I do with it (as tool/platform for my job, I mean), here some fun things you can do with the 140 chars of a tweet:

• Sell stuff (the service is free!) in a auction-based or fixed price way. Who needs eBay anymore?
• Serve an injunction.
• Control your lights or even fully automate your home. Amazing.
• Remotely monitor a server: here and here.
• Control a Mac.
• Get a taxi? Why not…
• Play chess (even against the whole community, cool!)
• Notify the entire planet that the view is beautiful from the space.
• Publish a newspaper, now we know it’s possible.
• Hold a worldwide press conference.

140 chars…. not too bad eh?

A wonderful week for one of my greatest passions: software ideas that rocks. In few days I discovered these fantastic two:

1) Ubiquity, a revolutionary way to interact the web in a natural way. Take a look at this impressive video and get it here. Oh… obviously: it’s for Firefox.

2) Dropbox, what SkyDrive should (and could) have been but is not. Easily and quickly synchronize your files with different PCs or access them directly from the browser.

The entire world wasted a lot of words in past two years about Web 2.0. I think that we shouldn’t care about version numbers, instead we only should care about great ideas (like this one, also from Mozilla Labs).

via Ale & Pietro.

It’s a long time I’m a big fan of portable apps, and – for at least two good reason – I use them not only from the USB pen, but even from system drive. First: as a developer I’ve a fresh OS installation relatively often and a simple copy is far smarter than many installations. Second, I can directly (via a network share) run portable apps from different machines (including virtuals I host). Not to tell the fact that settings and preferences always follow the apps and that my registry remains a little bit cleaner…

I wanna ensure you that, once you get used to this, it’s hard not to have it. So I started to collect the portable version of everything I can find, and currently my “Portable Apps” folder contains more than 50 apps. Every day I’m more convinced that almost everything should be portable, also (or especially) things like Visual Studio or other complex applications. I don’t want to list every single portable app I use, but let’s sat that…

I surf the web with Firefox Portable Edition and I read my email with Thunderbird Portable Edition and my feeds with FeedReader. I do IM with PSI (a jabber client – note that many jabber servers are server-side integrated with gTalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and others), I download with Free Download Manager and uTorrent, I work on FTP servers with FileZilla Portable.

I use Foxit Reader for PDF documents, I view/edit text files with Notepad2, Notepad++ Portable and I take notes with Dark Room (see also Tools for writing and the way I write). I’m currently evaluating xMind for my mind maps.

I watch videos and movies with Videolan Portable, manage and look my pictures with Fastone, sometimes edit them with GIMP Portable. I listen web radio (check Radio SNJ!!!!) with RadioPlay and my music with CoolPlayer+ Portable.

And, of course, I work with Reflector (can’t not to cite), Snipper Compiler, a lot of stuffs by SysInternals,  SqlDbx, and others.

I’m still waiting (may be dreaming) for VMware Workstation Portable, Visual Studio Portable, Office Portable, Photoshop Portable…

Take a look also here:

• PortableApps.com
• List of portable software on Wikipedia
• Portable software on SoftPedia
• The Portable Freeware Collection

Latest cool stuff I found on The Web:

<jobRelated>

• Windows PowerShell Scripts Repository
  

  The Script Repository categorizes the best sample scripts designed to run on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. The categories listed below connect you to sample scripts written using Windows PowerShell.

• Microsoft CRM JavaScript snippets
  

  I noticed that the articles dealing with JavaScript code are your favorite topics, so I decided to have a look at all of my posts in the Microsoft CRM newsgroups dealing with JavaScript samples. I found quite a lot of them, so instead of repeating some common solutions over an over, I’m including them on this page for easy access. Hope you find it helpful.

• Strong name an Assemblies which uses ActiveX
  

  If you try to strong name an .NET assembly which uses an ActiveX component, you will receive the following error message: Assembly generation failed — Referenced assembly ‘AxInterop.SHDocVw’ does not have a strong name Now, what can you do to avoid this error? The solution is very easy. You can’t strong name the ActiveX component, but it is possible to strong name the Interop assembly.

• Top 10 Ways to Motivate Geeks
  

  Being a geek myself, I think this is a subject I think needs to penetrate all levels of management in every company that values their geeks. By no means is this a rant, but for the last 10 years I’ve seen what motivates us and what doesn’t. I’ve seen the managers that just don’t get it. I’ve seen those that understand completely and react accordingly. So, I thought I’d share my observations and see what everyone has to add as well.

• SharePoint Server 2007 Resource Links

  A really extensive resource list. Check it out.
  

• Hawkeye – The .Net Runtime Object Editor
  

  Hawkeye is the only .Net tool that allows you to view, edit, analyze and invoke (almost) any object from a .Net application. Whenever you try to debug, test, change or understand an application, Hawkeye can help. With a unique option to Attach to any running .Net process, Hawkeye offers an impressive set of functionalities seen in no other product. Plus … it’s FREE.

• Adaptive Object Models
  

  Abstract: We have noticed a common architecture in many systems that emphasize flexibility and run-time configuration. In these systems, business rules are stored externally to the program such as in a database or XML files. The object model that the user cares about is part of the database, and the object model of the code is just an interpreter of the users’ object model. We call these systems “Adaptive Object-Models”, because the users’ object model is interpreted at runtime and can be changed with immediate (but controlled) effects on the system interpreting it. The real power in Adaptive Object-Models is that the definition of a domain model and rules for its integrity can be configured by domain experts external to the execution of the program. These systems are important when flexibility and dynamic runtime configuration is needed, but their architectures have yet to be described in detail. This paper describes the Adaptive Object-Model architecture style along with its strengths and weaknesses. It illustrates the Adaptive Object-Model architectural style by outlining examples of production systems.

• Reflective Program Generation with Patterns
  

  Runtime reflection facilities, as present in Java and .NET, are powerful mechanisms for inspecting existing code and metadata, as well as generating new code and metadata on the fly. Such power does come at a high price though. The runtime reflection support in Java and .NET imposes a cost on all programs, whether they use reflection or not, simply by the necessity of keeping all metadata around and the inability to optimize code because of future possible code changes. A second—often overlooked—cost is the difficulty of writing correct reflection code to inspect or emit new metadata and code and the risk that the emitted code is not well-formed. In this paper we examine a subclass of problems that can be addressed using a simpler mechanism than runtime reflection, which we call compile-time reflection.We argue for a high-level construct called a transform that allows programmers to write inspection and generation code in a pattern matching and template style, avoiding at the same time the complexities of reflection APIs and providing the benefits of staged compilation in that the generated code and metadata is known to be well-formed and type safe ahead of time.

• .NET naked – See these hitherto unpublished pictures of the .NET Framework architecture

  Cool! .Net Framework metrics analyzed.
  

• Understanding the TypeDescriptor: A Metadata Engine for Designtime Code

  Great post on TypeDescriptor and his functionalities, even those not related to design time.

</jobRelated>

<freeTime>

• Airport Security Cartoons – Mentos & Coke

  Simply go to see this!
  

• indexed – Original copies
  

  This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.

• Project Gutenberg
  

  Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. Our collection was produced by hundreds of volunteers.

• Charles Petzold’s Summer Reading: “New Numbers”
  

  It was there in the mathematics section where I found F. Emerson Andrews’ little book New Numbers: How Acceptance of a Duodecimal Base Would Simplify Mathematics (Essential Books, 1944) with a dust jacket for just $1 more than its original price of $2.50.

• arget="_blank">Airplane with four engines

  How to build a flies-engined airplane…
  

• WeAreTheWeb.org

  Fighting for Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom
  

• 10 things you should do on Friday afternoon
  
• 10 Things you should never do on a Friday afternoon
  
• YKSIW – You Know Something Is Wrong

</freeTime>

Ever wanted to:

• aggregate your feeds in a global feed (like: feeds I read –> OPML –> my published feed)?
• publish your feeds on web page?
• adapt your feeds for mobile clients?
• collect mail from many people in a single feed?
• produce a PDF from your feeds?
• all of these in single and web-based app?

If yes, xFruits is for you. It’s new, really cool and well done.

all about Microsot Dynamics CRM 3.0:

• Embedding Maps in CRM Forms
  

  Let’s add a map to the CRM form in an iframe and see where they are! This is actually really simple and all it requires is one HTML page and some changes in the form editor.

• Speed Racer – Call CRM at speeds that would impress even Trixie!
  

  The other day I was doing a bit of testing to find the fastest way to make rapid calls to CRM Web Services. The truth of the matter is that when you are calling CRM Web Services you are pretty much down to the metal; so the only places I found to make optimizations were at the .NET Web Service Request level and at the server level. The good news is that with a few very easy tweaks you can improve rapid CRM calls by almost 50%!

• Getting inside Microsoft CRM – Part I
  

  We will write our own CRM-host to get inside CRM and get access to the internal CRM-object model at runtime. This is fairly easy.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 List Web Part
  

  The List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 provides a subset of the Microsoft CRM record list functionality. It allows users to view Microsoft CRM records as a list from a SharePoint dashboard, open records in Microsoft CRM 3.0 from the list, and connect Microsoft CRM Web Parts to filter different lists.

• Easy Microsoft CRM 3.0 data access using RSS
  

  Learn how you can combine Microsoft CRM and RSS technologies to set up dynamic business data feeds.

• SQL injection & Assembly Hijacking…
  

  a really interesting video

• Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
  

  The basic idea behind Weinberg’s philosophy was that a system of formal peer reviews effectively multiplied the number of eyes looking for logic problems, poor algorithm choices, or even syntax. These extra eyes could catch nascent bugs much earlier in the development cycle than traditional testing could, resulting in shorter project completion times and lower defect counts in live systems. For developers to accept this system, of course, they had to set their egos aside.

• MS Dynamics CRM: “Execute” API in a Service Oriented world
  

  So I thought I spend a little bit of time writing about why we designed the APIs the way they are designed in V3.0.

• MS Dynamics CRM: Context-Sensitive Reporting
  

  We built this feature after our usability studies showed that business users consistently want to run report within the context of their every day work environment, rather than navigating to a separate reporting area and setting the report filter criteria so that the report runs on the right set of records. Many customers and partners have asked us how to create reports that are context-sensitive.