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?

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

I had the great pleasure of having been tagged by Adrian. So… it’s my turn:

How old were you when you started programming?

In 1994, when I was 16 and I was at the high school. But I must say also that at the age of about 10 year a “played” with BASIC on a Laser 500, something similar to a Commodre 64.

How did you get started in programming?

… in those days I learned Turbo Pascal, and I used it to solve not too complex math and physics problems.

What was your first language?

As I said, the very first language was Pascal. But, as a professional, I consider my first language to be Visual Basic 6. It is for sure the language that made me falling in love with programming.

What was the first real program you wrote?

At the end of a one year programming training I build a RSE – really simple ERP – for demo purposes. A WinForm application over an MS Access database. Presentation Layer e Business Logic were mixed up in the Visual Basic 6 forms, but I think here I wrote my first Data Layer.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In order Basic, Turno Pascal, C++, Visual Basic 6, Java, PHP, ASP, JavaScript, VB Script, C#, Visual Basic .Net, Python.

What was your first professional programming gig?

In Brain Force, the company I’m still working for. 6 years ago.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

I love programming: it consume a lot of resources but gives back a lot of satisfaction. But I would have choosen something else.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Start from the theory and with the doc. Ever. Ever!! And pay attention to who wrote what you read.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

An ORM. I’m really proud of it.

Now, let’s tag someone else…

• Pietro
• Marco
• Ale
• Lanny

I recently discovered a writing tool, and I literally fallen in love with the first time I opened it. Is DarkRoom, a minimal text-only editor that help you concentrate by making the entire screen black leaving only the essentials: words and scrolling arrows (see image).

Then I realized that I really prefer this kind of editors as I write my emails in text-only, I take my notes in Notepad (recently in Notepad2, recommended), I always write “readme documents” in .txt files rather than in Word or other processors.

And this surely influence the way I write, the way I compose sentences, the way I explain concepts, and so on. In a positive way, I think. Because, without colors, without text formatting (bold, italic, font size…), I have only words to express my self clearly, to make readers get the points and catch the concepts I’m writing about.
Further more, I’m not used to have grammar tools helping me. So I often check what I’m writing, and this sometimes drive me to better rewrite a sentence or a period.

I think this good exercise I’ve always done without the intention to getting better in the way I express what I want to say, in the end, really helped me. Specially in English, which is not my first language.

On the other hand, text formatting may be important too for the reader, and sometimes I use it in my posts. Perhaps, the solution may be to apply it only when you finished to compose the text.

This is for those who continuously have to configure Internet Explorer proxy settings to match different network locations.

I have two different configurations I’m switching at least twice a day: one for when I’m in the office and another for my home WI-FI network. Not to talk about the number of configurations I have for the customers I sometimes have to visit.

Script must be included in a .vbs file that you can call directly from the shell or with a shortcut.

Here the code you can run to enable/disable proxy:

On Error Resume Next

Const HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001

strComputer = "."
strKeyPath = "SoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings\"

Set objReg = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}" & strComputer & "rootdefault:StdRegProv")
objReg.SetDWORDValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER, strKeyPath, "ProxyEnable", 1 'Use 0 to disable proxy
objReg.SetStringValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER, strKeyPath, "ProxyServer", "proxyName:8080"

If err.Number <> 0 Then
    MsgBox err.Description
End If

MsgBox "Done!"

Note that you can work on a different machines (strComputer) and impersonate a desired user (the WMI string passed to GetObejct() function), but I haven’t investigated this yet.

It’s time to stop with those boring acronyms that made your email signature longer that your messages. Have you ever received an email like this:?

Ok, I will be there tomorrow.

John Doe
MCP, MCAD, MCSD, MCT…

and other tens of fucking chars meaning nothing, absolutly nothing. If you can’t renounce to exhibit your titles I recommend, instead, a much powerful way:

Link: The Daily WTF Gear, and, if you decide to buy one of those shirts, may be you will be interested in this amazing trick to fold them: Fold your shirt.

Note: I’m certifed too and I believe that certications can be valuable. But for you and for what you do, not for people knowing you are certifed. Every one who took some exams knows how easily you can pass them. I really don’t care about an acronym on the bottom of an email or in the sidebar of blog. The on-the-job verification is the only one that cares.

Early this year I discovered (thanks Alessandro) something that immediatly made me enthusiast: software virtualization. To be more precise: Software Virtualization Solution by Altiris. Let me explain why I think it’s so cool.

Not sure, but I guess no one else is offering something similar at the moment, further more Altiris is giving this tecnology for free (for personal use). It consist in a simple application called Software Virtualization Admin (download here) that allows you to place applications and data in what they call Virtual Software Package or layer. You do this simply launching any application setup in wrapper that intercept all the activities, performed during installation, involving the file system and the registry. When setup finishes all files, directories, keys and values are in hidden positions and appear only when the captured package is activated.

Activating and deactivating a layer is a real time operation that influences the way SVS filter driver manage the calls (via Windows API) directed to the file system of the registry. For example, when the layer in which I virtualized Google Heart is active, automagically a folder named “Google Earth” appears in “c:\Program Files\Google” and the registry keys related the the application do the same in the registry.

This allow you to have different versions of the same appplication without conflicts and, most important, keep your OS light and clean. I successfully virtualized Sql Server 2000 and 2005 (both on the default instance!), Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, the Java Runtime, Microsoft Office and almost everything I need to work and my laptos still boot in less than one minute…

Further more IT Pros can (with the related commercial products) benefit the great advantages this tecnology can bring to software deployment in enterprise networks.

The tecnology is relatively new but both the development team and the community are really active. I bet this is only the beginning, stay tuned!

The complete reference:

• Software Virtualization Solution 2.0 Reference Guide.

Some example of what you can do with software virtualization:

• How to set up a complete, yet light virtual development environment
• Success Story: Mercy Health Services
• The World’s Greatest SVS Demo
• SVS, COM, and DCOM – Experience by Example

After years of great satisfactions today I found Google missing an important feature: correct punctuation marks evaluation inside queries.

I was looking some information about getting comments in RSS from .Text blogs (my old blog was hosted on a .Text site and I want to import the comments). So, I ask Firefox to show my homepage (= Google) and I wrote down this query .text rss comments. I get many result pages containing text, -text and other but no one with .text in the first 30 results (out of 107,000,000). Ok – I thought – I must use quotation marks, and I tryed with “.text” rss comments. No way: exactly the same results I got with the first try.

I spent some minutes reading Google documentation and I found this (full article here):

Google doesn’t recognize special characters such as exclamation points, question marks, or the @ sign. These types of characters are so common that including them in a search would greatly slow the delivery of the search results. Additionally, the use of punctuation on the web is so inconsistent (for example, there’s no obvious way to decide between Mr. and Mr) that including it in the query often does more harm than good to the relevance of your search results.

No guys! Generally speaking punctuaion has great importance, and in some languages much more than in English. Some times the meaning of sentence can be totally different with or without a comma or a dot. In italian, for example, punctuation marks can be so important that we have a proverb referring to this concept: “Per un punto, Martin perse la cappa!” (translated: “Because of a period, Martin lost his post!“). And the explanation can also be found on Wikipedia:

(the origin of this proverb is a tale, in which an acolyte monk, Martin, was told to write the latin phrase “Porta patens esto, nulli claudatur honesto”: “Be the door (always) open. Be not closed to any honest (person)”, referring to the door of the monastery. He instead supposedly wrote on that door “Porta patens esto nulli. Claudatur honesto.”: “Be the door open to no one. Be it closed to honest (people).” Thus, he lost “the cape” (i.e.: the right of taking vows as a monk) because of a period, or dot (Italian language uses the same word). That to symbolize how little details make a big difference in meaning or results.)

Another proof? Try this: “.net” learning. 7 of the firts 10 (and 2 of the first 3!!!) results are not related to the .Net Framework because Google handles “.Net” and “Net” the same way.

Update: September 1, 2006 – 18.30
Altavista and Lycos act the same way. But still I’m convinced that this is the is wrong way. The assumption “… the use of punctuation on the web is so inconsistent (for example, there’s no obvious way to decide between Mr. and Mr) that including…” shouldn’t ever be made. The search engine should not decide in this case, it should simply do what I want: search for “Mr” when I ask for “Mr” and for “Mr.” when ask “Mr.“.

Another battle from the Microsoft Vs. Google war is taking place: seems this week Google will announce his Google Apps for Your Domain. As always it will be free, web based and ad-supported and will initially combine GMail, Calendar and IM with site creation software. Plus management tools for IT professionals!!

Later (but this year) Writely and Spreadsheets will be added to the suite. And about integration:

Google’s plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google’s formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web. Glotzbach envisions a third link to edit the documents online and generate E-mail to other users in a group when the edits are done. Writely can read files created by Microsoft Word, and Google Spreadsheets can read and create Excel files and formulas, though it’s unable to handle more complex Excel functions such as macros.

Source: InformationWeek.

Seems that Andy Warhol once said:

I never read. I just look at pictures.

For when you want look: I’m on flickr, check out my picture: web – rss. I strongly recommend Add rien’s Photos too.