Twitter

I just found about twitter, a website that provides a very interesting concept, called micro-blogging. Basically people register there, for updates on other people (called 'following' someone) and those updates are on 140 chars or less.

People can update others on new stuff on their life but also companies can update people who whish follow them on updates to their products, website, blogs, etc. You can generate automatic updates to your account via any rss feed using twitterfeed.

Best of all, they can send you the updates for the people you follow via free SMS (limited to 250 a week) worldwide making it a really ubiquitous experience.

Some useful "people" to follow:

The weather in Lisbon 

Football results live

Portuguese music festivals lineups as they are being setup

Publico newspaper

Euromillions results

Portuguese traffic report

Instituto Superior Tecnico's Lunch Menu

and my own updates (not very useful... 'cause there won't be many :P )

 

I just can't seem to figure out how they make money.... maybe they are waiting to be sold like youtube ?

76 minutes (and a lifetime) well spent

 

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.

 

(youtube link)

 

I did not know this guy, but something made me watch the whole lecture after following a link just like it was a 30 second clip.

It makes for a great lecture and one that we can learn a lot from.

Other interesting stuff from checking his website:

• Tips for working successfully in a group 
• Tips on time management

windows mobile 5 alarms and reminders

(or How I learned to stop worrying and love the buzzing sound)

 

Before I had a pocketpc, every now and again I watched with some evil delight the devices of friends buzzing ad eternum with some sort of operating system error, related to alarms.

Since November, I became a bit more worried because I now had one of those devices. Three months went by without a single problem relating to those pesky alarms but yesterday it finally struck me:

The alarm notification didn't show up (aka. I can't shut the f***** thing up) and the task/calendar reminders don't work at all. I tried every trick in the book (rebuilding the notification queue, erasing some suspicious items from that same queue, setting the date back and forth) but to no avail.

Then, as the thoughts of hard resets swept through my mind, I found this gem of a post in the pocketnow.com forums...

... and it worked.

So there you have it, for future reference and to help anyone with the same problem.

kaplansa, my ears salute you.

Nice error

Regular Expression Designer

Since not every mortal has the complete regex syntax in his head, I recently had to find some reference material for a regex I needed and found this useful little tool:

Regular Expression Designer by Rad Software

Rad Software Regular Expression Designer is a free download that helps programmers learn, develop and test Regular Expressions. It is an interactive Windows application that is designed to be simple and easy to use.

ViEmu

By accident I just found something I will be trying just as I return to work next tuesday: ViEmu

ViEmu for Visual Studio is the most popular and mature product of the ViEmu line. Many hundreds of developers use it all day, every day for all their development tasks. Supporting all basic and many advanced features of vi/vim inside Visual Studio, it's a boost for your development productivity.

Now I have a chance to recover some of the forgotten vi(m) practice I lost after college :-)

hitler and his xbox

A funny video about Hitler losing his xbox live account...

Project Cartoon

Every now and again, a cartoon comparing building a swing on a tree with the life cycle of software projects resurfaces and we get to laugh a bit.

Today I found someone actually made a site about it with some new pictures, merchandising and the ability to create new versions of it.

I'm seriously considering buying the t-shirt/poster ...

Zero

Well, after some peer pressure I now have a tech blog.

For what purpose, you say ? Hmm, i believe i'll have to find out for myself if I have anything interesting to babble about...

Stay tuned.