TWIL - Week #5

This Week I Learned:

Programming-related

• Windows Azure SDK for .NET v2.0 has some nice updates. Windows Azure SDK for .NET is a fully open source project (Apache 2 license) hosted on GitHub.
• ProgrammableWeb maintains a directory of  programmable Web APIs. As per their recent count, there are 9,000 APIs!
• I like tracking the weather these days. When I'm not connected to the Internet, I use Google's SMS feature to get weather info. Send a text message with the command weather {your-city-name}  to 9773300000 and you'll get a response with the weather conditions in seconds. This week, I learnt about SkyMetWeather which focuses on weather in India pretty comprehensively. They currently don't appear to provide an API to extend their service for developers. The graphics & presentation of weather data by Forecast, the new global weather service, is impressive. The Forecast API looks easy to use.
• There are a bunch of alternatives for .NET Reflector - that brilliant tool which was initially free
• Twitter is extending API v1 Retirement until June 11, 2013
• Words representing objects can be best remembered if you can visualize the object. I like the paper-version of the Oxford Dictionary as it makes liberal use of illustrations to explain the meaning of words. Among online dictionaries, TheFreeDictionary (best viewed in the printer-friendly mode without ads) has pictures. This week I ran into EZeeDictionary which is a picture dictionary of reportedly 2.5 lakhs word definitions. 
• Trello, the free web-based project management tool uses MongoDB

General

• Sockpuppeting means using a fake identity for deceptive purposes. It refers to an account made on an internet message board, by a person who already has an account, for the purpose of posting more-or-less anonymously
• F4 and Ctrl-Y in Word will "Repeat the last action". This feature is useful when you have to scale large images to fit the width of your document. 
• You can selectively color parts of an image using Paint.NET 
• Some companies are designing their offices in ways that employees who work in seperate divisions bump into each other. The hope is that these casual face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie. Gmail and Street View are said to have started off from casual employee conversations.