I mentioned it before today: I started to create my virtual book shelf for technical books in LibraryThing a few days ago. It allows you adding new books by simply selecting them from a list. By entering the title, author or ISBN number you just query one of many book directories such as the Library of Congress or simply amazon.com. If you don't find your book (e.g. in my case a couple of German books) you can add alternative Amazon websites. There are some interesting features in this kind of features I am interested in: (1) you can export your information to tab-delimited or CSV files. (2) You can easy access all the book information including cover images without typing all the information in first. (3) LibraryThing provides an API to access the information. I haven't found time to check the API yet, but it allows you  to receive simple information based on the submitted ISBN, title or language of the book.

Charles Miller came up with a great explanation about the words impossible, trivial, feasible, hard and very-hard when used by engineers. Worth reading it.

Just another nice Twitter add-in, this time for Windows Live Messenger. After enabling the hidden Live Messenger Add-In API you can install Twessenger written by Kunal Kundaje. It updates your Windows Live Messenger status to your recent Twitter post. Nice work.

Source: http://kunal.kundaje.net/twessenger/

Twadget is a Widows Vista Sidebar Gadget written by Rod Begbie. It allows you to post to your Twitter account and read your subscriptions. Nice work.

Source: http://arsecandle.org/twadget/

Writing a blog entry takes some time, Twitter let's you easy drop a line about what you are doing right now. It includes mobile phones (yeah!) and instant messaging. Unfortunately It does only include GTalk, LiveJournal and Jabber - no MSN Messenger. The API is quite simple and the widget provided is pure HTML/JavaScript. I remember about that suggestion while performing the theSpoke tests 2-3 years ago. BtK and me did have seen some potential in this...

Definitely a Web 2.0 application...

A remarkable amount of nothing is going on at the blog-o-sphere - so nothing to summarize from there.

After the last meeting of members of the International Society for Web Engineering e.V. two weeks ago, we finally launched the ISWE portal. At the same time we established two social networking groups for our members within LinkedIn as well as Xing, formerly known as OpenBC. Application for memberships is available here [pdf].

Currently, I am revising my own paper, submitted to the BCS computer Journal as well as being Guest Editor for a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering  on Automation and Engineering for Ambient Intelligence.

It looks like this week will be a lot of writing and reading as well.

During the last week I accidentally surfed on a couple of interesting web sites as well. I found a online FLV Converter that allows you to save YouTube videos as DivX and MPEG4 into several containers. Christian Weyer wrote a nice article about dealing with WSDL in WCF. Instructables seems to be a nice web site providing step-by-step instructions how to do certain things: maybe I will go for the HDD clock.

Finally, my headset broke over the weekend, i.e. I won't be available by Skype [skypeme] for the next few days until I get a replacement.

Source 1: http://www.iswe-ev.de
Source 2: http://www.bcs.org/
Source 3: http://www.ieee.org/t-ase/

In case you missed it:

"eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help."

Source: Download

Windows Live Writer is for sure the current highlight in blogging tools. The Windows Live Writer Gallery brings a whole bunch of extensions to Windows Live Writer which make it even better. Especially the digital ink and Visual Studio plug-ins look promising... pending for further investigation.

Source: http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8

Already scrobbled today?

"Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile."

I just downloaded iScrobble and added a LastFM widget to this page. Unfortunately, the widget does not fit 100%. So, I have to modify the page layout a bit soon.   

The tool does permanently upload your played songs (including syncing the iPod playlist). Welcome to the new world. Big brother - and the media industry is watching what you are listening.  However, LastFM provides some great possibilities so search for similar music and artists.

Source: http://www.last.fm/

Don't Drink and Code!

BtK