The only job where you start at the top, is digging a hole…

One of the coolest, kindest talkative and responsive people i have come to know on Twitter are those of a beautiful Region called Scandinavia. Not only are they genetically superior, tall handsome and lovely these people are probably one of the most intelligent and hard working humans in the world.

Innovators, designers, programmers, sportsmen you name it Scandinavia has got it. This is a nation which should not be overlooked, on Twitter or anywhere else. The love and support I have received from them outweighs all of the others, and i appreciate that!

Ok so before i get into the post let me just give you a brief intro on the region as written on the Wikipedia:

Scandinavia is a historical and geographical region in northern Europe that includes, and is named after, the Scandinavian Peninsula. It consists of the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; some authorities argue for the inclusion of Finland and Iceland., In Scandinavia the term is, however, used unambiguously for Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which share a mutually intelligible language (a dialect continuum), ethnic composition and have close cultural and historic bonds, to a degree that Scandinavians may be considered one people.

[To follow them just click on the corresponding image to get to their twitter profile. TIP: Right Click and open in new tab or window. Don't have a Twitter account. Then GET ONE HERE!]

Norwegian Tweeters

I am not listing any and every Scandinavian, just the ones I feel add the most value! You can find some other Norwegians below:
http://twitter.com/tropicthink
http://twitter.com/astridmeland
http://twitter.com/yojibee

http://twitter.com/mrmadsen
http://twitter.com/ragnartornquist

Or see the whole list –> http://bit.ly/XCoJF

Swedish Tweeters

Other Tweeters from Sweden:
http://twitter.com/dabitch
http://twitter.com/sebastianj
http://twitter.com/adamalsing
http://twitter.com/eztv_it

http://twitter.com/LindaStanford
http://twitter.com/deeped

OR see the whole list —> http://bit.ly/8Ytcc

Danish Tweeters

Find more Danish Tweeters here:
http://twitter.com/Heilemann
http://twitter.com/wuestenigel
http://twitter.com/karinhoegh
http://twitter.com/markhallcc

http://twitter.com/kingoftraffic

Or see the whole list –> http://bit.ly/wVPuo

Comments are welcome, and if i missed anyone out that you think deserves it, prolly cuz its late and i’m tired. Enjoy connecting and tweeting with these very great and kind people!

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I’ve been a reader of the Time for quite some time now and so happy that Twitter has made it to the front cover. Congratulations to Ev Williams and Biz Stone the brains behind the platform many of us have grown to love and use in our everyday lives.

If you don’t subscribe to Time you can read the Front Page story here online if you want –> “How Twitter will change the way we live.” Taking a look at the cover page you will see that the concept of Twitter (web 2.0 technology) is clearly digitalized, effectively portraying a fresh perspective of what Twitter and its 140 character updates can offer you.

Indeed not everyone comes to Twitter for the same reason, but the universal concept of “abundance” in every form is what brings us all together in this powerful web 2.0 social media micro-blogging application.

We all love to engage each other in short conversations, share links and ideas, promote ourselves or brands but most of all we learn from each other. One universal fact remains and thats learning from each others sharing, learning from different people and what they have to say.

One of the founders of Twitter tweets about significant politicians using twitter to learn and spread their voice.

Or how about this woman who is clearly excited about how the platform can change her way of living through learning and sharing.

Point is that if you aren’t using Twitter then you should! It takes only 1 minute or so to Sign Up and add some followers. So start observing and learning how twitter can change your life today!!

Here are some quick links to get you familiar with Twitter. For the more curious individual please check out some of the statistical links also.
Twitter Bible: Everything you need to know about Twitter.
Top 250 People that are the Coolest, Most Influential or Neatest on Twitter.
Top 25 Social Networking Sites
Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent
Time Article: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live by Steve B. Johnson

If you particularly enjoy Time as much as me and want to spend a Sunday enjoying a really cool *free AIR application (Celebrating Time 100) you can download it from here.

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I love bombing links on twitter I think you all should be aware of where you can find links to awesome stuff across the web. Have a look at this list of some of my faves, I’m sure you will find something that you havent seen before.

What i try to do is not restrict myself to a particular topic (unless you are targeting users), and thats given me a fair deal of success. Rather I feel you should hit the masses out there with different stuff. The sites listed below should be more than enough to cater to everyone out there, and if you want to gain popularity, followers and get Re-tweeted I suggest giving them a try.

I’d like to credit @tobiasness with the term “Link Bombers” as he was the one who coined it! Thanks man –> you can check him out here http://www.twitter.com/tobiasness

[Feel free to add any cool sites that i might have missed. Thanks!]

Elle - Womens Beauty and Fashion

Pop Urls - Discover the latest Buzz

Boing Boing!!

Digg - A treasure chest of content!

Original Signal

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Twitter is becoming more and more popular by the day. Fact is that with so many Twitter clients and services out these days (and more coming out everyday) it can be confusing as to which ones right for what purpose.

Listed below are 10 + twitter tools that helped me sort, fliter, search and add new followers to my Twitter profile. Of course everyone has a personal preference, but i have listed the newer and most popular tools out there for you enjoyment and use.

Built by Germans so you know its gotta be awesome, as well as user friendly! Frankly i like the application for its simplicity - it also caters to a huge gap in the market, which is how young entrepreneurs become successful!

Your free address localization service. Turns every postal address or GPS coordinate into a short URL that can be used for links, emailing, Twitter or sms.

When you purchase impressions, your Twitter profile is displayed on the Twitter apps in the FeaturedUsers.com network. The more impressions you purchase, the more often your profile is displayed.
FeaturedUsers.com shares your sponsorship money with the Twitter app developers in our network.

So, you’re not only developing a larger follower base, you’re also supporting Twitter app developers who provide you with useful Twitter tools. Become a Feature User today!

Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.

See all of your followers or friends on one page. Filter them by keywords in their description, sort them by a variety of attributes, and search for terms in their tweet history.

Scoopler - Real Time Search on Social Media

Scoopler is a real-time search engine, which aggregates and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day.

This is achieved by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time.

Tweetizen - Discover Tweets that matter to you

Tweetizen is a simple web-based tool designed to help you filter the daily influx of tweets, and easily find the ones that are relevant to you.

Use Tweetizen to create twitter groups, and you’ll be able to stay on top of what’s happening in all your areas of interest. Imagine having instant access to breaking news and the latest tweets on news, politics, technology, gossip, fashion etc. all in one place, rather than having to create multiple twitter accounts just to be able to find what you want.

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This is a quick follow up post from Tony Spencers post “cURL with PHP and Apache on Windows.” I’d like to thank him for sharing his knowledge.

The reason i wanted to post this is to clear up any confusion you about getting Curl to work on Windows XP (with PHP 5.2.9-2 and Apache 2.2.11). Most likely this solution will work with all versions of PHP5 and Apache 2.2.x and if you are running XAMPP you can check how easy it is to >> enable << .

Getting Curl to Work!!

1. First thing to do is to have the development environment installed locally on your computer. I have one at the office with installed without the installer and one here at home with the installer. For all intensive purposes lets concentrate on using php/apache installed with the MSI installer. If you got that going thats great, if not head on over to this >> Tutorial to install your local development << (the manual way with the installer) If you got it installed already head on over to the next point
2. Next thing you need to do (after your installation) is to check your phpinfo() file. If you don’t have one make one and load it up on your local web-server. It should look like the screen below:
   

   If you don’t see your Curl extension in phpinfo() after trying to find it I suggest you install php again using the installer. Make sure your ENABLE all extensions/features in your installation as you will get an option to do so. (install all features please) If you explore the extension features in your install dialogue box you will see CURL there. This my friends is the key to the problem. If the installer gives you the option for less headache then use it. Did I mention that you can also rerun the installer and choose “Change”, then add the CURL extension?!

3. Once you have installed properly and find the Curl extension in your phpinfo() screen make sure to copy these files from your PHP root directory (mine was D:\Program Files\PHP) to your c:\windows\system32:
   libeay32.dll
ssleay32.dll
   Also make sure that a copy of php5ts.dll is also in your Apache/bin directory
4. Last step is to uncomment this line curl: extension=php_curl.dll in your php.ini file. That should do it for you and hopefully everything worked out right!
5. To test that Curl is actually working use this snippet of code and drop it in to your server root (usually htdocs):

   <?php
       error_reporting(E_ALL);
       ini_set('display_errors', '1');
       $ch = curl_init();
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,
       'http://news.google.com/news?output=rss');
       curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
       $contents = curl_exec ($ch);
       echo $contents;
       curl_close ($ch);
       ?>
       

   Try this as well to display feeds from your blog (where $sXML = show_feeds(’put the url of your blog here/atom’)

   <?php
   function show_feeds($path) {
           $ch = curl_init();
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$path);
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR,1);
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,1);
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
           $retValue = curl_exec($ch);
           curl_close($ch);
           return $retValue;
   }
   $sXML = show_feeds('http://blogspot.fluidnewmedia.com/atom');
   $oXML = new SimpleXMLElement($sXML);
   <p>foreach($oXML->entry as $oEntry) {
           echo $oEntry->title . "\n";
   }
   ?>
   

6. If you see the the rss feed of Google then you are done! Change the output to ‘html’ and you will see the RSS feed displayed properly in html.

Scripting Twitter with cURL via Command Line

Ok the above explanation shows you how to use Curl and PHP together to build applications based on API’s that you would like to hook into. It doesn’t mean that you have Curl installed in your command like prompt where you can actually see the XML.

To do that is quite simple. Go over to http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and download the the Win32 Generic (7.19.4) by Dirk Paehl. Go ahead and extract it to a local folder (I extracted it to D:\Program Files\Curl).

Next open up the command prompt and cd into the same directory you extracted it into. Now just type in curl at the prompt to make sure the command is recoginized

If you want to easily overcome the shortcomings of Twitter’s API us this command below:

curl --basic --user username:password --data status="Checking out Curl!!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
//replace username:password with your user name and password


You should end up with this below:

So by now you should have a good idea of how Curl works with Apache and PHP as well as on the command line. The way i explained above should work straight out of the box. Good Luck!

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So you have heard of Linux and one of its most popular flavors (Ubuntu) and want to try it out on your Windows system? (Most people probably don’t know what Linux is and where it came from.) So, if you are new to Linux I just wanted to quickly mention that the name is derived from Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) a kick-ass Software Engineer and Computer Scientist from Finland. Learn more about him!

To make a long story short Ubuntu is a community developed operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. Whether you use it at home, at school or at work Ubuntu contains all the applications you’ll ever need, from word processing and email applications, to web server software and programming tools.

Ubuntu is and always will be free of charge. You do not pay any licensing fees. You can download, use and share Ubuntu with your friends, family, school or business for absolutely nothing.

INSTALLING PORTABLE UBUNTU ON WINDOWS XP

The installation procedure is simple enough. Goto http://portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar/ and download from the Souce Forge Site.

Next drop that application file into your local hard-drive or on a USB or flash drive (choice is yours). Run the application (Double click on the Portable_Ubuntu.exe icon and it will self extract).

Lets stick to the easiest way to get started. Once you have extracted the files either use your CMD prompt (Command Line Prompt) to run the portable_ubuntu.bat file or double click on portable_ubuntu.bat to start the Operating System. The portable_ubuntu.bat can be found where you extracted the application.

Once you have done that you should see screens similar to the one below of the installation process. Dont worry about any errors at this stage, it should work straight out of the box.

All you have to do after the install is complete is to watch out for the rectangular Ubuntu Dockable Palette on your desktop - it looks just like the screen below. You can drag it around and Portable Ubuntu lets you work with Dual monitors too!

Thats it you are done. Now you can have an Ubuntu Shell right in your Windows operating system. Note that Portable Ubuntu does work on Windows Vista and Seven, however you have to log on as the administrator to prevent security issues.

Check out some of these links as a reference in case you run into problems:

http://lifehacker.com/5195999/portable-ubuntu-runs-ubuntu-inside-windows
http://portableubuntu.demonccc.cloudius.com.ar/documentationhttp://www.pendrivelinux.com/portable-qemu-persistent-ubuntu-linux/
www.howtoforge.com/running-ubuntu-on-windows-xp-with-portable-ubuntu

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This is a quick and dirty way to display Google Maps in Android. Its really not that hard and after learning how to do this you can easily start thinking about how you want to architect your Android App using the different bundles that come with google (Maps are only one of them!!).

Fire up Eclipse / Create your Project

Easily set up your own project here => I am using GANEYMEDE eclipse, which is the international version of the popular Eclipse IDE. If you don’t have the Android SDK you can download it from here and you can download Eclipse from here.Also make sure you have the latest version of Java => download it from here.

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