If you were wondering what the heck #ktrain is, it’s a social experiment, born inside the Facebook Group Indigeni Digitali to test and reverse engineer social Indexes scoring algorithms (k stands for Klout, the most famous of such indexes).

Since early this morning dozens of tweeters are retweeting and broadcasting the #ktrain hashtag and checking the results on klout.com.

The rules are simple:

1. tweet something (anything!) using the hashtag #ktrain
   
2. reply and retweet tweets with the #ktrain hashtag
3. rinse and repeat
4. check out on klout what happens to your social score

Bonus: get to know the community behind all this buzz

Here a sample of such actions



At this point you may be wondering why are we doing this.
We are experimenting to see all the added effects of thousands of tweets on Klout and at which point they will start to change (if any).
We are having fun with this nonsense, it’s like a party with free beer!

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Wonderful, i just put online my last little webapp: JsonPack , it’s a web tool to manipulate Json.

At the moment it can:

• Reformat Json for ease of reading
• Generate .Net C# model classes from Json
• Generate Objective C Model classes from Json

I will really appreciate any bug resolution or feature request

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Doctor Tunes is a small automated Music metadata download tool: it will scan your music library filling the missing music tags and normalizing the existing ones.

with Doctor Tunes you can:

• fill and correct year and genre
• download album artwork (only when it is not present)
• normalize artist and album name

Doctor Tunes works best on semi structured libraries (that is, music libraries where you are missing some data, not everything) filling the missing data needed to better enjoy your music.

An example: i personally developed and use this app to fill year and genre on my music library and to be able to filter and understand my music.*

If you need Doctor Tunes and think that 1.5$ is a fair price to pay for such useful thing, you can find it on the Mac App Store:

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*updated app

I just finished a project : Doctor Tunes, a nice Mac app that helps in reorganizing itunes media library. I developed this little bastard to explore itunes and music metadata apis and to bring order to my fairly big song library.

This is what i discovered:

• there are a lot of metadata apis, each one is different and not compatible. choose wisely.
• song lyrics are copyright protected and any attempt in building a commercial app on free lyrics db would be a request-for-being-sued
• there are some commercial metedata apps on the mac store, each of them expensive and crappy.
• http://echoprint.me/ has an open source library  that allows you to calculate a song’s fingerprint and search metadata on their db
• shazam and soundhound use echoprint
• discogs has a nice api and database for song and metadata search.
• developing an app for mac is fun.

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My love for Instagram and the tiny and colored world of photos they are building led me to try their apis. For such a project i decided to make a full implementation of their apis, an instagram web interface to browse and discover new photos and people.

If you are interested my app is here: quickagram.com

It has been built using:

• Asp Net MVC 3
• Microsoft sql compact 4
• Google Maps api
• Envolve web chat api
• css3,html,jquery… same old stuff.

I released my Instagram api wrapper on github here so, if you need an easy and complete implementation, there it is.

The app is currently running on godaddy but, due to poor performances, i am planning on moving my test rig to a more performing host (or a lovely vps).

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Interesting Technology: lately it seems that  there is a lot of effort in building really scalable and distributed systems, maybe this is the real technical challenge of the social internet .

via Preview of Storm: The Hadoop of Realtime Processing — BackType Technology.

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Some days ago i was in need of a simple web proxy app to help me develop some webservice integration. Browsing the internet i was not able to find anything remotely useful and so i built my own: It is a simple web proxy console application, configurable using her own app.config file.

Feel free to download and modify the code, use it to test your apps or to dump and analyze web traffic or extend it and build an http tunnel. It’s an open source little tool to ease your day, if you find it useful remember me .

One more note: on vista/seven it need admin privileges to open a port for listening.

download here: Github Repo

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Image via Wikipedia

Lately there are a lot of discussion about sedentary work, nutrition, sports and health related topics and for that reason (plus because i am really in this kind of stuff) i built 2 apps around this.

But i will do more, i want to share what i think is my little secret: Orange Juice, 100%, sugarfree, organic orange juice and white yoghurt.
Everyday, in the last 3 years (in am 32) , i had those 2 things for breakfast and in 3 years i have never been ill for one single day.

Maybe this is just a case, maybe is because i am relatively young, or just because vitamins (A/C/B) are really important for an healthy life, who knows, but i am sure that my breakfast played a part in this.

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The five programming languages with the top growth in the past three months were:

• HTML5 (45.2%)
• SAP Sybase PowerBuilder (26.0%)
• Ruby (15.8%)
• Python (15.8%)
• Silverlight (12.6%)

via 7 Surprising Trends That Show What Tech Skills You Need to Succeed.

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This is too good to be true!

This site has a lot of free technical courses made directly from Google, it seems that these are the same used by Google engineers to learn new skills.

Courses — Google Code University — Google Code.

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