Some time ago a friend told me about QR-Codes. Before that I had already seen some of them in instant messaging avatars, without knowing the meaning of those images. QR-Codes look like this:
This is a kind of barcode like the ones that you see in the super market, but that can store a lot more information. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry about QR-Code.
An interesting thing about this format, is that there is a lot of software available for mobile phones and even windows mobile, that allows you to read these barcodes using your mobile phone’s camera. It is a nice way of sharing contacts (phone number, e-mail, URL’s) or a simple message (how about wearing a t-shirts, allowing your geek friends to read the message? 
)
A nice software for Windows Mobile is i-nigma barcode reader. Just point your camera at a QR barcode, and read the message!
A nice usage of this technology is present in the Windows Mobile free software directory freewarepocketpc.net. You can browse for software in your computer, and when you want to install an application in your device, instead of connecting it to the computer to transfer the cab file, or copying the download link by hand, just point your camera at the QR-Code in the download page, and download the software using the link encoded in the barcode image, reading it with i-nigma, or other similar software.
Believe me, it works pretty well. I wasn’t convinced until I tried it by myself.
Thanks for the introdution to QR-Codes, Nelson and thanks for showing me i-nigma, André! 
Just take a look at http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=94
“Microsoft SharedView is a fast, easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere. Use SharedView to put your heads together and collaborate - create, convey, and communicate…across physical boundaries, through firewalls, and down to the smallest details.”
I’ve just tried it for 5 minutes, it worked pretty well, without any port forwarding or firewall configurations.
I had a lot of problems to even try to start using similar tools like Remote Assistance or Windows Meeting Space.
Posted on 2:34pm 3/06/2008 by Bruno Silva in
Software
Here I leave my first thoughts about IE8.
First of all, I’m pretty disappointed that IE team is still attached to the old search popup window… It is time to leave it behind and use a search like Firefox or some IE7 plugins.
In some websites I have problems with text selection. In the following picture I was trying to select the text after the “seminar” word… Awkward.
I really like the activities functionality. You select some text and an arrow appears to use the highlighted text to perform an activity. The arrow does not appear in all the text though…
Another problem that I had took place while I was debugging an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio. An Javascript error message appeared, and every time that I choosed not to debug, the same window would appear again in a endless loop.
Keep working in this software IE team. 
I would enjoy to use a nice Internet Explorer version, maybe somewhere in the future I leave Firefox to use IE as my primary browser (or maybe not… I just love some extensions)
Take a look to Artur’s post about the news.
Including Internet Explorer 8 Beta, Silverlight 2.0 Beta and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
Finally I received an e-mail that told me that Office Live Workspace is available!
“Office Live Workspace is your online place to store, access, and share 1000+ documents. Use it to distribute meeting notes, work together on group assignments, or simply store documents that you can access from any computer.”
Take a look at http://workspace.office.live.com. A soon as I try it I’ll write a little bit about it.
You can add sample text to a Microsoft Word document by typing =rand(A,B) followed by the enter key.
A represents the number of paragraphs, and B the number of sentences for each paragraph.
Applies to several versions of Microsoft Word.
