I finally had time to announce the winners for the Fit In Feb Developer Challenge. Check out Peter’s before and after picture. Awesome!

Go see the rest of the winners over at my “Get Less of Me” health blog.

I’m looking forward to doing another event like this at some point in the future. I’ll just need to find better ways to automate more of the process and do daily leader boards and that sort of thing.

What sort of “Healthy Developer” contest would you like to see?

Several exciting things happened today. First, I was re-rewarded with an ASP.NET MVP (thank you, thank you… I’d like to thank that academy… oh wait), Microsoft announced the *much anticipated* Silverlight MVP expertise, and finally, to everyone’s surprise, the new Linux MVP award.

“The Microsoft MVP Award Program recognizes and thanks outstanding members of technical communities for their community participation and willingness to help others. The MVP Award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing their real-world expertise with technology users.” – Says Rich Kaplan, Microsoft Vice President

I’m especially encouraged by the first three Linux MVP’s that were named… Joseph Hill (Mono product manager and seriously smart C# guy), Miguel de Lcaza (creator of the Mono Project) and whurley, Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy for BMC, BarCamp organizer, evil genius and blogger

.)

“I’m excited to see Microsoft finally embrace the broader technical community and recognize the contributions that Linux developers on the Mono project continue to make to the Microsoft platforms.” – Says Joseph Hill, Mono Product Manger and new MVP recipient

I’m pretty sure that the “partnership” between Microsoft’s Silverlight team and the Mono team’s Moonlight project are starting to pay off.

“To think that Microsoft has finally recognized my life long effort to open source their various operating systems and software products is astounding,” said BMC Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy whurley “clearly Microsoft is finally on the path to embracing open source in a meaningful way that will benefit both the company, and the community at large.”

Of course, I’m still wondering if there will ever be room in this “new” open world for a Linus Torvalds MVP?

Update: already 44 hits on Digg!

Several people have asked me, “when are the final details going to be posted?”, Well, I’m happy to finally announce them! If you haven’t been following the Fit in February Developer Challenge, then it’s easy to catch up! Basically, it’s a challenge for developers (but anyone can participate) through the month of February, the prizes are a MSDN Team Suite Subscription, a Zune, and an 80GB VSTS Logo’d Zune! (very cool and geeky)

It’s easy to catch up… go check out the official site and then join the Facebook group!

The Developer Challenge that I announced on Friday is gaining some awesome momentum! The Facebook group now has over 80 members (in 3 days) and in addition to the MSDN Team Suit that I am giving away, Brian Sampica has offered up a Zune, and the VSTS Team just added a VSTS Logo’d 80GB Black Zune to the mix!

Catch all of the details over on my health blog – Less of Me – then get ready to get active in February!

We’re a bit past the new year… but I finally got around to trying this.

“I, Caleb Jenkins, herby resolve to Cut back on admitting fault at the office”

Hmmm… that resolution doesn’t seem very empowering or agile? Maybe you’ll have a better resolution than I had. I really like how the “wheels” look like they are rolling when really it’s just a simple gradient applied to the top and bottom of the visible area of a list box. Nice technique! Go try it out!

Enjoy!

I was just looking at the i-nigma reader for Windows Mobile.

If you have it installed, you can point your phone’s camera at this image and then call me… crazy!

Update: Looks like Microsoft is working on something similar, but broader in scope and uses. Sweet!

I just found this and it made me laugh…  the geek in me always wondered what would happen.

Enjoy!

Because friends don’t let friends use HTML Tables …

I’ve been spending more time lately working in MVC and MVP, (specifically M-V-VM) style applications. I thought that it would be a good time to pull out some of the great MVC PSA’s that Adam Keys from FiveRuns and the guys from RailsEnvy put together. They started a while ago, but they keep adding more! Be sure to check out the other MVC PSA’s linked below.

Check out the other Model View Control – Public Service Announcements:

 10. OpenID / OAuth Support. I know, I know… you guys are all over this, along with a better Jabber API, hCards and several other projects. Having worked on a couple of twitter applications it would be so nice to have OAuth… and as a user, OpenID would be very nice as well.

9. @Replies view in mobile Twitter. I don’t watch twitter all day, every day. Who does? So it makes it very nice to sit down and hit the "replies" view on the main web page to make sure that I haven’t missed anything that was specifically directed to me. When I’m on my mobile phone http://m.twitter.com is one of the best ways that I’ve found to use twitter. Its’ just very frustrating to not have a @replies view there! While we’re on the @replies topic… it would also be nice to include replies if your @name was mentioned anywhere in the response, not just first. (we’ll call that 9.2   )

8. Tracking feature to work everywhere, not just through SMS. Most tweeple have probably never heard of this feature, but when you are accessing twitter via SMS, you can give various twitter commands. For example, let’s say that you are interested in what people are saying about events in the DFW area (in case, you know, you happen to live in the DFW area – conveniently enough for me, I do). From your registered SMS device you would simply enter "40404 track DFW". Then any twits that mention DFW would show up in your twitter feed.

7. Live IM integration. It’s great that I can use Twitter with gTalk, AIM, Yahoo (and every other IM on the planet)… but I use Live Messenger and I’d really like that to work for me.

6. Tag my contacts. It would also be nice to be able to add some context around certain people… met this person at SxSWi, this person is a SharePoint Genius, etc…

5. Multiple feeds that I can create and then group contacts by feed. I’d then like to be able to "listen" or "un-listen" to my various feeds via a twitter command.So for example, there are a lot of "acquaintances" or "friends of friends" that I follow, but sometimes I only want to actively "listen" to my co-workers, or to my closer friends.

4. Groups. Sometime I attend events that have other people at the event that are also twittering. I’d like to hear what they have to say, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to follow them forever. It would be nice if I could just follow a group, and see the tweets from anyone else that is also following that group.

3. I might know you… who do we know in common? I get this on Facebook, why not Twitter? When someone adds me it would be nice to try and see how and from where I might know this person.

2. I’m following you, but are you following me? When I visit a person’s profile page, I can immediately tell if I am following that person or not. What would be great would be if I can quickly tell if that person is following me or not.

1. Reliability. Yes friends, "up time" has now become a "feature"…. please dear twitter, for the sake of all that is good, can we please kill that "FAIL Whale" and just stay up for more than 5 hours straight?

That’s all I have for now. (I’m sure that I’ll think of more later.) What about you? Are their any features that you would really like? What do you see as the largest feature gaps or missing pieces to twitter? If you could add a feature to twitter, what would it be?

If you’re not already, you can follow me on twitter.

I found this widget today via the JuliaRoy blog. It took me a minute to figure out how to copy for your self (just click on the link in the widget itself that says "copy widget"). Yes, I can be slow sometimes. I’d love to see this sort of visualization done with Silverlight… or maybe even as a PopFly mashup.. (PopFly makes it *really* easy to create your own mash ups).