I guess we’re still three months out, but TechEd Bloggers is just getting ramped up. Not to many registered bloggers yet. So far, I’m the only registered blogger in the staff category. Last year, I was staff and speaker (the only track owner also presenting I might point out) but this year I’m in marketing so they didn’t let me speak! 😄 Actually, I picked all the ARC track sessions and speakers, so I have no one to blame for myself. Yep, no one to blame but myself for significantly easing my own workload to only worrying about organizing the track, hanging out in the ARC cabana and hearding speakers (note to self, get Ted’s mobile number before the event starts) without the added worry of having to present.

Who else is going to Orlando?

I’ve been doing a bunch of thinking about the use of heavily stereotyped UML class diagrams and how similar it is to the DSL approach. I’m working on a new post, but I wanted to parrot Gareth who announced earlier today that the March 05 CTP build of the DSL toolkit is now available. I’m installing it as I type. Well, not exactly true – I’m installing VC++. This drop apparently requires it.

Rob Caron has the scoop…as usual. MS is building a game specific version of VSTS called XNA Studio. From the press release, sounds like a bunch of additional features primarily around digital asset management. I wonder if such tools will be available to mere non-game-coding mortals?

So I’m experimenting with this podcasting stuff. I started by listening to a few podcasts – primarily Daily Source Code and Mike’s Manic Minute - and using Doppler to pull these down to my Zen Micro. But then I started expanding out a bit – adding Ron Jacobs and Major Nelson – and I started to hit issues w/ the software. Of course, not everyone tags their podcasts with the same metadata style. Given the way the Zen Micro works, I want all the podcasts to have the same genre (i.e. “Podcast”) and then have either one song per “album” where the album has the date in the title (preferably in the yyyymmdd format for sort purposes) or one album per artist where the song has the date in the title. That way I can see all the shows from a given podcaster on my Zen Micro in a list and can easily determine the oldest and newest shows. Doppler supports tag overriding for downloaded podcasts – i.e. so I can set them all to have the genre “Podcast”. However, their “smarttags” implementation doesn’t work at all. You’re supposed to use smart tags like %date% and %album% in the tag overrides, if they worked that is. And even the hard coded genre override doesn’t work for WMA files. I assume Doppler is using an MP3 specific library for modifying the metadata tags, rather than the Windows Media libraries that work with both. I assume these will get fixed as the tools get better. In the meantime, I’ve subscribed to the MP3 versions of Ron and Major Nelson’s podcast feeds.

Update: Doppler tag overriding doesn’t seem to work for the hardcoded genre either.

Last weekend, I tried in vain to install a PIE GM9-AUX in my Chevy Blazer. The GM9-AUX converts the CD changer port on the stock CD player that came in the car to a standard RCA jack, which I can plug any one of my four Nomad media players into (though I imaging 99.9% of the time, it will be the Zen Micro) via a standard miniplug to RCA adapter cable. This weekend, my neighbor Dino helped out and we got it installed. He did most of the dashboard removal work and I did the cable installtion and threading it thru the dashboard to somewhere accessable from the driver seat. Thanks Dino!