Michael has posted a great list of modelling links on his blog. I hadn’t realized Ramesh Rajagopal was blogging. Ramesh works on the class designer I blogged about last week.

Michael also has links to MSFT’s Dynamic Systems Initative. Since I came from the developer camp, I usually focus on application architecture. DSI is going to be crititcal to infrastructure architecture. We have a section on infrastructure architecture on the Architecture Center that includes more info on DSI.

Update: Michael linked to a two partinterview with Keith about the Whidbey modelling tools. Highly recommended.

I rewrote the script that I blogged about over the weekend to convert shorten files to WMA 9 lossless format. You’ve got to have the shorten utility on the path and have Windows Media 9 Encoder installed.

Download the SHN2WMA script.

BTW, I claimed that the WMA lossless format was half the size of shorten’s format. Turns out that the ratio varies widely. For the concerts I’ve converted, I’ve seen as reduction percentage between WMA and shorten be as high as 55% and as low as 12%.

I know a bunch of people are on campus today for the MVP summit. I’m going to try and hang out as much as I can, but you can also come see me. I’m in Building 22 (close to 40/41 and 42/43/44 where a lot of the developer division is). Send me email, call me at (425)705-6045 or just stop by my office 22/2061.

My brother called earlier this week to let me know that the Pat McGee Band, a band he introduced me to, has a new album “Save Me” and a new EP “Drive By Romance” with four live tracks. I picked up both on Napster last week. Also, they will be in Seattle on May 4th. Most of the bands my brother introduces me too are local to the east coast, so I rarely get to see them.

If you want to know how good Pat McGee is live, you can head over to the Internet Archive where they have archived about 140 live shows of Pat with and without his band. Pat McGee is “trade friendly” which means he lets his fans tape and trade his live concerts. Other artists up on the Live Music Archive include the Grateful Dead (over 300 shows!), Little Feat and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

The only issue with the the Live Music Archive is that the songs are mostly in a lossless compression format called “shorten”. Unfortunately, there’s no way to play shorten files in Windows Media Player (as far as I know – there is a plugin for WinAmp). What I really want is to convert these files to Windows Media format using the Lossless codec. No such utility exists, though I did find a free command-line utility to convert shorten files to uncompressed wav files. So I hacked up a little batch program to convert each file from shorten to wav and then to WMA lossless. Turns out that the WMA lossless versions of the files are about half the size of the shorten versions, so I get both playback convenience as well as a non-trivial space savings. I’d post the batch file, except that when I said I hacked it up, I really mean it. Hard-coded paths, implicit assumptions, bad code, the works. I’m going to take another pass at it, then I’ll post it.

After several weeks of using NewsGator’s online services to read blogs, I’m finally got app reinstalled (machine switching and paving – you know the drill). While the web-based reader is nice in a pinch, it’s not as convient as the Outlook-based reader, so I got way behind on blog reading (which is partly why I’ve been behind on blog writing). So there may be a few things that made the rounds in the past few weeks that I’m only getting to now. Like this.

True.