“Architecture is about how you decide not what you decide”

Thanks for the kind words Paul.

For those of you visiting the site directly (as opposed to reading via syndication) I slightly tweaked the theme. All stuff related to me or the blog is down the left hand side. The right hand side has the search box, the Google ads and my blogrolls. Let me know if something isn’t working (other than the calendar – I just realized that I need to build styles for that)

Update: Calendar page styles are fixed.

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.

As he wrote on his blog, Pat Helland’s last day at Microsoft is tomorrow. He’s busily cleaning out his office right now. 😦 He’s starts on Monday @ Amazon to help them implement a service oriented architecture. I heard their CTO was hiring.  Pat’s a big reason why I came to work for Architecture Strategy so I’m really sorry to see him go.

On the plus side, no one will quip “it’s been nice hanging out with you” in the men’s room anymore.

Seriously, Pat’s been through some seriously hard times this past twelve months, and I think the change is a great opportunity for him. I imagine I’ll see him often enough – he’s back on campus next week to present at an architecture forum. Plus, I offered to setup dasBlog on pathelland.com so he’ll keep blogging.

Norman added AdSense to his blog, and I know several other kids that are doing it, so I succumbed to the peer pressure. So far, it’s just a single ad over there on the right, but the “Wide Skyscraper” ad format would fit there. I’m interested to see how this goes.