As I have written several times on this blog, I am using Napster 2 Go with my Creative Nomad Zen Micro. Unfortunately, the N2G compatible firmware from Creative is still in beta. Everyone in a while…not sure what the repro steps are…the Zen Micro would lose all the N2G music licenses. They’ve released new firmware (2.11.02) that is supposed to solve this problem.

However, while the new firmware will eliminate this from happening in the future, it doesn’t help you with songs that have lost their license. So you have to delete them off the device and reload them. Simple enough to do w/ WMP10. However, the music you download from N2G has a set of license restrictions, including a limit for the number of times you can transfer it to a portable device per month. I think the limit is three. I’ve reset my device a few times experimenting with it, so about half my N2G songs had reached their limit. Major bummer.

However, I dropped a quick email to the folks at Napster and the next time I synced my device, suddenly all the songs had their transfer count reset. So I was able to resync even the songs that didn’t work before. I had figured I wouldn’t get those songs back until next month, so I decided to download some other stuff to tide me over. Having the older songs transfer was a very pleasant surprise.

Bravo Napster Support!

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

Thanks for the kind words Paul.

Doug wanted to know if the new DSL toolkit runs on the December CTP of VSTS. In a word, no. The March DSL Toolkit requires Beta 1 of VS05 Beta 1 or Beta 1 refresh. However, at some point, there will be a version of the DSL Toolkit that runs on VS05 Beta 2. (“At some point” meaning not on the day that VS05 Beta 2 ships but some short period of time after that.)

This is why I use Virtual PC. I can install the CTP build in one VPC and the Beta 1 build w/ DSL toolkit in another.

Back in college, I used to DJ for KSCR, USC’s student run radio station. I’ve got a bunch of old cassette of my “work”. Now, with the PlusDeck, I could actually install a tape deck in a free 5.25″ drive bay of my home computer. But for $150, I think I’d rather just plug my old tape deck from the garage into the sound card.

Robin has a hilarious post on the upcoming beta 2 of Xamlon Flash. I started looking into flash a few weeks back for a couple of things I’m working on. I took a quick look at what it takes to build flash movies, but quickly realized I didn’t have the personal bandwidth to learn it. However, Xamlon looks like it will give me the ability to work with familiar tools. Robin sums it up this way:

“Flash users are finally going to have access to good tools. Anyone who tells you Actionscript and Flash are better tools for programming than C# and Visual Studio is on crack”

I asked Robin on email a few weeks ago if they saw Xamlon Flash as a way to bring .NET developers to Flash or if they say Flash as just another way to deploy Xaml based apps. In beta 1, it was firmly on the former as you had to write a bunch of flash specific stuff to make anything work. But it sounds like they’ve almost solved that:

We were programming at the swf level…Then another sample came out that was using the early version of our component set. Suddenly the layout is all coming from markup (well not 100%  yet, but very close), as are the graphics. And this markup is Xaml (and in fact could easily be changed to XUL or whatever). Because of this, the code isn’t dependant on anything in swf, so hey, it could actually be run on Avalon. The beautiful thing about the markup is it abstracts away the most system dependant things, making it pretty easy to deploy to swf OR the native OS. Maybe this is the icing, but that might well be the biggest deal in the end.

For me, the being able to code to Flash from VS is the critical feature. But it’s nice to know that moving to Avalon in the future may been simple or even simply a recompile.

BTW, check out this pretty cool photo demo.