Podcasts I'm listening to

For a long time now I’ve been listening to podcasts – first on on the iPAQ rw6828, then a HTC TyTN II, and more recently my iPod Shuffle.

My original subscriptions were:

• .NET Rocks – Carl and Richard talk about .NET stuff
• Hanselminutes – Scott interviews interesting people
• Dr Karl on Triple J – Dr Karl’s Science Talkback from Triple J Radio
• RunAs Radio – The IT Professional version of .NET Rocks

At the suggestion of Ben and Nigel I added:

• ALT.NET Podcast – ALT.NET things – nothing new recently
• Stack Overflow – Joel and Jeff talk about Stack Overflow
• Herding Code -
• Pixel8 – Craig Shoemaker on user experience
• Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker on .NET
• Software Engineering Radio – Interviews on broad range of computer science topics

And I’ve also added:

• Radio TFS – Team Foundation Server
• SQL Down Under – Greg Low’s interviews with SQL experts
• SQL Snapshots (coming soon) – Also from Greg Low, I found out about this via Rob after mentioning to him the idea of a podcast for a “Talking Books” version of the SQL Books Online.

The best way I’ve found so far to get the podcasts onto the Shuffle is to use WinAmp and the ml_ipod plugin. WinAmp does come with an built-in iPod plugin, but I’ve found ml_ipod provides superior support, including synchronising podcasts – something iTunes won’t do for a Shuffle at all.

Ouch again

I’m a sorry and sore case again. My back gave out a few minutes into the first half of a game of Basketball on Saturday. Despite initial cries of “foul” from my teammates I quickly realised that the only reason I’d fallen to the floor in pain was an all too familiar but dreaded feeling in my lower back. One I’d hoped I’d never have to endure again. It’s so annoying as I’d been trying really hard to keep up the stretching and strengthening exercises given to me since the last incident. I realise this also doesn’t just impact me - it messed up the rest of the weekend for my whole family, which is extremely frustrating. Maybe it’s an indicator that I need to think about other forms of exercise, and my body isn’t as young and flexible as it once might have been? Or maybe the timing is appropriate for me to make the transition from player to supportive parent. We’ll see.

Tracing the Sync Framework

Using the Sync Framework (aka Sync Services for ADO.NET) can feel a bit like a black box. You implement some classes, override some methods, call Synchronize() and it all just magically happens..

Except when it doesn’t. Sometime strange things can happen, and it would be nice to know a bit more about what Sync is doing under the hood. Unfortunately this is one product that Microsoft haven’t release source code for, so you can’t step into it with your debugger.

That was where I thought the story ended until I stumbled upon this topic on MSDN – How to trace the Synchronization Process.

So add some stuff to your app.config file and you should get a little more information about what is really going on.