The Mammut-EMS® Bouldering Championships tour is the premier pro rock climbing tour in North America. Event organizer Pete Ward has hosted two phenomenal competitions so far this year and is gearing up for another huge event November 9-11 at Metrorock in Boston. Just before the incredibly successful August event at the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Pete sat down with Lara Jones of KCPW, Salt Lake’s National Public Radio affiliate for an informative interview on the tour and his plans for the future. Pete was joined by Eastern Mountain Sports® sponsored climber Chris Sharma, as well as Sasha Digulian. Listen to Chris and Sasha’s stories about bouldering and participating in the bouldering championships and get yourself psyched up for the next round of competition.

http://bluepizza.ems.com/default.aspx?showID=16

 Steven Smith on Caching in ASP .NET

This week Steven Smith of ASP Alliance makes his dnrTV debut. Steve gives us several great demos which demonstrate how to correctly use ASP .NET caching technology.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=85

We're producing a new podcast for John Heald, the Senior Cruise Director of Carnival Cruise Lines. John has visited places most people dream of, sailed on ships big and small and made millions of people laugh.  Now hear his first hand tales of working, living and enjoying life aboard a FunShip. 

The first show is an interview with one of my personal heroes, John Cleese!

  David Wright and Anand Raman on Sandcastle

David Wright and Anand Raman join Carl this week to show us Sandcastle, a set of tools for generating Microsoft documentation of managed reference code. David and Anand take us step by step through the building process and describe each function and option in detail.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=84

<10 Foot Development for Media Center/>

Every copy of Windows Vista Home Premium and above has Media Center on it. Have you run your copy? Turns out that you can develop your own "10 foot apps" (that can be run with a remote from your couch) with Visual Studio Express or even Notepad. Scott talks to Charlie Owen to find out how.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=100

 Miguel Castro on Membership Providers

Our good friend Miguel Castro is back on dnrTV talking about Membership in .NET. Miguel takes his previous Membership show to new heights with custom providers that extend the current Microsoft model.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=83

<Vista 64 - Developing on 64-bit Vista Ultimate/>

Scott adds some much needed detail to last weeks show. Is developing on 64-bit in .NET tricky? What gotchas do you need? Who should move to 64-bit? Recorded from his hotel room the night before Scott goes to work at Microsoft.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=99

 Scott Hanselman on Windows PowerShell

The Hanselmaster is back on dnrTV with a great command shell tool that should have come with Windows: PowerShell. Add an additional free extension library and you'll be amazed at the powerful scripts you'll be able to write.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=82

Well, it's been a while since I blogged about my Triphasic Sleep Experiment. You can read my first two posts here:

Post 1: An experiment in triphasic sleep (8/23/07)

Post 2: Triphasic sleep update (8/24/07)

Looking back on that second post now, it's funny. I started with "It's been a few days..." Look at the dates. It's really almost 2 days, but I had 5 or 6 phases in that period of time, so it seemed like "a few days."

Update:

My co-hort Brandon Wehn, who was doing the experiment with me, threw in the towel last week. He was oversleeping and rather than keep going through the zombie phase he decided to get some sleep. I can't say as I blame him. This has been tough physically.

I am still going forward with it with moderate success. I have had a few 5-hour phases, and I've always had 3 per 24-hour period, but for the most part I have stuck to it.

However, I have modified my original schedule. It is as follows:

• Phase 1: 2:30 AM to 5:30 AM  (3 hours - 2 full cycles)
• Phase 2: 10:30 AM to Noon (1.5 hours - 1 full cycle)
• Phase 3: 6:00 PM to 6:30 PM (30 minute power nap)

If I'm really tired I will sleep a third cycle at Phase 1.

So what's all this about cycles?  The average sleep cycle lasts 90 minutes. It's a misnomer that we dream during our deepest sleep. In fact, REM (dreaming) occurs in the apex of the sleep cycle (the lightest part). I have pilfered a chart from an article at http://web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/psy340/lectures/psy340.09.02.stages.sleep.html that sums up the average sleep pattern:

What this chart does NOT show is that the REM stage gets longer as the night progresses, with the longest period being right before waking, in the 4th to 5th cycle. The idea is to train your body to get the REM sleep it needs without having to sleep as much.

I'm still only getting 5 hours of sleep, but I'm hoping that as I progress, my cycle time will compress, and I'll be able to get more complete cycles in less time.

I've been on the modified schedule now for a few days and I feel OK. I'll let you know how I feel next week.

<Vista 64 - Is Now the Time?/>

Carl and Scott are both running 64-bit Vista while others wait. Was it the right decision?

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=98

Pwop Studios hosted its first unofficial recording session last night with a new band project I've started called Carl Nivris (a take-off on the word carnivorous). While it's a purely original band, we do have a few cover tunes we like to play. This is Herbie Hancock's awesome funk groove, Chameleon. It's not exactly true to the original, but then again Herbie never plays it the same way twice either.

Click here for the 256kbps wma file

Matt Covey is playing drums. This is my kit, a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads. Dave Anderson is playing bass. He's playing an old Fender Precision bass through a GK amp direct. You'll have to put up with the overly-compressed bass as we were still messing with the input settings when we recorded this. Jed Johnson is playing his 1957 Hammond B3 organ. That's right.. 1957!  The Leslie speaker was miked at the top and bottom. Jay Franklin, my brother, is playing a Kurzweil PC88 digital piano, and I'm playing my 1983 les paul through an effects unit and into a Mesa Boogie dual rectifier on the left, and a Lab Series L5 amp on the right.

It was one take, but recorded on separate tracks. Just a little EQ on the individual drums, a touch of reverb on the snare and toms, a 2K notch cut on the guitar, and that's about it.

The band will be recording an album of all original funk tunes this fall.

 Don Demsak on LINQ to XML Part 2

Don XML concludes his two part series on using LINQ to XML in .NET 3.5. This week Don shows us how to create XML and HTML using XLinq and wonders at some possible new features.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=81

Codestacy [kohd-stah-see] noun

The euphoric feeling that you get from successfully forging and implementing a simple and elegant software solution to a real problem.

As developers, sometimes we forget that we can perform magic. We can use our IDEs, languages, databases, and compilers to solve real problems. With all this talk of dynamic languages, LINQ, and all this other nascent stuff, its good to know that even without tomorrow's technology we can do incredible things with basic (sic.) code.

Today I successfully tested a new publishing system for Pwop Productions. The original system was a windows app that ran on the server with lots of hard coded meta information about the shows we do. You'd see code that expressed things like "If the show we're publishing is dnrTV, it's a zip file, so don't convert it to mp3."

The second phase of development of the publisher was to move all the meta information out of the app and into a database. That was a great leap forward, but there was still a lot of UI tweaking necessary in order to get the show done. You had to manually upload a WAV file via FTP to the file server where the final files are hosted. You had to make sure the title and description for the show being published was on the screen. The publishing started after an audio file showed up in the incoming FTP folder, but in order to know the file was complete, you had to paste the size of the file into a text box. It worked, but there were still lots of places where mistakes could be made, and most of the problems were caught mid-process.

The last phase, which I just completed, combines a client-side Windows Forms application with a publisher on the server. You start the process off by dragging and dropping a file onto the client. At this point a whole bunch of checks are peformed to make sure that the filename is valid (our file names contain the show name, the episode number, and sometimes the guest or topic). The show has to exist in the database. Also, there are flags in the db that tell us whether the show always has a guest and/or a sponsor. If any of these conditions aren't met, the user is asked to fix it.

If it's a WAV file, it gets compressed with FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). It is then uploaded to the server with an FTP script. But first, a text file with the same name as the audio file is uploaded, containing the size on one line, and the split point (the point at which we split the audio into two files) on another.

The server-side publisher app (which is now a console application) sees the text file, reads the info, and waits for the entire file to be uploaded. It decodes the FLAC file, creates the required file formats (which it knows from reading the meta information out of the db), creates the torrent files (thanks to David Smith's BTSharp), copies the files to the appropriate directories for web and bittorrent hosting, adds the file information to the database (so the website can display the links), enables the show for the website, and publishes a blog post from a template. The RSS feeds and the website are driven completely by the database.

So, long story short.... you drop a WAV file on a form and 10 minutes later (barring a network or file system error) the show is published.

Yes, I am definitely codestatic today.