I bought some DRM-free music this weekend on Amazon MP3. The experience was fantastic. Its obvious that they really put a lot of thought into the user experience when they built the site. I already have an amazon.com account, so once I decided to make a purchase, the first thing it did was ask me if I wanted to install the Amazon MP3 downloader. I installed it, provided my account information, and my download started instantly. The download was REALLY fast…I downloaded Pink Floyd’s The Wall - a 2 disc set with a total of 26 songs - for $8.99, and the download of all of the songs took maybe 5 minutes at the most (over my broadband cable connection). The really nice thing about it was not only did it download the music, but it also automatically added it to my iTunes library. Very nice. From there I was able to instantly load it onto my iPod (I don’t have mine setup to automatically sync).

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana

That quote is just fantastic on so many different levels. Take a minute to think about it and consider how many different ways it can be applied to your life this very moment.

A while back my friend Jeremy told me about a little tool he used for importing music from his iPod into his iTunes library called Senuti. He mentioned it as a way of getting around iTunes content DRM issues. When you buy media from the iTunes store, the DRM it comes with will only allow you to transfer it a certain number of times before it disables it. Well, I’ve transferred my stuff enough times that I was beginning to worry that I might be getting close, and I had a need to transfer my stuff again, so I decided to take a look at Senuti.

So, since I got my MacBook Pro, I’ve sort of put off the task of trying to get all of my media transferred to the new laptop. The idea of backing up my iTunes library on my old PC laptop, and then importing it all (over 15GB worth of data) over the network into my iTunes library on the new laptop just did not sound appealing at all. So then I remembered about Senuti, and how it would let me import everything directly from my iPod. My only question was whether or not it would have any issues with the fact that my iPod was formatted for Windows and not a Mac. According to the FAQ, there had never been any reported issues with this. Apparently it would work just fine with Windows formatted iPods. Sweet! So last night I gave it a shot. I was very pleased with the outcome.

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I shared this yesterday, but I just don’t think that’s enough to give it the nod that it deserves.

Code review is an essential part of any good software development process. The problem with it is that it can be a very tedious and sometimes painful process if not done correctly. This is the reason that a lot of organizations just choose not to do it at all.

Fortunately, over the past couple of years, a few tools have come on the scene that make code reviews much more efficient and much less painful. My hope is that this will encourage more organizations to make code reviews a more common part of their software development processes. The most recent one that I heard of was just yesterday, and its called Review Board. Its web based, and uses changesets taken from the version control system that it is integrated with (yes, you have to be using version control too…and if you’re not, you really should be) to organize reviews.

It appears to work very similarly to Crucible, which I’ve become very fond of, but it hasn’t been around the block as many times, so its not quite as mature. The most notable difference between the two is the price: Crucible is fairly expensive, while Review Board is open source, and thus, free.

Granted, its a pretty small deer, but this is just crazy.