So BarCamp Boston 2 is set for March 17th in Cambridge. I presented a Ruby on Rails talk at BarCamp Manchester a few month back, but Rajiv is already doing a talk on that next month.

There’s so much out there in terms of what to talk about. I was thinking about doing a talk on marketing - but I’m not a marketer - in fact I’m developing my sales and marketing skills through reading. I figured it would be a good exercise to actually go through a presentation on it.

What about development tools? I was thinking about selecting a few tools like TextMate, SeleniumIDE, Subversion, and FireBug and doing a presentation on how they make me a better developer.

One of my other ideas was presenting on the rise of new web design patterns. Tagging interfaces, modal dialogs, expanding/collapsing menus, etc. I could also touch upon using these patterns and AJAX practically instead of the rising problem of overuse.

All kinds of great things to talk about, but no real compelling topic. Any thoughts?

I spent last Saturday coding in Cambridge at the first DevHouse Boston event. Thanks to Shimon Rura for organizing and Permabit for hosting. It’s where a bunch of developers in the Boston area get together and try to hack together applications in 10 hours. The event was a lot of fun. It’s always great to work with my friend, Kyle Bradshaw.

Kyle had a great idea - port an application called Tag & Rename from Windows to OS X. He noticed there really isn’t a great tool to clean up ID3 tags on your MP3’s. Basically, ID3 tags are what identifies your MP3’s - artist, song name, and album title. Coincidentally, he met Jeff Dlouhy who wrote an MP3 organizer named Corripio. Eager to hone my Ruby programming ability and being indecisive about what project to take on, I took a look at a library called Ruby-Amazon. Anyways, I was able to build a pretty nifty script that pulls down album information from Amazon’s web services. Jeff’s working on using it to implement the ID3 tag cleanup functionality.

All in all, it was a great time. Lots of smart people doing many interesting things. In particular, one group played around with VoiceXML and it really peaked my interests. It’s still young technology, but it has tremendous implications for automated answering services and voice recognition. It’s definitely a framework worth taking a peak at.

If you’re into reading source code - check out the Ruby script.

If you’re interested in cleaning your mp3 collection up on a Mac, be sure to check out Corripio. Jeff has a bright future, and this program serves as a great example of his abilities to develop clean OS X apps.