In Valve's 9 November status update, they mentioned that little SDK business, as well as providing information and some pictures.

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Here's a sneak peek at the plush Weighted Companion Cube coming soon to the Valve Store. Your rear-view mirror will want a pair of companions, too.

I'm disappointed they're not actually cubes, but Lorithad says he'll be buying one. I still prefer the more puzzling solution to this problem.

RPS talks to Valve employee David Speyrer about working at Valve, various ways to kill Hunters, and Episode Two's design challenges.

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In Episode Two we did really want to bring more humour into the franchise. I mean, Half-Life had plenty of humourous moments, if a dark kind of comedy. The setting and premise of Half-Life 2 was pretty dark, and we did try to make you believe in the Combine oppression of humanity. But over time, as a team, we wanted to bring back some of the Half-Life humour into the franchise without diluting the sense of gravity.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=554

Yesterday, Mike Durand made this post over at the Steam Forums, and today at 11am PST our wishes came true! Here is the message from Mike.

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I wanted to let you all know that I have finished testing the SDK update and it will go live tomorrow morning. Thanks very much for your patience while I spent extra time testing it out.

The main purpose of this release is to get the updated content creation tools in the hands of the community. The next major release will include the client and server DLL code for Episode 2 although there may be a couple of minor releases before that to address any problems.

Here are the interesting things to know about the release:
- The new SDK contains tools for creating content compatible with both the Ep1 and Orange Box versions of the Source Engine.- By default the SDK launcher will launch the Orange Box versions of Hammer, Face Poser, and Model Viewer.- Adding '-engine ep1' to the launch options for the Source SDK tool will set the launcher to run the Ep1 versions of Hammer Face Poser, and Model Viewer- There is a .vmf file for one of the shipping Portal maps in the 'sourcesdk_content' directory - testchmb_a_05.vmf. I will add an example map for Team Fortress 2 in a subsequent release.- When running the Orange Box versions of the 'studiomdl' and 'vtex' you should include '-nop4' on the command line to bypass our Perforce integration with these tools. I will eliminate this need in a subsequent release.
We're launching the new SDK on the morning of 11/07 so that I can be available to make fixes as soon as you get your hands on the SDK. Once it goes live please post to this thread if you see problems. We aren't able to release this version of the SDK as a beta so I will try to act as quickly as possible to fix problems and put out an update.

If you haven't done so, restart Steam to take full advantage of the SDK update. You might also want to take this time to delete all of the junk that is in your HL2DM/CSS/DoDS/whatever game you are using to build Portal maps in and clean up your directory structure.

People are reporting some issues with Error models and invalid textures in Hammer, keep in mind that old VMFs may not work correctly with the Orange Box SDK. If you need to use them and don't want to undo all of your work, use the -engine ep1 flag when starting the SDK (and don't delete your extracted content) and things should be fine.

IGN swapped words with the woman herself: Overwatch, Announcer, and Homicidal Supercomputer:

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In the recording sessions we talked about how passive aggressive GLaDOS is. Eric Wolpaw is the principal writer, and he's just so funny and clever. And of course I was trying to sound like a computer. In the recording sessions they would play a computer-generated voice for me. I would try to sound like that but then add in the different emotions they wanted. [Valve] would direct me through the sessions. It was really very satisfying work.

Full scoop at IGN.

(Hat tip: Crooked Paul)

Here is another email from Mike Durand regarding the SDK release date and the delays about it, again taken from the hlcoders mailing list.

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No, you aren't being a pest at all. It's a fair question since I've missed my forecast release schedule.

The complication that arose is that I need to include two copies of all of the tools in this release since it needs to support both the Ep1 and Orange Box versions of the engine. And making a beta of this SDK is not an option since we had to make some changes to the SDK Steam depot structure to support having two copies of the tools. So I'm spending a lot of time tweaking the directory structure to get both versions to run and I've had to tweak the tools themselves to coexist properly. Also, since we can't do a beta I am spending more time testing than I anticipated.

So bottom line is I'd rather have you guys moderately mad at me for being late than REALLY mad at me for breaking the existing SDK functionality. I have been working on the SDK release but it is simply taking longer than I had planned.

When the new SDK is ready you guys will be the first to know.

Thanks for the info, Mike. We're all waiting for that day!