Monday, April 16, 2007

Morning Coffee 64

• I took my son to the Pacific Science Center this past weekend to see the Grossology exibit. His favorite was the barfing machine, but we also got to play Urine: The Videogame, stand inside a giant nose, work the burping machine, climb the scab wall and slide down the throat into the stomach and come out thru the colon. We also checked out the dinosaur exibit (Patrick's favorite part: petrified dino poop), Kids Works and the Peter and the Wolf laser show. It was awesome.
• This week's Big News^tm is the rebranding of WPF/E as Silverlight. Tim Sneath has the rundown, including the news that more news about Silverlight is coming at MIX. Personally, I think Silverlight is a great name. I was worried it was going to be another W*F name. (I'm waiting for the day that MSFT marketing tries to rebrand Win32 as the Windows Technical Foundation).
• Gianpaolo Carraro writes about what happens when a SaaS company bites the dust - i.e. "what happens to my data?" I expect that this is one of the aspects of SaaS that you have to weigh, though I doubt most companies will explicitly think about what happens if their SaaS provider goes belly up. As the SaaS market expands and more companies will go belly up (I agree w/ GP 100% that this isn't SaaS specific, rather a natural force of any market) how much will that drag on SaaS adoption? I'm thinking it'll be a fairly significant drag, but the SaaS market will eventually rebound.
• Nick Malik picks up the decentralization meme is started last Friday and compares enterprise architecture to city zoning boards. In general, I agree with Nick's "not in a vacuum and not with a heavy hand" comment, but even more with his point that "we haven't figured all it out yet." Most EA efforts I've seen have been heavy handed and fairly divorced from reality (aka in a vacuum). More on this topic in the future.
• Kirk Evans closes the loop on city planning with a reference to Pat Helland's Metropolis work. Pat's work has been a huge influence on me. I often repeat Pat's point about cities being "interconnected yet independent". Services need to be interconnected yet independent also.
• Roger Wolter has a new Master Data Management whitepaper out, this one MDM hubs. I was literally talking about MDM on a conf call this morning, so Roger's timing is impeccable.
• I haven't read RADAR Architecture yet, but the fact that DAR in the acronym stands for "Dumb-Ass Recipient" made me laugh. (via Sam Gentile)
• MIT Media Lab has cointed the latest 2.0-ism: Human 2.0. I love Nick Carr's take on it: "We're definitely overdue for an upgrade - it seems like we've been stuck in Version 1.x for a few hundred thousand years, and that was after a beta that went on for freaking ever. Still, I think I'll probably hold off until 2.01 or 2.02. I don't want to be on the bleeding edge for this one."