Morning Coffee 137

• Note, I somehow duplicated Morning Coffee 135. So I've skipped 136 to make up for it.
• Congrats to Hillary Clinton for her unexpected win in the New Hampshire primary. As I said last week, I think Obama has a better chance of winning in November, but I've got nothing against Clinton or her politics.
• Speaking of winning, congrats to LSU on winning the BCS. Are they the best team in college football? Personally, I don't think so - there are at least three other teams (Georgia, West VA and of course USC) who can make a persuasive argument that they should be #1. But losing to teams like Penn Pitt and Stanford, neither WVA and USC have an argument they should have been in the championship game. But that's what makes the BCS such BS. If nothing else, at least the "we need a playoff" meme is picking up steam.
• This is sort of cool: Eye-fi is a wireless enabled SD card so you can wirelessly upload pictures from your camera to your PC or favorite photo service. However, I think the price needs to come down a bit. I recently bought a 2GB SD card for my wife's new camera for $20. A 2GB Eye-fi card is $99. Not sure wireless upload is worth 5x per card.
• With all the focus on LINQ providing type-safe queries, it's easy to forget that some apps do need to build their queries at run time. Scott Guthrie points at a Dynamic LINQ C# sample (also available for VB) that builds LINQ expression trees from strings. It kinda takes you back to the bad-old-days of embedding SQL strings in your code, but there are scenarios - especially BI scenarios - where you need this capability.
• Soma announces the VC++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta. This is the long-awaited (by who?) MFC update as well as support for the C++ TR1. TR1 provides some FP-esque support like function objects and tuples, so maybe this is worth a look. On the other hand, given that much (all?) of TR1 is lifted from Boost, maybe we should just use that.
• Speaking of cool libraries, check out C5 (aka the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#). It's basically a complete redesign of System.Collections.Generic (or SCG as they call it). I've read thru their online book and I'm very impressed. Of course, with me focused on F# of late, I'm primarily using immutable collections, so I'm not sure how much use I have for C5 right now.
• There was a free CoDe magazine in my DevTeach bag back in November with a fascinating article on where LINQ goes from here - LINQ 2.0 if you will. One of things the article discusses is tier-splitting, which has seen the light of day in Volta. Will Volta also deliver External Relationships, Reshaping Combinators and Join Patterns or will those come from different projects?
• I had to pave my workstation yesterday. I was running an interim build of Vista x64 SP1 and I couldn't make Virtual Server work with it. As part of the repave, I discovered I needed to update the firmware of my SCSI controller, but the update had to run under DOS. Freaking DOS? My workstation doesn't even have a floppy drive to boot DOS from! However, I was able to boot from a USB thumb disk instead. That's damn useful.

Morning Coffee 133

• I've been off for two weeks, so getting back into "the swing" of things will probably take a day or two - both at work and on my blog. Hope everyone had a happy holiday season.
• I ended the year with 245 blog posts, which wasn't quite as many as either of my first two years blogging, but was much more than I had been writing for the last two years.
• It was a Zune Xmas in the Pierson house. I got a pink Zune for my wife, and my mother and father got Zunes for each other. I got to load them all up with content for Xmas morning. Maybe I'm just used to WMP, but I'm not a huge fan of the Zune software. Yes, it's very pretty but it's missing some fairly basic features like automatic down-sampling lossless music. On the other hand, the on-device experience rocks and my wife is using her Zune regularly. I've got a trip to England coming up in April, and I'm thinking about getting one of the new 80GB ones for the trip.
• They lost any chance of playing for the national championship, but USC sure looked like a champion yesterday. Seems appropriate for this crazy college football season that if Ohio State doesn't win big, pretty much all the other BCS bowl winners with a legitimate argument to be #1.
• The Caps beat the eastern-conference leading Senators yesterday for the third time this season and the second time in four days. They have 13 points in the last ten games and 10-5-4 since Boudreau took over as coach. If they keep that pace up, they would likely make the playoffs - that would be quite a feat given their horrific start.
• Speaking of hockey, I watched most of the Winter Classic yesterday, including the game-winning shootout goal by the Anointed One. It was really strange but cool to watch a hockey game between snowflakes. I agree with Scott Burnside's take that these outdoor games are good for the league, but shouldn't be a regular part of the season.
• I finished Portal yesterday - that's a fantastic game. I also got Mass Effect, so now I need to decide which to take on first: that or Half-Life 2.
• A few months ago, I was thinking about using HomePlug for home networking but decided to upgrade my wireless network instead. But recently I've started streaming movies from my loft computer to my Xbox, and the wireless network isn't always up to the task. I could run CAT5, but there's already an unused coax cable running up to the loft and I wondered if I could just use that? I discovered the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, but none of their certified products appear to be available. Those products have to share the home coax network with the cable company, but I can dedicate my coax cable. Anyone know a way to use coax to bridge CAT5 networks? Even something DIY?

Afternoon Coffee 126

• In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense - the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches to? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
• It won't get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can't win without Dennis Dixon.
• I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here's hoping. I'm going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it'll probably be R6:Vegas. Don't really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it's 3 DVDs.
• In more "Screw Turkey Day, we're shipping anyway" news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one's called the "Modeling Edition". I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It's worth a look, just to see how they've integrated DSL and GAT.
• My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There's also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
• Quick reminder: I'm @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I've got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we'll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn't bother asking Dale to cover for me.

Morning Coffee 116

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue"
Steve McCroskey, Airplane!

• So it's been a while since my last post. Just over a month, not including The F5 High, which wasn't "original IP". Frankly, I just stopped reading pretty much cold turkey. I wanted and needed to go heads down on day job stuff for a while. Since I haven't been reading, Morning Coffee is going to be a little cold while I ramp back up.
• The new NHL season is upon us, and the Caps are looking good so far. Obviously, they have the new uniforms, but they're also out to a 2-0 start for the first time in five years. And in those two games, they've only allowed one goal and are 100% on the PK. It's nice to see them start strong, but obviously there's a long way to go. Here's hoping the can stay strong all season.
• Speaking of staying strong, the wheels that were rattling last week came off the Trojan bandwagon completely this week. I'm not sure it's as big an upset as Appalachian State beating Michigan but it's close. What happened to the team that scored 5 TD's in a row on Nebraska?
• Big news last week is that MSFT is going to release the source code to much of the .NET Framework. Scott Guthrie has the details. Frankly, between Rotor & Reflector, it wasn't like you couldn't see the source code anyway, so this seems like a no-brainer. But integrating it directly into the VS Debugging experience, that's frakking brilliant.
• I haven't had a chance to install the new XML Schema Designer (Aug 07 CTP)  but I was really impressed with this video. The XML Team blog has more details. However, I'm not sure what the ship vehicle is. The CTP install on top of VS08 beta 2, but in the video they keep saying "a future version" of VS, implying that it's not going to be in VS08.
• Dare is spending some time investigating SSB. I think it's interesting that some of the REST crowd are starting to see the need for durable messaging. Dare argues that the features and usage models are more important than wire protocol. As long as it's standardized, I don't care that much about the protocol. Several of the REST folks mentioned AMQP. While I've got nothing against AMQP technically (frankly, I haven't read the spec), but what does it say about durable messaging vendors (including MSFT) that a financial institution felt the need to drive an interoperable durable messaging specification?

Morning Doughnuts 4

• According to Reuters surgeons who play video games are more skilled. Remind me to ask the doctor if s/he owns an XBOX 360 the next time I am getting operated on.
• I have reached the National Championship game in dynasty mode of NCAA Football 2007. The opponent of my BYU Cougars...why that would be Harry's alma mater, the USC Trojans. Funny how that worked out.
• Nicholas Allen writes in his blog about when you should use Indigo to write a channel, and more importantly when you should not. As most of you know Harry and I are doing quite a bit of work with WCF so we are interested in this type of advice.
• Our team has been thinking about how to manage a large number of services in an automated fashion. This would include deploying new services, monitoring the services, automatically handling scaling, service discovery, and automated provisioning to name a few possible capabilities. I almost think of it like the next version of UDDI, especially when it comes to provisioning. I think that as systems become more distributed that the ability to automatically manage these systems is going to be key to their success. I know that some thought has already gone on in this area by people far smarter than I, but as I consider how to operate an infrastructure with thousands of services in it it is apparent that the opportunity is there for us to design and implement a system management framework that automates the majority of the tasks. I need to spend some time to consider how the framework would work, and document the capabilities.

Morning Coffee 6

"The paper sure loves to talk about
Selling out
Some of us never get the chance"
Stick Around by Mr. Jones and the Previous

• Didn't see that coming. I guess the Buckeyes didn't either. Congrats to the Gators. That makes at least three championships in a row won by the underdog. For all the complaining about the BCS, it's hard to argue they got the champion wrong this year. However, with the exception of the Fiesta Bowl, the BCS games weren't very good this year.
• There's a video of the new Xbox 360 IPTV service up on 10. I realize it's a demo and we're nearly a year away from release, but I'm not impressed. Xbox 360 Fanboy pointed to a blogger who got a deeper look at the service at Microsoft's CE booth. Frankly, it doesn't look or sound like it's much different than standard cable service (though I like the sound of 35Mbps bandwidth at my house). I realize familiarity is good, but do we really have to lock ourselves into the existing TV paradigm?
• I got roped into a webcast today on Optimizing Application Platform Infrastructure. It's at 11am Pacific time. Stop by and say hi.
• My colleague Dale has a rant about Service Oriented Assholes. His definition: "Any person or team that pontificates on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) without considering the realities of implementing SOA in a real business environment with real suppliers, customers, and products. These people are great at designing something on a white board or on paper, but couldn't produce a real workable production ready system if their life depended on it." Sort of a more specific (and vulgar) version of Joel's "Architecture Astronauts". How many SOA-holes do you know?

Morning Coffee 3

I'm living in a tinder box, hosing down the roof
It's raging all around me, and I still refuse to move
There's a lesson I'm desperate to learn
And I'm willing to burn
     "Willing To Burn" by Maia Sharp

• A warm welcome goes out to the 110th congress. Between the Democratic majority in both houses and Republicans looking to distance themselves from President Decider and his abysmal approval ratings, maybe we'll actually get something accomplished in the next two years.
• Not as nice as USC trouncing Michigan, but I like seeing Notre Dame on the receiving end of a 41-14 beatdown from LSU in the Sugar Bowl. That's the 9th consecutive bowl loss for the Irish.
• Actually started getting some work done yesterday. Today I'm doing some WCF STS work, but yesterday I focused on SSB and WF.
• I need to better understand WF's faulting and compensation model. I got sidetracked yesterday when I realized that when a WF instance faults, the built-in SQL persistence service deletes the persisted instance from the database. That doesn't seem right to me, but I was wrong last time I called out the WF SQL persistence service so I want to do more digging before I open my trap.
• I dig WF persistence. I wrote a few weeks ago about shipping a WF instance to a developer for debugging. Yesterday, I thought about having a persistence service that kept a history of the WF instance rather than overwriting it. I wonder if that would help with production debugging?
• Great quote yesterday by my boss, speaking ill of a project that will remain nameless:
  "Basically, they've spent the last month building an executive presentation to say we're screwed"

Morning Coffee 1

I gave up drinkin', I gave up smokin'
I gave up thinkin' all the time, stone cold revoken
No reason to my rhyme, I wasn't jokin'
If there's a phony bone in me, I want it broken
"Rub It In" by All Day Sucker

I'm trying to write more in 2007. Here's a roundup of stuff rattling around my brain:

• Fight On! So much for Michigan and their bleating about being left out of the championship game. Also, massive congrats to Boise State.
• Santa did bring me free time this holiday, but I spent it playing games rather than writing them. I'm digging Gears (big surprise) and Dead Rising, and I've starting playing Viva Pinata with Patrick. Plus, I finished GRAW which I had on loan from a friend just in time to start playing Vegas. Note I said "free time" which is to say time when I wasn't hanging out with my family. Typically during naps or after everyone was in bed, though I did skip at least one birthday party to play instead.
• We had a "surprise" snow storm two days after Christmas. Not enough to be dangerous driving, but enough to make a snowman with my kids. It's still there, though now that it's 55 degrees, I'm guessing it will be totally melted by the time I get home from work. It's been melting a little bit each day, so it's been like watching the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark in slow motion.
• My wife and I finished watching season 5 of Alias last night. Fun, though it had really jumped the shark by Season 5. We watched the entire series on DVD, which really makes me wonder about the future of broadcast TV. We watched season 1 of Lost on DVD but we've been watching on TV ever since. I'm hooked on Lost, so there's no way I could go back to DVDs at this point, but I'm thinking that DVD is a better way to go for most TV. I wonder how this will change TV storytelling.
• I wish I could see how a show like Lost or Alias evolves over time. How much of the Rimbaldi story arc was mapped out before the show started? How did the production team deal with forced changes like Jennifer Garner's pregnancy or the apparently surprise series cancellation?
• I had 12 days off for the holidays, so it's very tough to be back at work. As I suggested above, I did very little coding while I was off, so getting back in the saddle won't be easy. It's especially hard on my little boy that I'm back to work. He was acting up yesterday which is fairly unusual. I finally asked him if he was sad about me going back to work and he broke down crying. I'm very lucky to be a part of such a tight knit family.
• I've been in my "new" job for six months, but it seems like longer. I mean that in a good way. It feels like I fit better in this job, on a much smaller team, actually building stuff instead of just "evangelizing" it. Nothing against evangelism, I just think I burned out on that job.

So starts a new feature on DevHawk. As you might guess from the "1" in the title, I'm hoping to make this a regular feature. As I ease back into work, expect more tech related nuggets along with the more random stuff. I should admit, however, that I actually don't drink coffee. :)

Logjam Worsens

Last week, I wrote about the college football logjam. While we've seen one team fall out of the running, the overall race for the #2 slot has tightened significantly. Last week, Auburn and USC held a small yet significant advantage in the voting over West Virginia, Florida and Michigan. This week, that margin is gone. Auburn's loss combined with SC's wholly unimpressive win (spoken as an SC alumni) over the Huskies and Florida's impressive win over #9 LSU creates essentially a four way tie for second place. Only 100 votes separate #2 from #5 in both the AP and USA Today polls.

There are also a few other undefeated teams in the top 25: #7 Louisville, #19 Missouri, #20 Boise State and #24 Rutgers. Baring significant upheaval in the polls, only Louisville really has a shot to join the group at the top. They play West Virginia in a few weeks, so the winner of that game will likely stay in the hunt for the BCS title game. And Ohio State still plays Michigan at the end of the season, so we're still looking at a maximum of four unbeaten teams.

As bad as this scenario is, it's even worse to consider what happens if all these unbeaten teams lose. Currently, Texas, Tennessee, Notre Dame, California, and Auburn are all essentially out of the hunt. As long as there are at least two unbeaten teams, really none of these teams can legitimately argue that they deserve a shot at the title. But you can bet that ranked one-loss teams will be highly-motivated to beat ranked no-loss teams in order to be able to make a case for inclusion in the title game. USC plays #18 Oregon State, #10 Cal and #9 Notre Dame. Florida plays at Auburn and Georgia. Michigan plays Iowa (not to mention #1 ranked Ohio State).

If I was a betting man, instead of an Trojan fan, I would bet the BCS title game would be between West Virginia and the winner of the Ohio State / Michigan game. Obviously, if SC plays Notre Dame the way they played against Washington, they'll lose. But SC will be amped to the max for Notre Dame, so I would be more concerned about SC looking past Oregon State or Cal the way they obviously didn't take Washington seriously. By the same reasoning, I figure Auburn has a better-than-decent chance of beating Florida next week. If SC and Florida lose, that leaves three unbeaten teams, two of which play each other. Hence my prediction.

Of course, I'm not a betting man, so I'm hoping to see the winner of Ohio State and Michigan play USC for the championship. Note I wrote "hoping" which is code for "that's only going to happen if they play better than they did the past two weeks".

College Football Logjam

Two years ago, Auburn was on the outside looking in on the BCS title game. If things continue as they are, we're looking at a logjam at the top worse than 2004 or 2003.

At this point, nearly half way though the season, Ohio State has the #1 slot sewn up, assuming they win all their games. Their only remaining game against a ranked opponent is Michigan. Michigan already beat then #2 ranked Notre Dame, so this will be no cake walk for Ohio State. But, let's assume they win since they fall out of the national title hunt if they lose.

After that comes the logjam. This week's coaches' poll has the remaining unbeaten teams ranked as such: #2 USC, #3 Auburn, #4 West Virginia, #5 Florida and #6 Michigan. This week's AP poll has Auburn #2 and USC #3, and the rest of the unbeatens the same. These polls are VERY close. In the AP poll, Auburn and USC are separated by only 28 votes. West Virginia, Florida and Michigan are only 53 votes apart, with West VA and Florida only 2 votes apart!

Of the six unbeaten teams, only four will survive to the end of the season. As I said above, Michigan plays Ohio State at the end of the season plus Auburn plays Florida in two weeks. Of the six teams, Florida has the hardest schedule. They play four currently ranked teams, two on the road (LSU, @Auburn, Georgia, @Florida State). USC has three games against ranked teams, but none are in the top ten and their all at home (Oregon, Cal and Notre Dame). Ohio State has probably the easiest schedule, with only one game against ranked opponent - i.e. Michigan - and they get them at home.

So assuming Ohio State, Auburn, USC and West Virginia all run the table, it's a toss up who will be ranked #2 and play Ohio State in the BCS title game. Both USC and Auburn are #2 in one of the two major polls. Auburn has three games against ranked opponents (two remaining + their 7-3 victory over then-#6-ranked LSU). USC has four games against ranked opponents (three remaining + their 28-10 victory over then-#19-ranked Nebraska). But none of USC's ranked opponents are in the top ten and all of Auburn's are (at least currently). So who has the edge? Who knows? I do know that in this situation, either Auburn or USC will be left out in the cold. Not to mention West Virginia who has basically no chance to crack the top two unless someone stumbles.

I'm predicting lots of complaining at the end of the season. Like every season where there's more than one unbeaten team. I'm begriming to believe that's why the BCS was created, so that fans can focus their hostility on computers rather than the polls.

Update - I forgot to mention the ultra nightmare BCS scenario. If USC, Auburn and Michigan run the table, you'll likely have a USC vs. Auburn title game with Michigan ranked #3. That means Michigan would have beaten both then-ranked #1 and #2 during the season, but wouldn't get a shot at the title.