Morning Coffee 150

• Yesterday was the NHL trading deadline, and the Capitals were very busy. They obtained Huet from Montreal, Federov from Columbus and Cooke from Vancouver. Given they are fighting just to make the playoffs, going for three soon-to-be unrestricted free agents seems like an odd choice. However, the consensus (among my parents anyway) was that it's critical to get this very young Caps team some playoff experience. Even if all three walk at season's end, it'll be worth if the Caps make a playoff run. Besides it's not like we gave up much: an extra second round pick in '09, a 19 year old defensive prospect (who was apparently 14th on the depth chart) and an underachieving winger.
• Speaking of the Caps playoff chances, they are currently one and a half games back of the division leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eighth seed Flyers. Yes, I rank hockey teams using baseball's standings system. Otherwise, you have to talk about games in hand (i.e. the Caps are five points behind Carolina with two games in hand).
• The writer's guild ratified the new contract, so Hollywood labor strife is now officially behind us. At least until July when the the actors may go on strike.
• It seems like a slow week for Microsoft geek news, which is odd since WS08, VS08 and SQL08 all launch today. I'm guessing it's the calm before the Mix storm next week.
• After going dark for six months, Linq to XSD has been re-released to work with the RTM version of VS08. Scott Hanselman demonstrates Linq to XSD by applying it to OFX, an XML Schema he calls "goofy" but apparently helped develop. OFX uses derivation by restriction, which has no direct corollary in C#, but Linq to XSD's  is able to translate between XML and objects without loosing any of that type fidelity. Nice to know Linq to XSD can tolerate OFX's level of goofiness, though I'm guessing most people use much more straightforward schemas.
• Speaking of Linq, I discovered LINQPad via a comment on Rob Conery's blog (which I found via DNK). It's basically a code snippet IDE for C# 3.0 and VB9, with it also has built in database connection support, so it can fulfil much the same role as SQL Management Studio. I only played with it for a few minutes, but I was really impressed.  This is definitely going in my utilities folder. I wonder if they're interested in supporting F#?
• Not sure how I missed this, but you can get MSDN Magazine via same Syndicated Client Experience as Architecture Journal. Unlike AJ which is divided into issues, the MSDN magazine client is divided into topics which is harder to square with the physical magazine. On the other hand, since MSDN Mag has been around longer, perhaps topics + search is a better discovery mechanism.
• Soma announces the Visual Studio Gallery, a repository of VS Extensions. It's kinda cool, but the whole discovery mechanism is clunky. I might like to experiment with some free or even free trial products, but there's no way to filter on cost so finding them is a hassle. Also, there's no way for community members to vote, rate or comment on the products in any way.
• Nick Malik can't answer the question "how does Enterprise Architecture demonstrate value?" I could be snarky and say "it doesn't", but that's only half the answer. It doesn't, but it should. My opinion, since you asked Nick, is that EA fails to deliver value because it tries to control the uncontrollable. Trying to gain efficiency thru establishing standards and eliminating overlap via reuse are pipe dreams, though literally millions of $$$ have been poured into those sink-holes. There are a few areas where centrally funded infrastructure projects can solve big problems that individual projects can't effectively tackle on their own. EA should focus their time there, they can actually make a difference. Otherwise, they should stay out of project's way.

Morning Coffee 146

• The writers strike is officially over. Everyone goes back to work today. Thomas Cleaver has what I thought was the best post summarizing how the writers won. TV Guide has a rundown of how and when various shows will resume. I can't wait to see Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight. Lost - aka the best show on TV - looks like it will be getting five more episodes (in addition to the eight shot before the strike).
• Speaking of TV, Battlestar Galactica Fans: circle April 4th on your calendar.
• Obama won all three "Potomac Primaries" yesterday, and is now the Democratic front-runner, though there's a long way to go before the convention. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a great take on presidential experience - I'm guessing he's an Obama fan.
• In minor acquisition news, Microsoft is acquiring Caligari, makers of 3D modeling tool trueSpace. The Caligari folks are joining the Virtual Earth team, though I wonder what the XNA folks think of the acquisition. This isn't the first 3D modeling product Microsoft ever acquired - we owned Softimage for four years in the '90s.
• Scott Hanselman and Tomas Resprepo both write about PowerShellPlus, which I saw week before last @ Lang.NET. Scott really likes it, for both PS novices and gurus, but Tomas thinks the UI is busy, based on the screenshots. Personally, I'm not doing much PS work lately - occasional one off stuff, but that's it - so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
• Speaking of Scott & Tomas, Scott also has a nice gallery of VS themes. I'm partial to Tomas' Ragnarok Grey. Is there a VSThemesGallery.com site somewhere?
• Still speaking of Scott, he points to the new ASP.NET Developer Wiki (beta). I poked around, but didn't find anything shiny. I was very surprised that searching for "MVC" returned no results.
• Speaking of MVC, Scott Guthrie has a rundown on what's coming in the MIX preview release of ASP.NET MVC. Biggest news IMO is that it's /bin deployable - i.e. you don't need your hoster to do anything special to support MVC (assuming they already support ASP.NET 3.5). Also big news, they're releasing the source so you can build and patch (and enhance?) it yourself.
• Chris Taveres continues is ObjectBuilder series and Tomas continues is DLR Notes series. BTW, my F# based DLR experimentation continues, albeit slowly (frakking day job). Hope to be able to post on this soon.
• One of the things driving my interest in F# is manycore. An interesting tangent to manycore is general purpose programming on graphics processing units (aka GPGPU). MS Research just released a new version of Accelerator, just such a GPGPU system. I personally haven't played with it - I've been focused on writing parsers, not parallel code.
• Is XQuery really "a promising technology of the future" as Don Box suggests? I see exactly zero demand or use for it in my day-to-day work. Of course, Don's paid to build future platform goo, so maybe it is promising and Don's afore-mentioned goo will leverage it, though I remain skeptical. As for XML being "Done like a well-cooked steak", I'd say XML is like a great steak cooked perfectly, except it's done exactly how you don't like it. You can appreciate its quality, but you don't really enjoy it as much as you could have.

Morning Coffee 143

• I've been sick for three days, hence the lack of posting around here.
• As a Redskins fan, it's hard to root for any other NFC East team. On the other hand, it sure was easy to root against the Patriots. Congrats to the Giants on their Super Bowl victory. Favorite headline: 18 and uh-oh!
• Sounds like there's cause for optimism regarding the writer's strike. But is it already too late? Will the 9% drop in viewers ever come back? Personally, I think the studios have hastened their own irrelevance.
• With last night's win, the Caps are one game above .500. In and of itself, that's nothing to be proud of - Coach Boudreau remarked when we reached .500 that the Caps had "officially reached mediocrity". However, the Caps are the only team in the SE conference that's above .500. If hockey used baseball standings, Carolina, Atlanta and Florida would each be 1/2 game back of the Caps. It's going to be a fight to the finish.
• In fairly big managed Ruby news, Wayne Kelly has decided to contribute to the IronRuby effort, effectively walking away from the Ruby.NET which helped get off the ground. One the one hand, obviously this is great for IronRuby. On the other hand, I liked the idea of multiple managed implementations of Ruby, so here's hoping Ruby.NET doesn't fade away.
• Speaking of the DLR, I know I mentioned Martin Maly's blog in my Lang.NET Morning Coffee Post, but I didn't actually get to read his posts on targeting the DLR until I unexpectedly had several days off sick. If you are at all interested in writing your own language for the .NET platform: Go. Read. Now. You should also check out Tomas Restrepo's blog, he has also started writing about targeting the DLR.
• Larry O'Brien's blog is currently offline, but he commented that he doubted my ToyScript F# parser would be more than 600 lines of code. Currently, the parser is clocking in at 287 lines of code plus about 50 more for the AST. It's not done yet - see earlier statement about being sick - but I'm fixing bugs not writing additional code at this point. To be completely accurate, that's 287 lines of FParsec code. It's taken me a little bit to learn FParsec, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.
• Scott Hanselman points to the new MS Deploy project, a tool for managing content and configuration on web servers. I've never understood why this wasn't a standard part of IIS. It seems every hosting company I've used has rolled their own web-based management tool like DotNetPanel.
• Oh yeah, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 shipped Monday. Congrats!
• I fired up Inside Xbox the other day, and there was a page about the new Disney Channel show "Phineas and Ferb". Of course, with two kids under five, anything new on the Disney Channel is notable in my house. What made this blog-worthy is the fact that it's directed and written by Dan Povenmire, who I knew from my USC days. I used to go see his band Keep Left and groan loudly at the bad puns in their song "PSA". Dan, if you found this searching for yourself online: Awesome work, my kids love the show!

Morning Coffee 139

• Big news on the WGA strike front: the AMPTP reached a deal with the Directors Guild last weeks. Initial reaction from United Hollywood is mixed, but I'm hopeful this will at least get the AMPTP / WGA talks started again.
• Speaking of new media, Xbox 360 Fanboy has a rundown of 45 short films from Sundance that are getting released on Xbox Live Marketplace. That's pretty a-typical content for XBLM. Typically, new content on XBLM has been from "Hollywood Heavyweights". I'm pretty excited to see them branch out content wise.
• Speaking of Xbox 360, seems they had a good year. Congrats!
• Still speaking of Xbox 360, everyone gets a free copy of Undertow this week.
• Scott Guthrie announces the availability of the .NET Framework Source Code. Shawn Burke has instructions for how to use it with VS08. So far, they've made the core base class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, ADO.NET and XML available. LINQ, WCF and WF are expected to become available "in the weeks and months ahead".
• Ted Neward wonders if Java is "Done" like the Patriots, or "Done" like the Dolphins? If you want my opinion (I'm guessing yes, since you're reading my blog), definitely done like the Dolphins. OpenJDK was a desperation move to make Java "cool" again, but it won't work. People who want an open source stack are using LAMP and language wonks who saw Java as mainstream SmallTalk have moved on to Ruby. The question will be if Sun buying MySQL will make Sun cool or MySQL uncool by association. I'm guessing the latter.
• Speaking of Ted, he's got a great post about the relevance of game programming to the mainstream or enterprise developer.
• Speaking of game development, David Weller points to all the new XNA GS 2.0 content up on Creators Club Online.
• There's a new version (1.9.3.14) of F# out, but no announcement from Don regarding what's new. I reviewed the release notes, seems like this is primarily a bug-fix release with only very minor feature additions.
• Speaking of F#, Don points to Greg Neverov's implementation of Software Transactional Memory in F#. This immediately reminded me of Tim Sweeney's Next Mainstream Programming Language talk. Tim suggested said language would need to support a combination of side-effect free functional code and software transactional memory. F# is looking to be closer to that language all the time.
• Still speaking of F#, Don Syme's Expert F# book is out. I read the draft version - it rocks - but I'm still going to get my own real copy. You should too.
• With their win Saturday, the Caps are back to .500 for the first time since late October. Since Thanksgiving, the Caps are 15-7-4. Only four teams in the league have a better record over that time span. We play one of them tonight - the Penguins - and it's on Versus, so I'll even get to see it. In HD no less.

Morning Coffee 131

• On a recommendation from my mother-in-law, I've been watching Torchwood. Sort of Men in Black, the series and set in Cardiff. Since it's made in England, it'll be one of the few shows still running in the new year due to the WGA strike.
• A while back I pointed out that many DotNetKicks articles were submitted by their authors. I submitted a few of my own, just for kicks (har har), with mixed results. Today, I discovered that the parse buffer post from my Practical Parsing in F# series was submitted, picked up some kicks, and made it to the home page. That's pretty cool. I guess writing more dev-focused articles is the way to go to get attention on DNK.
• Amazon has rolled out a limited beta of SimpleDB, which appears to be S3 + query support. Cost is based on usage: 14¢/hour for machine utilization, 10¢/GB upload, 13-18¢/GB download and $1.50/GB storage/month. I'd love to see SimpleDB software that I could download and install, rather than hosted only. Even if I was going to use the hosted service, I'd like to develop against a non-hosted instance.
• Research for sale! I was checking out the MS Research download feed and discovered a link to the Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) library. This was previously called GLEE (Graph Layout Execution Engine) and was "free for non-commercial use". Now, you can buy it for $295 from Windows Marketplace (though the previous free version is still available). The idea of directly commercializing research like this strikes me as pretty unusual. It must be a really good library.
• Scott Guthrie shows off the new Dynamic Data Support that will ship as part of the ASP.NET Extensions. I'm like, whatever. Scaffolding wasn't that that interesting to me in RoR, so it's no surprise that it's not that interesting in ASP.NET.
• Jeff "Party With" Palermo blogs about the IoC support in the new MVC Contrib project. Also looks like they're porting RoR's simply_restful. (via Scott Guthrie) 
• I need to try out some of Tomas Respro's VS color schemes (also via Scott Guthrie)

Studio Busting

A week ago, I wrote that the ongoing writers strike might accelerate the transition to Media 2.0. Several other folks think the same way and explain why much better than I have. Marc Andreessen (aka creator of Mosaic) has a fantastic post that not only explains this transition better than I can, it also helped me understand my views on unions in general.

In the post, he describes two economic models - the Hollywood model and the Silicon Valley model. The Hollywood model is highly-centralized, with a small number of huge companies (aka "big media") owning practically everything. In contrast, the Silicon Valley model is highly-decentralized, where pretty much anyone can create a company or bring a product to market. Marc believes that the entertainment industry at large is transitioning to the decentralized model. I agree 110% - the general decentralization trend is one I highlight in my "Moving Beyond Industrial Software" presentation that I've been delivering recently.

Unions are a response to the dramatic power differential between an employer and individual employees. By pooling (aka centralizing) their bargaining power, the union provides a counter-balance to the power wielded by the employer(s). But in a decentralized model, unions aren't really necessary. Marc describes the "alignment of interests between creators and financiers" as "near-perfect". Near-perfect might be a bit on the rosy side, but it's a model I'm much more comfortable with than mega-corporations & unions.

Some believe that the AMPTP (aka the studios) is trying to break the entertainment unions. But what if those unions decided to break the studios? I gotta think that while there are lots of quality writers out there, the best in the business are members of the writers guild. What if they just decided to stop writing for the studios and go into business for themselves? Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times wonders the exact same thing.

Fans4Writers

Most of my readers get DevHawk via the RSS feed, so I wanted to explicitly call out a new addition to my flair. If you're not aware, the Writers Guild of America is on strike. When you buy a $20 DVD, the writer makes a measly 4 cents. When you watch an episode of your favorite show online, the writer makes nothing. This video explains the situation pretty well.

Even though I'm about as liberal as you can get, I'm not a big union guy. Neither of my parents were in a union. Neither Julie nor I are in a union. My only exposure to unions growing up was negative, typically when the Washington Opera (where my mother works) was negotiating with the musicians or stagehands. I vividly remember one musician's strike where one of their demands was to increase the minimum call size to be bigger than the size of the orchestra pit. Needless to say, that seemed like an unreasonable demand to me (though to be fair, I only heard the management side of the story).

In the recent hockey labor dispute, I was firmly on the side of the owners since day one. And while the teacher's union is one of the strongest bastions of democratic party support, I think the modern education system is fundamentally broken. So while I am a liberal, I've never been a big union guy.

However, I'm firmly with the writers union on this one. I spent several hours tonight reading a bunch of strike-related blogs, like United Hollywood. Obviously, they're coverage of the strike is pro-writer biased, but it's hard to argue with the idea of a fair wage for Internet delivered content. I particularly like this video which is a series of clips of media CEOs bragging about how much money their companies can make online. Yet - again, according to pro-writer blogs - they refuse to even negotiate paying the writers a percentage of the money they make for using the writer's content that way.

And to add a Media 2.0 spin to all this, there was a fascinating post wondering if Google could/would "scoop up the entire entertainment industry". I don't think substituting Google for AMPTP (which includes among others "big media" like Disney, Fox and Viacom) would be a good idea - new boss, same old problems. However, the idea of bypassing the studios with direct Internet distribution is a good one. One has to wonder how much this strike will accelerate that trend. This strike seems much more risky for the distribution companies & networks than for the writers - even direct distributed content needs to be written, right?

Morning Coffee 84

There appear to be several posts from several blogs that have spawned from my discussion about REST with David. I'll catch up on them and respond here in the next day or so. In the meantime...

• Saw PotC: At World's End over the weekend, due to a fluke last minute babysitter availability. It's gotten mediocre reviews, but I liked it. Not as much as the first two, but certainly better than Spiderman 3. June looks fairly bleak @ the box office. We'll probably take the kids to see Surf's Up And Ratatouille. (Remember back when there was only one kids movie per summer?) Evan Almighty might be funny and I remember reading 1408, but I think they're both rentals. The only thing I'm otherwise remotely interested in is Sunshine.
• Speaking of storytelling, Lost and Heroes wrapped their seasons last week. While early on, it looked like Heroes was going to be the new Lost, Lost's season finally was awesome. If you don't watch Lost, you're really missing out on the best show on TV right now. You have eight months to catch up before season four. Heroes may not be lost, but they're keeping the interest up with their online comic book plus while Lost scales back to 16 episodes for each of three more seasons, Heroes is bulking up, adding six "Heroes: Origins" and bringing the total to 30 for next season.
• Larry O'Brien fantasizes about his dream PDC. Aren't there lots of conferences about learning how to "create great applications" on and for the Microsoft/Windows Platform? What about TechEd? (which is where I'll be next week)
• Sam Gentle continues to dig into WF, examining the various ways you can extend the WF runtime by replacing the persistence, loader and scheduler services. He's also taking my advice to scrap ExternalDataService and work directly with the WorkflowQueuingService.
• Steve Jones compares SOA to trains and I don't get it. I mean, his advice on the value of batch processes makes sense, but his train/car analogy seems a bit strained, esp. when he calls the railway system "event based". Can't a car be "event based" too? There's just a much smaller number of people who care about a given car's events...
• Ted Neward debated OR/M with Ayende on .NET Rocks. Based on Ted's post, the show must have been a doozy. Sounds like Ted took some controversial positions, including advocating OO databases. Of course, "shies away from controversy" isn't how I would describe Ted.

That Deaf Dumb and Blind Kid Sure Plays a Mean Pinball

Michael K. Lee (Tommy)
Photo by Jay Koh
Property of Village Theatre

Last night, I got to see the final dress rehearsal of The Who's TOMMY at the Village Theater in Issaquah. My mother-in-law got a couple of free passes because she's working with the director on a separate project. There was no way to get a babysitter on such short notice, so that meant either Jules or I got to go. She's not as big a Who fan as I am plus the theater is five minutes from my office, so I got to go.

Most people who know the show have either heard the album, seen the movie or both. Pete Townsend adapted it for Broadway in the early 90's and I got to see it as it came through Washington DC on it's way to New York. Suffice to say that the movie is very different from the stage show. It's so different that the Village Theater specifically "does not recommend the film for previewing to gain an understanding of the stage version."

If I had to pick, I like movie version more than the stage version. The stage arrangement of the music is orchestral, which I feels waters down the power of the music. This is most obvious on Eyesight to the Blind which was performed in the movie by Eric Clapton. The orchestral arrangement is barely recognizable as the same song in my opinion. The stage version also adds a new song - I Believe My Own Eyes - which I don't very much.

However, if you look at it on it's own, The Who's TOMMY is a good show. It's over the top, but for this show that works. Tommy's journey from "deaf, dumb and blind kid" to "new Messiah" is even more appropriate today than it was in 1993 when the Broadway version premiered. At the time, Townsend got a lot of flak for the changes the show, but as he said "what's actually changed is the times".

While the show itself is over the top, this production is even more so. To quote from the flyer (which I can't find online) everything is in nearly constant motion. Actors, set pieces and a huge video screen that dominates the stage. Again, given the show, it works. The cast was good - Michael Lee (pictured above) as Tommy was a particular stand out. There were a few rough spots in the large chorus numbers, but that's to be expected in a dress rehearsal, right?

Bottom line, it's a good show so if you live within driving distance of Issaquah, you should check it out. If you're already Who fan, just be aware that it's not supposed to be just like the movie...

Vacation Coffee

After a week's vacation, I'm back in the office. I might have left with an empty inbox and newsreader, but I returned to nearly 300 emails and over 500 news items. Actually, 300 emails for a week is actually really good - most of them are in my "low priority" folder which means they are internal mailing list emails rather than things I actually have to deal with.

Major thanks to Dale for keeping the lights on around here while I was gone. With my renewed commitment to blogging this year, I'd rather not see DevHawk "go dark" for a week while I get some R&R. If you liked what Dale had to say, go subscribe to his blog. I hope he keeps up with his daily posts, now that he's no longer on the hook around here.

Anyway, since I have little idea what's going on in the technical blogosphere, this is a vacation wrapup instead. Normal Morning Coffee returns tomorrow.

• We spent a week in Southern California. Two days with my brother-in-law in Santa Barbara, two days at Disneyland and two days with my uncles in Palm Springs (with travel days between). We had a blast, but that's a lot of driving. Next vacation, we're going somewhere we don't know anybody and staying put the entire time.
• My brother-in-law has three kids, including a son a few months older than Patrick and a daughter a few months younger than Riley. I've long said I would never move back to Cali, but seeing them all play together made me think it might be worth it. I don't have any cousins (my father was an only child and neither of my mother's two siblings had kids) so I didn't realize what a big deal it is. I think Patrick misses his cousin Jack more than he misses Disneyland.
• When I lived in LA, I used to have a season pass to Disneyland. But seeing it thru my kids' eyes made it brand new again. Our two days in "The Happiest Place on Earth" were a blast, though in retrospect we should have taken a day to rest and hang out at the pool between the two days.
• Riley's favorite ride was Pirates of the Caribbean (which she calls "Yo ho ho"). My friend Brooke told Jules that little kids "natural reaction" is to hold on tight during the drops, but Riley put her little hands up and shouted "Wee!" They recently added some elements from the movies (Capt. Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones) to the ride. My wife and I were worried they were going to ruin it, but the changes were fairly small and subtle and we liked them.
• Patrick's favorite ride was Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters but the Jedi Training Academy was a close second. His Jedi training was my favorite moment at Disneyland. He got to train with a lightsaber and fight Darth Maul. Here's a video clip of my young Padawan:
  
  The big problem with Jedi Training Academy is that they only pick a limited number of "younglings" every show. Patrick didn't get picked the first time we went, and frankly I pushed him out there the second time without him officially getting picked. You could conceivably waste an entire day at Disneyland attending all six Training Academy shows and never get picked. That sucks.
• Biggest disappointment of Disneyland: Patrick being 1" too short for Star Tours. I was bummed.
• Disney's California Adventure is a nice adjunct to Disneyland, but as a stand alone park it pretty much blows, though Jules and I did enjoy the Tower of Terror.
• Disneyland seems to becoming Disney-Pixar Land. Pixar movies are the basis for several of the newer rides, including the new Finding Nemo ride opening this summer. There was an article in the Disneyland Pixar Evolution in the airplane magazine so I'm not the only one who's noticed.
• After two days in Disneyland, I expected Palm Springs to be a let down. But instead it was a nice casual cool down after two hectic days in the Magic Kingdom. Plus it was great to see my Uncles, who we hadn't seen since last summer when my brother got married.
• We flew home Saturday so we could have a casual Sunday before heading back to work and school today. We watched Phantom Menace last night, though the kids are still a bit young for it. We decided on Episode I instead of the original Star Wars because it has a little boy (i.e. like Patrick) and a fight with Darth Maul (i.e. like Patrick). But it doesn't hold a candle to the original trilogy.

Morning Coffee 10

Wow, I made it to ten of these morning coffee posts. That puts me only two orders of magnitude behind Mike and one order of magnitude behind Sam.

• We got snow, again. My son apparently said the other day "OK God, that's enough snow now". When a 3 year old is tired of snow, you know you've gotten a lot.
• Of course, people in snowier climates than here (the NorthEast, Northen Midwest, pretty much all of Canada, etc) will snicker that 5 inches of snow is "a lot".
• I'm moving my STS code into a new VPC for handoff to the dev team. I was running Virtual Server before, but for individual work like what I do, Virtual PC is much easier to use. Drag and Drop into the VPC alone is worth it to me to use Virtual PC instead of Virtual Server. I am using the beta of Virual PC 2007, though I couldn't tell you what the differences are.
• Steven King may love the new season of 24, but I can't shake the feeling of jumped shark. However, I am impressed that Fox released the first 4 episodes of the new season today.
• Two name changes later, the RTM version of SQL Mobile Anywhere Compact Edition is now available. BTW, I found this blog post by Steve Lasker about using SQLce with ASP.NET. So it sounds doable, though not recommend. Of course, for those of us using shared hosting, SQLce is a non-starter until it becomes part of the standard .NET framework install.

Morning Coffee 9

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up... live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr

• My boss asks "Are We There Yet?" on fulfilling Dr. King's dream. Sadly, the answer is no. I think we're making progress, but we're not "there" yet.
• No back to back trips to the Super Bowl for the Seahawks. They had chances to win it both down the stretch as well as in overtime and they couldn't capitalize.
• I blogged about "Politics 2.0" back on election day. Here's an article about viral video in politics that's very Politics 2.0.
• It finally warmed up enough yesterday to make a snowman. Patrick named the snowman "Capa" which is what he call my father. Apparently, my father and the snowman have the same bushy eyebrows (according to my wife). It's supposed to snow again tonight, so maybe we can make a "Granny" or "Nana" snowman (snow-woman?).
• The new season of 24 started last night. Please review Larry's list of the Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of '24'.
• My wife posted a picture of Patrick and I playing Lego Star Wars II. We really enjoy it, but I need to watch my language when we play. When we were fighting the Rancor, Patrick announced to his mommy that we were fighting the "big fucking monster". Woops! Patrick already knows several words that your not supposed to say (and he reminds us if we ever use them) so I guess should add that to the list. Or I could start saying frak instead.

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?

Hawkeye on XBL Video Marketplace

As per Major Nelson's blog, the XBL Video Marketplace went live yesterday. Being off work yesterday (vacation time: use it or lose it), I fired up the ol' 360 to have a look see for myself. V for Vendetta in HD? Cool. 6GB? Not so cool. Guess I'll have to blow away some of the demos that I'm not playing in order to make space.

The amount of HD space needed for HD movies begs the question, why isn't Video Marketplace available for PC? My 20GB of Xbox HD space is taken up with game demos and downloads. But my home PC(s) can spare that kind of space. I'd much rather download the content to my PC then stream it across my home network to the 360 when I want to watch it. Not sure how DRM (I assume the content uses WM DRM) impacts network streaming, but I would guess that's a solvable problem.

While I'm talking about DRM, why do I have to pay to download DRMed rental content? Shouldn't I pay when it's time to actually watch the content? I understand having a time limit (24 hours) to finish watching content I rented, but why is there a time limit (14 days) to start watching it? Once it's downloaded it, I'm no longer using XBL resources, so why put any limit on it at all?

The pricing model seems pretty much in line with iTunes and/or Blockbuster. $2 to own a TV show, $3 to rent a "classic" movie, $4 to rent a new release movie, with a 50% markup for HD content ($3/$4.50/$6). While these prices are pretty typical, where's the all-you-can-watch subscription plan? The all-you-can-listen model is one of the key values of Zune or PlaysForSure services like Napster and Urge not to mention NetFlix. I'd probably scrap my premium channel cable plan if I could get an unlimited subscription to XBL Video Marketplace.

I'd also like to see more content pricing tiers. Owning a 45 minute CSI for $2 seems pretty fair. But $2 for an 11 minute Space Ghost Coast to Coast seems overpriced. And while I'm making requests, how about making it easy to buy an entire season of a given show – both from a pricing perspective (i.e. a discount for buying an entire season) as well as a user experience perspective (i.e. one click to buy the whole season).

So all in all, a pretty cool service with some room for improvement. The availability of significant amounts of good HD content is a MAJOR winner for this service and a great foundation to build on. Like all things XBL related, I assume Video Marketplace will evolve over time. Can't wait to see how it goes.