Caps' Season Ends

I should be mad. Angry. Furious even.

The Capitals season ended tonight in large part due to what I think was a horrific non call in the second period. The on-air commentators were stunned that the officials allowed the goal after the Flyers Patrick Toresen took Caps' goaltender Huet out of the play by body checking Shaone Morrison into him. Sami Kapanen had the whole net to shoot at and didn't miss. The NHL quickly trotted out an excuse justification for the call, but what else are they going to say. "Yep, the officials blew the call. It only decided game 7, no big deal"?

As I said, I should be pretty upset. Especially after what sounded like a poorly called game four (no comment from me - I didn't see the game).

However, I can't help but think back to the last Friday in November when the Caps had the worst record in the league @ 6-14-1 and had just promoted their minor league affiliate's coach to the big leagues. If you had told me then - almost exactly five months ago - that the Caps would go 37-17-7 over the remaining 3/4ths of the season, win the division in their last game and take battle back from a 3-1 series deficit to force a game seven, I would have wondered what you were smoking.

This season has been a gift for Caps fans and I've relished the few games I've gotten to see, even the one that sent us home.

Furthermore, even though they lost, these playoffs are a promise of future success. I tell my kids all the time that the only way to get good at something is to work hard while you're bad at it. Playoff hockey is no different. Most of the Caps had little or no playoff experience going into this series and it really showed thru the first three games. But they kept at it and played much better over the last four games of the series. They went 2-2 in those games, but the two losses went to overtime. A little more luck (or better officiating) and the Caps are headed to Pittsburgh instead of the golf course. 

Speaking of Pittsburgh, look back at the Penguin's performance in the playoffs last year. Like the Caps, Pittsburgh is loaded with young talent that were thin on playoff experience. Also like the Caps, they went home after the first round. However, unlike the Caps, they only managed one win against an Ottawa team they had beaten three times down the stretch in the regular season. Furthermore, when facing elimination, the Penguins laid a goose egg. However, as much as I hate to complement the Penguins, things are very different this year. Here's hoping the early playoff exit has a similar effect on the Caps.

Bumping around my music collection for a song that captured my mood, I came across Getting Better from Tesla's debut album.

All that rain, outside my window
But I'll live on I know
Its gettin' better every day
Soon the sun will shine, through my window
When it's gonna come
You know I really, couldn't say
But I know, it's gettin' better every day

Swapping "season" for "day" kills the rhythm and rhyme, but it captures how I feel.

Thank you Washington Capitals for a great season. I look forward to many more to come.

Thank you Bruce Boudreau for jumping in the deep end unafraid and turning this season around.

Thanks you Washington fans for turning out in such force. Who would have thought the Verizon Center would be considered "most electric arena"?

Finally, thank you to Ted Leonsis for enduring the criticism, for turning Washington DC into a hockey town and for ensuring I'll be able to wear my #8 Ovechkin jersey until my kids are in high school.

'rents Rock the Red

My brother saw this picture on The Peerless Prognosticator and noticed something cool.

Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images

Those are my parents, screaming their head off after Brashear scored in game one. I especially like my mom rockin' the old school Caps gear.

Flyers Knot Series @ One

Ever hear the phrase "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all"? That's about how I feel about the Caps effort in this afternoon's loss to the Flyers.

There are two possible explanations for today's game:

1. After going 11-1 to finish the season and coming from behind in the third period of game one, the Caps were just emotionally drained and couldn't get up for today's game.
2. The Flyers have figured out how to shut the Caps down completely.

Personally, I think it's explanation #1. If it's #2, it's gonna be a short series.

I had written a bunch of observations, but go read Japers instead. He hit all the points I was going to and more.

Update - I almost forgot, good to see Patrick Thoresen (the Flyer who took a Mike Green Slapshot to the groin Friday) wasn't as seriously hurt as initially thought.

Caps Win Game One With a Three Goal Third

OK, I'll admit it. When the Caps were down 4-2 after two I started having, you know, unsure thoughts. Thoughts like:

"We should be proud to have even made the playoffs".

"It's a young team, they're just getting started, this year doesn't matter much".

Oh me of little faith. :)

The Caps took game one of their best-of-seven series with the Flyers in fairly dramatic fashion, scoring three goals in the third period, including a nifty steal by Ovechkin for the game winner. Game winning goal, assist and eight hits on a supposedly more physical team == quite a first playoff game for Alex the Great.

I'm sure folks that more regularly blog the Caps than I do will recap the game better than I will. Peerless Prognosticator already has and I'm sure Japers will by tomorrow. But here are a few of my thoughts.

• The stats say we did well in the faceoff circle, winning 58% (36 of 62). However, their first goal was scored when the Flyers got a clean faceoff win in our end, so I was acutely attuned to every faceoff loss from that point forward. My gut impression was that we hadn't done as well as we did.
• Remember, I don't get to see the Caps very often. So it was kinda surreal to see a Caps team able to cycle the puck down low so well. The Flyers seems fairly helpless to stop us.
• On the other hand, we didn't seem to do so well getting the puck out of our own zone. On Philly's second goal, we managed to get it out of the zone, but turned it over in the neutral zone which lead to a 3-on-2.
• With the exception of the second half of the second (where the Flyers scored three times in under four minutes), I thought the Caps out played the Flyers most of the way. The third period was especially good for the Caps. Not only did they score three, the held the Flyers to a mere three shots, and NONE after Ovechkin scored what turned out to be the game winner. My mom always says a two goal lead is the most dangerous lead in hockey. that sure was true tonight.
• Both Ovechkin and Brashear showed great patience on their goals. There's a great picture of Ovechkin waiting for Biron to commit over @ Off Wing Opinion.
• The refs pretty much let them skate. There was what I thought was a missed tripping call at one point and my brother pointed out Richards was standing in Huet's way in the crease on Briere's second goal, but frankly it was such a pretty pass I doubt Huet could have gotten it. Caps do need to do a better job clearing their crease.
• There's a bit of a controversy surrounding the Caps' fourth goal. The Caps were on the power play and Green unleashed a shot that hit Flyer's winger Thoresen in the groin. The refs didn't whistle the play dead and the Caps scored while Thoresen writhed on the ice in pain. Apparently, the rules are that you don't blow the whistle unless the player's life is in danger, so it looks like a good non-call. But I'm guessing Philly fan doesn't agree.

Game two, Sunday 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific. You'll know where I'll be.

Morning Coffee 161

• Huge perk of the new job: new hardware. I had to give up my Dell workstation but I got a Lenovo T61p dual core widescreen laptop, an HP dc7800 dual monitor quad core desktop and a Polycom CX700 IP phone. I'm really digging the Lenovo's integrated fingerprint reader - no more password login - but I'm most impressed with their integrated driver management software. Sure beats the heck out of hunting for dozens of updated drivers all over the place like most vendors for you to.
• Minor downside to all my new toys: I spent most of my first week on the job installing and configuring said new toys.
• Caps will face the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs which starts Friday. I have a feeling that I'll be feeling poorly Friday around 3pm and have to head home early. :)

DyLang Stuff

• Apparently, Michael Foord isn't getting enough exposure on this blog. :) He left a comment to remind me to mention the IronPython URLs link blog he writes along with Mark Rees and Seo Sanghyeon.
• Speaking of Michael, his employer Resolver Systems just launched a new product: Resolver One Quant.
• Still speaking of Michael, he's quoted in the InternetNews article Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi posts a preview of his spare time project "Silverlight on Rails". This RoR plugin lets you declaratively specify if you want your RoR controller code to be accessed remotely via AJAX and run on the server or if you want that code to be downloaded to the client and run in SilverLight. Very cool stuff.

Other Stuff

• Don Syme provides some insight into the F# producization process. There's going to be an update to the "Research release" later this month and a CTP of the "Product release" later this summer (Brian McNamara has the CTP details). I am looking forward to these releases, though I'll probably be too busy w/ IPy to experiment much with them.
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki continues his adventures with F# with a look at tuples, records and discriminated unions. Of the three, I find discriminated unions the most interesting since there isn't anything like it in other languages I've used.
• Gregori and Chris both announce the release of Unity 1.0. Congrats guys! But if I don't have time to hack around with the latest F# release, you can imagine I won't be getting to Unity any time soon...
• Jeff Atwood recommends you build your application UI first. Furthermore, he does a good job selling the value of paper prototyping as well as introducing the concept of PowerPoint prototyping. Money quote: "You don't want something too powerful."
• Via LiveSide I discovered James Hamilton's blog. Normally, hardware infrastructure isn't really my bag, but I find his ideas around using ISO standard shipping containers as modular data center building blocks fascinating. For example, check out this post that suggests sticking modular data centers in condos would be cheaper than building data centers!Subscribed.
• Speaking of ISO, you may have heard Open Office XML was ratified as an ISO standard. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around this, but Miguel de Icaza lists of what he considers major community wins from the standardization process. Anything that "pushed Microsoft into more open directions" is a good thing IMO.

Rock the Red

Japers says all there needs to be said: CONQUE(RED)!

With a 3-1 win over the Panthers, coupled with a Hurricanes' 4-3 loss to the same Panthers the night before, the Washington Capitals are the Southeast Division champions.

These words are music to my ears: Capitals Playoff Tickets On Sale Now!!!

The win was their 7th straight, and they went 14-4 since the trade deadline @ the end of February. They finished the season 43-31-8 after starting the season 6-14-1. That's a 20 game swing (from 8 games under .500 to 12 games over) in 61 games. That's frakking amazing. Had the Caps played at that clip all season, they would have ended up with around 109 points, which would have been good enough for first in the east, though still short of Detriot's 113 points (and they still have a game to play). Ovechkin isn't the only Cap who should be a shoo-in for a trophy. Coach Bruce Boudreau should be a lock for the Adams.

I just spoke to my parents, who were at the game and have almost no voice left after no doubt screaming their frakking heads off or chanting M-V-P in the stands. I also spoke to my brother, who lives in 'Canes country these days but was on his way back home from England. Until he talked to my father earlier today, he didn't even know the 'Canes had lost last night. He sounded slightly stunned, but that might be a by-product of being on a plane all day.

What an amazing year. Can't wait to see what they do in the playoffs.

Go Caps Go. Rock the Red.

Morning Coffee 160

I took most of last week between jobs and have spent much of this week getting machines setup, access to builds, etc. Furthermore, RSS Bandit ate my feedlist and I am still soldiering on sans mobile phone so I was pretty much unconnected for about a week and a half.

IPy Stuff

• Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to configure a web site project in VS08 to use Dynamic Silverlight’s development web server Chiron. I looked at turned it into an exported template, but I think the Start Options are stored in the suo file and I’m not sure how to include that in the template. Maybe it could be set w/ a macro or at worst a GAX recipe?
• If you’re a regular reader, you might as well get used to the name “Michael Foord”. He’s a developer @ Resolver Systems, makers of the IPy based Resolver One app/spreadsheet hybrid I’ve written about before. He’s also the author of the upcoming IronPython in Action book and the maintainer of Planet IronPython and the IronPython Cookbook. I’m going to try very hard to only link to Michael at most once per day. Frankly, that’ll be tough.
• Today’s Michael Foord Link: Michael turned his PyCon talk on IPy + SL2 into a series of articles entitled IronPython & Silverlight 2 Tutorial with Demos and Downloads.
• Ken Levy (who now sits just down the hall from me) clued me into the 1.0 release of IronPython Studio, which is a free IDE based on the VS08 Shell for IronPython (based on code from the VS SDK). Big new feature in this release is support for the integrated VS08 Shell, which means it’ll snap into your existing VS08 installation (well, not express) rather than forcing you to install the 300 MB isolated shell.

Other Stuff

• Caps had a BIG win last night when they needed it most. Now they’re tied with Carolina for the SE division lead, but they lose the tiebreaker so unfortunately, they can’t make the playoffs without help. ‘Canes have to head back home last night to play Tampa Bay, they have to win tonight and Friday to clinch. Loss in either gives the Caps control of their own destiny. Caps are only one game back of Ottawa, Boston and Philly, none of whom have played well down the stretch. It does mean I have to root for the frakking Penguins to beat Philly, twice.
• Now that I'm in a job where I'll be traveling occasionally, I really appreciated Scott Hanselman's travel tips, though I'm not sure "Don't look like a schlub" is in the cards for me.
• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Scott Guthrie blogged that the ASP.NET MVC Source Code is available on CodePlex. The project name is “aspnet” not “aspnetmvc” which makes me wonder if they might release the source to more ASP.NET stuff over time.
• Speaking of Scott Guthrie, today he blogged about unit testing in SilverLight. Jeff Wilcox appears to have the definitive post on the subject, including links to the SilverLight testing framework (it’s included in the SL Controls source code release). He also provides a prebuilt “SilverLight Test” project template for easy download. Personally, I really like the in-browser test runner. I wonder how hard it would be to hook that up to DySL so you could write your tests in IPy? (given that IPy doesn’t have attributes, I’m guessing there’d be at least a bit of work involved in making this happen)
• Speaking of SilverLight, apparently the next version of Windows Mobile (i.e. 6.1) will support it. Since I'm in the market for a new phone anyway, I'm thinking of getting one of these. Also, it's nice to see a marketing site for WM 6.1 using Silverlight instead of Flash like WM 6.0 marketing site does.(via LiveSide)
• Ted Neward turns the news that MSFT is releasing XAML under the OSP into a long and fascinating history lesson that is well worth the read. I’m going to skip commenting on it, beyond advising you dear reader to read this if you haven’t already, except to wonder: how many sides does a “Redmondagon” have?

Morning Coffee 157

• My Xbox 360 started flashing the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Friday. <sigh> I'm not going to have much time to play in the next week, so it's not the end of the universe, but I did have to dig an old DVD player out of the garage for interim duty.
• My Caps really stepped in it over the weekend dropping two games they had to have and by most reports (aka according to my dad) that they dominated most of the way. Caps Playoff Math isn't as dire as say Clinton's Nomination Math, but they are three games back of the Hurricanes with twelve to play.
• Ted Neward has a pretty good F# overview article in the most recent MSDN Magazine. I say pretty good because I wonder if someone with no functional programming experience will "get it". As much as I like F# and functional programming, I think some of the basic concepts don't pass Don Box's two beer test.
• Speaking of Ted, somehow his feed fell off my radar (bad DevHawk!) and I missed several great posts like Modular Toolchains (note to Ted, check out A Research C# Compiler), Why we need both static and dynamic in the same language (note to self, check out Cobra) and The Fallacies Remain.... (recently, I'm the guy shouting about risks).
• Speaking of MSDN Magazine, have you seen their new site redesign? I can't find any announcement of it, but man the site looks great.
• If you missed MIX, the sessions are all online already. That was fast.
• John Lam blogs about the availability of the Dynamic Silverlight bits. Apparently, Dynamic Silverlight includes more recent bits than the Silverlight 2 SDK, which does includes binaries and tools for IronPython, IronRuby and Managed JScript (quickstart). So you can get started with dynamic languages on Silverlight using the SL SDK alone, but I expect that the Dynamic Silverlight bits will be updated more regularly than the SDK.

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 147

• My son Patrick turns five today. The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here's a picture of the two of them at Patrick's party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
• If my son is five, it means this blog is also five - I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy's big day comes around.
• Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity...yet. Personally, I'd like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I'm not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports "Analysts say FISA will suffice", maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
• After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they're 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they're still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
• Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft's developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it's a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they're minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
• The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
• Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on "Unleashing the Creative Community". XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would "announce full details on, and ... vision for, opening XNA creations to the community" sometime this year. I'm guessing this is said announcement.
• Speaking of Xbox, there's a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
• Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the "final release" make it sound like they won't be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
• Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p's new IoC container. I've seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn't cover any Unity specifics. :(
• MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I've worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I'm excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
• I don't know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet's user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
• Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
• In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I'm not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

Morning Coffee 144

• I finished Mass Effect last night. I definitely need to play thru that one again, though I'll probably wait until the new Bring Down the Sky DLC ships next month.
• Caps won again last night, improving to 20-10-4 since changing coaches at Thanksgiving. They're now at 57 points, taking the lead in the SE division with a full game on Carolina, Atlanta and Florida. Still a ways to go - 27 games left in the regular season - and things are far from "sewn up" but we're a damn sight better off than we were in November.
• Speaking of a horserace, looks like Clinton and Obama are in one after Super Tuesday. Their estimated delegate counts are basically tied. On the other side of the aisle, McCain opened up what is probably insurmountable lead - even though he has the right-wing media stars and Christian leaders against him. Money quote of the day:

“The real story of the night, when you look at their rallies and their turn-out numbers, is that the Dems have two strong candidates either of whom could lead a united party to victory. Forget the gaseous platitudes: in Dem terms, their choice on Super Duper Tuesday was deciding which candidate was Super Duper and which was merely Super. Over on the GOP side, it was a choice between Weak & Divisive or Weaker & Unacceptable. Doesn’t bode well for November.”
- Mark Steyn, National Review 
(via Carpetbagger Report, lest you think I regularly read National Review)

• Charlie Calvert is starting a new series on the future of C#. First up: Dynamic Lookup. Probably most interesting is the news that the DLR "will be the infrastructure on which the C# team implements dynamic lookup". Does this mean C# will target the DLR? Sure sounds like it. I think it's a good addition, but I'm not a fan of the proposed syntax. (via Bitter Coder)
• Brian McNamara saw me present @ LangNET and sent me a link to his blog. He's building up a monadic parser combinator library in C# 3.0. This is basically the same concept that FParsec implements, though C#'s syntax is much less attractive than F#'s for this kind of code. However, Brian does a very good job explaining why monadic parser combinators are useful and making the idea accessible to the C# programmer (i.e. you don't have to learn F# or Haskell to understand what he's talking about). He also points to Luke Hoban's C# 3.0 monadic parser implementation.

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 142 - Wishful Catchup Edition

• After spending most of the last four days away from my desk, I was planning on a quiet day to catch up on a variety of things. Then I heard the oh-so-minor news that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for almost $45 billion. Hasn't been much reaction on the dev, architecture, politics and hockey-oriented blogs I read, but you can get a ton of reactions on TechMeme.
• Lost is back. Finally. I stayed up late last night reading Lostpedia, catching up on Lost Missing Pieces and the Find 815 ARG.
• Alex The Great had four goals and an assist in last night's victory. Coughing up three goal lead and letting the Canadiens tie the game in the last 30 seconds isn't encouraging, but a win is a win. The Caps are currently one game behind the SE leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eight seed Rangers. Alex was named first star for January.
• Ted Neward has a nice summary of Lang.NET by day: one, two and three. I wonder if my talk qualifies for the exception to Ted's rule that "A blog is not a part of your presentation, and your presentation is not part of your blog". I had 15 minutes to discuss something I've written about over ten posts  (so far).
• John Lam points to the latest DLR hosting spec. I'm much more interested in the DLR code generator, but at least the hosting interface is documented.
• Scott Hanselman has a nice post on fluent interfaces. Note to self, find out if Beautiful Soup works with IronPython.
• I wonder if the VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy works with F#? (via Sam Gentile)
• Chris Tavares has an extensive post Deconstructing ObjectBuilder? I've poked around inside OB before, but I'm really looking forward to Unity (also via Sam Gentile)
• NVIDIA finally updated the drivers for the video card in my Tecra M4. That only took a year.

Caps 6, Penguins 5 (SO)

NHL.com Game Summary NHL.com Game Recap

It wasn't a pretty win, but I'll take the two points just all the same. Especially given the long history Washington has of losing to the Penguins - they had lost the past six meetings before tonight. Japers' roundup mirrors my own thoughts, though On Frozen Blog's roundup was funnier - they made a drinking game out of the number of times the on-air announcers referenced Sid the Kid. Certainly, there's no love lost for Crosby among Caps fans, but the amount of on-air time spent discussing an injured player bordered on ridiculous - Sid the Kid was mentioned 27 times by OFB's count + five in the post game. Worst was probably Malkin's first goal - he hadn't even stopped celebrating and the announcer was already talking about Crosby.

Caps were pretty dreadful on special teams tonight. Pens had three goals on eight penalties while the Caps had only went one for six. However, the penalty kill came thru in overtime overtime with the Caps down 5-3 for 1:07. The Caps won both defensive zone face offs and blocked four shots - Quintin Laing had three of those blocks - and kept the Pens from registering a shot on goal for the entire power play. That was money. If they gave out game stars to unsung heroes, Laing would have gotten one.

For all the great young talent on the Caps, there's got to be real concern about goaltending. I love Olie the Goalie, but he didn't get it done tonight. The Penguins had a grand total of 15 shots (14 if you don't count the one from beyond the blue line with one second left in overtime). 5 goals on 15 shots == a pretty crappy save percentage. Malkin's first goal was very impressive skating, but he didn't so much shoot as throw the puck at the net. And letting Talbot's  open the scoring by stuffing the puck in at the post was weak sauce as it were. I'm not so much worried about it for this season, but with Kolzig talking retirement as his struggles, I'm not sure who the Caps have in the pipeline between the pipes. 

It sure was fun getting to watch an entire Caps game in its entirety with my family. Patrick and Riley watched most of it. Patrick wanted to know who the bad guys were - he figured it out after I pointed out the Penguins were wearing black...like Darth Vader. :) Julie wanted to know how I'd handle it if Patrick grew up to be a professional hockey player, but was drafted by Pittsburgh. My love for Paddy Boy far exceeds my hatred for the Penguins, though that's the only scenario I could imagine rooting for the Penguins. My boy Patrick, however, protested and said he wanted be a Capital and play with Alex the Great. Patrick will be 18 by the time Ovechkin's contract is over. It could happen. Guess I gotta teach him to skate!

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 138

• In writers strike news, the WGA has made side deals with Worldwide Pants (aka Dave Letterman's company), United Artists (aka Tom Cruise's company) and The Weinstein Company (previously known as Miramax). The WGA strategy of divide and conquer seems to me making slow progress. Update: The Weinstein Company was founded by Miramax's founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein after they left Miramax. But Miramax is still around. Thanks to GrantC for the correction.
• They're still two games under .500, but the Caps completed a season sweep of the Eastern Conference leading Ottawa Senators last night. They're only 3 games out of the top spot in the (admittedly very weak) Southeast division
• Big tech news today isn't coming from MSFT-land. Sun is buying MySQL and Oracle is (finally) buying BEA. Both deals seem like pretty significant culture clashes, though Sun/MySQL seems like the better fit of the two.
• There's a new draft of Service Modeling Language 1.1 available. If you'll recall, this used to be called the System Definition Model, part of the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Hadn't heard anything from those folks in a while, good to see they're making progress.
• Stephan Tolksdorf dropped me a line to tell me he was able to "vastly simplify" FParsec, and as a result it now runs on the current version of F#. Awesome!
• Speaking of F#, Scott Hanselman has a new F# podcast, this time interviewing Dustin Campbell. Check out all of Dustin's F# posts.
• I didn't know about the "Copy as Path" feature in Vista. Why is it hidden?
• I was a big fan of the WDS deskbar shortcut feature - a feature that is missing in Vista. Enter Start++ by Brandon Paddock, which adds shortcuts to Vista's search box. It also supports "iPhone apps" and scripting. But JScript? Where's the PowerShell love, Brandon?
• EA released the source code to the original SimCity under the GPL. Bil Simser is digging into the code and it looks like he's going to port it to XNA. (via Ozymandias)
• Wes Haggard has published the source code to CodeHTMLer on CodePlex. He took two updates from me: the F# language definition as well as the ability to choose the font when not using PRE tags.

Superman Signed

Big news yesterday for Washington Capitals fans. Alex "the Great" Ovechkin (aka Superman) signed the biggest contract in NHL history - $124 million over 13 years. According to Eric McErlain, that's an average of over $300k per hour of ice time and $5k per shift. Nice work if you can get it.

Actually, all kidding aside, this is a great move for the Caps.

The financial bar was set last summer when Sid "the Kid" Crosby signed a 5-year $43.5 million contract extension - about $8.7 million a season. Since then, Caps fans have had to suffer thru rumor after rumor that our man Alex wasn't going to be playing in DC much longer. However, the suggestion that Ovechkin would be leaving never made any sense to me. He was slated to become a restricted free agent this summer - meaning the Caps would have the opportunity to match any offer. Furthermore, the max any player can get under the new CBA is 20% of the salary cap - currently about $50 million. So it was pretty obvious Ovechkin was going to stay a Cap and get paid somewhere between $8.7 and $10 a season. 

More impressive than the dollars is the length of the contract. Not only is it the wealthiest in the league, it's the second longest (Islanders goalie signed a $67.5 million 15 year contract before the start of last season). This contract means Ovechkin is slated to spend at least 16 years in a Caps uniform. In this era of free agency, more often than not you end up "rooting for the laundry" since the players come and go so quickly. It's nice to know the #8 Caps jersey I got for Christmas will be relevant until the 2020's.

Also, signing Ovechkin for that long makes massive financial sense, even if some "experts" can't (won't) see the value. The salary cap increased from $39 million for the 2005-06 season to $50 million this season. Can the league sustain 13% revenue growth for the foreseeable future? If so, the salary cap will be in the $100 million range by the time Crosby's deal expires. Even if revenues only grow at half that rate, we're still looking at a salary cap in the low $70 millions by 2013. So Crosby will be looking to make at least $14 million and maybe as much as $20 million per season when he resigns. Viewed that way, getting Ovechkin for "only" $9.5 mil a season makes good financial sense.

Of course, the last time the Caps committed this kind of money to a superstar, it didn't work out so well. But unlike Jagr, who got his new contract before skating shift one for the Caps, we know what #8 can do while wearing the Eagle