I just installed Konfabulator as I’ve seen several people, like Scoble, blogging about it. I think I need to dig thru the widget gallery. Of the preinstalled ones, I only like the Battery Level and WiFi Signal widgets. But I really like them – as in like them enough to keep the software installed just for them. I’ve only played with it for 5 minutes, but already I am not interested in any of the interactive widgits – having a nice partially transparent graphic displaying information at a glance works for me the best.

Esp. after the launch of Halo 2, I’d love to see a Konfabulator widget with the status of my Xbox Live Friends list. Maybe something for the XboxFriends folks?

Speaking of Halo 2, I’m headed home now to do just that…

Roger Sessions, noted architectural guru, author and Microsoft Architect MVP, has posted his latest newsletter on the WS-* family of specs. In typical Roger fashion, he decides to give them his own name – WS-SCRAM with SCRAM standing for “Secure, Coordinated, Reliable Async Messages”. (I forget where, but I once heard Roger refer to “three-phase transactions” instead of the relatively standard “two-phase commit transactions”.) Roger claims MS et. al. are pushing WS-STAR where “STAR” is an acronym standing for “Secure, Transacted, Async, Reliable”. Personally, I’ve never seen it written out like a an acronym and I always thought the * in WS-* was used as a wildcard, but it is true that we are focused more on transactions than coordination. On the Longhorn DevCenter, Indigo is described as providing “secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability.”

This is actually the second time Roger’s taken on transactions in a web services architecture. His last newsletter on the topic had a much more detailed but harder to follow example. He points out that there are two related specs in this space – WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity but that he thinks only WS-BA is going to work in the long run. WS-AT requires holding locks open in the DB, which is highly unlikely between services in different trust boundaries communicating with async messaging. Am I really going to lock the records in my database while I wait for a service that I don’t trust to figure out if it is able to commit or abort? I don’t think so. Pat’s wrote a great scenario showing how unrealistic the concept of long-running transactions really are.

However, at the end of the newsletter, Roger takes Indigo to task for implementing WS-AT and not WS-BA and I don’t agree with him. While I think WS-AT shouldn’t be used in web services architectures, Indigo is also responsible for moving existing technologies like COM+ forward. Leaving out WS-AT isn’t really an option in those scenarios. As for not implementing WS-BA, I’ve got to wonder just how valuable is WS-BA? While WS-BA avoids the DB locking issue of WS-AT, it still doesn’t deal with the delegation of control. WS-BA still leaves me beholden to the decision of some outside coordinator. This seems to violate two of Don’stenets of service orientation: “Boundaries are Explicit” and “Services are Autonomous”.

I didn’t join the midnight madness, but I did pick up Halo 2 at the company store today. There was a line around the building before the store opened this morning, but by lunchtime it was down to a 15 minute wait. Like many others, I was on the multiplayer beta, but I’m guessing nothing compares to the real deal. I’m not going to get a chance to play until tonight 😦 but I sure am looking forward to it. Quick reminder – my gamertag is RayTracer, though I’ll probably start off w/ the single player campain.

I wonder how many Xbox owners called in sick today?

In trolling for HW suggestions, I forgot to mention what I’m planning on using the HW for. I’ve got a couple of things in mind:

• Public facing web/media server. Family members are constantly asking for updated pictures of Patrick. I’ve gotten tired of regularly uploading pictures to a public website for them to download. I’ve got them all on my personal machine, so it would be much easier just to expose them directly. Similarly, between our camcorder, the video functions of our digital cameras and PhotoStory, I also have quite a bit of video media to make available to the rest of my family.
• Experimental / development server. ASP.NET 2.0 is coming, so if I’m going to expose photos and/or video, I might as well take advantage of the new stuff to do it with. I’m also thinking about writing some apps for keeping track of my family tree along with my dad and cousin.
• Movie making / 3D Rendering. I was working on my garage over the weekend and I came across my old copy of 3D Studio Max. It’s up to version 7 now, so my copy of version 1.0 is way behind the times. I’ve been interested in movie making for a long time and if (when?) I get back into it I know I’ll want to do some effects work – stuff like Matrix XP. This is where the Intel P4 HT vs. AMD Athlon 64 question really comes into play. Dual core vs. 64 bits?

One thing that’s not on this list is Media Center. I’m interested in MCE05, but then yesterday MSFT and Comcast announce that they are rolling out Microsoft TV Foundation Edition in Washington state starting next week. I think, in the end, I’ll want MCE since I’d like the ability to hack my TV but for now I think I want to try out the MSTV stuff. Also, the HDTV story around MCE doesn’t look clear yet – it works with “over-the-air” HDTV, but makes no mention of cable delivered HDTV. I think the HW in this area is pretty new, but I would guess that would change in the next 6-12 months.

Update: I just spoke to Comcast regarding the MSTV functionallity. Their PVR functionallity supports both HD and non-HD programs so I’m definitely going to give that a try. Only downside – they can’t come install for a week and a half. 😦

So I’m thinking of getting some new hardware. My big question is Intel P4 w/ HT vs. AMD XP vs. AMD 64 (along with associated mobo & memory) Any suggestions?