I’m a software guy, so here’s a couple of home networking questions I’m hoping one of you readers can answer. My internet connection (cable) comes in upstairs in the loft (aka where all my computer stuff lives). My TV and Xbox are in the living room on the opposite side of the house, downstairs. Between the distance and general house interference, the network perf in my living room stinks, with both my laptop and Xbox.

I’d basically resigned myself to running Cat 5 cable from my living room to the loft, which is a pain because it would have to run thru the crawlspace and up the side of the house to the loft and punch in thru the outside wall. Frankly, I haven’t been able to make the time commitment to do that yet.

I was checking out the Linksys site and right there on the homepage is a promotion for their Powerline products. Now that would be MUCH easier than running Cat 5. But how good is it, really? They claim “Data rates up to 200Mbps”, which is plenty fast if they really reach that throughput. Anyone out there had any experience with this Powerline stuff? For around $200 and getting to skip running cable under the house, it’s probably worth it for me to take a shot. Worse that happens is that I have to take it back.

Regardless if I use powerline or run Cat 5, that solves the Xbox problem but I still want a stronger wireless signal on that side of the house. So for my second question, what’s the word on multiple access points? Should I set up multiple wireless APs or should I set up a repeater somewhere in between to boost the signal. I’m actually looking at getting a new wireless router/AP anyway, so maybe I could just get one of the ones with some type of range boost. I currently have a now-discontinued MN-700 (what do you want, I’m a company man) so it’s a good time to get a new AP anyway.

Another option to the wireless strength question is the AuraGrid, which tunnels your wireless antenna signal over the coax cable in your home to give you multiple antennas all over the house. So I could easily add a wireless antenna wherever there’s a cable jack. Anyone have any experience with that product?

Anyone who wants to give me free advice, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line. Thanks in advance.

• The Washington Capitals
  
  unveil their new jersey tonight, though they have a picture on their web site. I’ve got mixed feelings, though I’m trying to reserve judgement until I see it “in action”. I like that they’re back to the traditional Caps colors. But the Caps have jersey change fatigue. They only had the screaming eagle jersey for twelve years, and they swapped out the blue jersey for the black one (that started life as a third jersey) somewhere along the line.
• Lawrence Lessig hangs up his IP spurs to go after the deep corruption of the political process. He points out that after a decade focusing on IP, he’s learned all he is going to about these issues so he decided (among other reasons) that it was time to start fresh learning about something new. I keep telling my kids that “always keep learning” is one of the secrets to life. This move by Lessig is the embodiment of that principle. Good for him. (via John Lam)
• My old team keep chugging along. They’ve recently added “special coverage” sections on Agile Development and Enterprise Architecture.
• Miguel de Icaza details the three week “hackathon” (his words, not mine) they went thru to get a working version of Silverlight on Mono – aka Moonlight – in time for ReMix 07 in Paris. It’s an impressive engineering achievement, to say the least. Also, it’s nice to see the folks from Microsoft France invite Miguel to come be a part of their keynote. (via Larry O’Brien)
• Rob Bazinet points outVisualSVN in response to my question about SVN clients other than Tortoise. Like AnkhSVN, VisualSVN snaps into Visual Studio. However, where AnkhSVN is a native SVN implementation, VisualSVN depends on Tortoise. Scott Bellware wrote “VisualSVN takes a novel approach to bringing SVN into the Visual Studio IDE… it brings Tortoise into the IDE!”. So it still sounds like Tortoise is the SVN client everyone cares about.
• Scott Berkun details a variety of immature development and management methodologies, including Development By Denial (DBD), Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) and my personal favorite Asshole Driven development (ADD). Scott Hanselman suggests looking around and making sure you’re not said asshole. I tend to be somewhat…how should I say it?…strong willed about the direction projects I work on should take. My current project is about driving a paradigm shift to service orientation, and I don’t think you can’t drive that kind of change without being somewhat strong willed. It’s a thin line between strong willed and asshole and hopefully I come down on the right side of that line more often than not.

• Brad Wilson blogs about SvnBridge, a tool that lets you use Subversion clients like TortoiseSVN to talk to Team Foundation Server. While I think that’s cool, I wonder is anyone interested in subversion clients other than TortoiseSVN? For example, will people choose AnkhSVN instead of the Team Explorer Client?
• Speaking of TortoiseSVN, I wonder if those guys are interested in building a TortoiseTFS project? I did find two other TFS shell extensions projects: Dubbelbock TFS and Turtle, though neither appears as full featured as Tortoise.
• Scott Guthrie details VS08′s multi-targeting support. Of course, the three versions of the .NET Framework VS08 can target all use the same underlying runtime, which probably made it easier to build.
• Michael Platt refactors Don Box’s original tenets of service orientation so he can include some information about how these services get built.
• Scott Hanselman tackles the tricky question of assembly granularity.
• PowerShell Analyzer is now available for purchase. Among other things your $59 gets you, besides a 50% savings, is “Feature request priority“. That’s pretty cool. I wonder how many other micro-ISV’s take the approach of “pay me now and you get to help me pick some of the new features.”
• Brandon LeBlanc
  
  writes about dual monitor support in Vista. I’m loving the dual monitor support, though I have a somewhat strange setup. I keep my primary monitor rotated in portrait mode, which is great for reading and writing. I typically use my second monitor for blogs and mail. I even wrote a custom multi-mon wallpaper utility so I could easily generate new wallpapers for my non-standard monitor layout, including bitmap rotate support. If there’s interest, I can post it. (via Sam Gentile)
• Nick Malik continues to write about Mort, with the usual response from the usual folks. I liked his point that “You cannot fight economics with education”, but otherwise I’m staying out of this discussion.
• In the same vein, Martin Fowler writes about Technical Debt. I completely agree with his hypothesis that short changing design may save time in the short term but will cost much more in the long term. However, the problem is that the people who are making the tradeoff – i.e. the people paying for the project NOT the people building the project – either don’t understand the tradeoff or are more than happy to sacrifice the long term cost for the short term gain. How are most projects measured? Being on time and on budget with the planned set of features. Very few projects – and none that I’ve ever seen – are goaled on long term maintainability. Until you can change that, this issue will continue to linger.

• My wife loves me. I’m a very lucky man.
• I’m starting to really dig Safari Books Online. Having a tablet really helps here, I can sit in bed and read and it’s ALMOST like reading a real book. Is there an offline experience? Something like the NYTimes WPF Reader app would be killer.
• I’m not a Twitter guy, but I like the idea of using it to publish CI results. Not quite as cool as using the Ambient Orb, but close. (via DotNetKicks)
• Soma details the dogfood usage of TFS in Developer Division. Sorta interesting if you’re into knowing that stuff. Brian Harry apparently has much more.
• I realize that linking to Pat Helland every time he writes something is fairly redundant. If you want his feed, you know where to find it. But he writes great stuff! The latest is Accountants Don’t Use Erasers, which talks about append-only computing. His point that the database is a cache of the transaction log is mind blowing, yet makes total sense.
• Bruce Payette blogs a PS DSL for creating XML documents.
• Jesus Rodriguez details WCF’s new Durable Service support in .NET 3.5. I get the need for the [DurableServiceBehavior] attribute, but do I really have to adorn each of the service methods with [DurableOperationBehavior] too? That seems redundant. Also, I wonder how this looks at the channel layer?
• Speaking of WCF’s channel layer, I recently picked up a copy of Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith. This is the first book I’ve found that has more coverage of the channel layer than the service layer, so I like it.
• Dare writes about Web3S, Windows Live’s general purpose REST protocol. Apparently, WL started with Atom Publishing Protocol, but found that it didn’t meet their needs around hierarchy and granular updates. David Ing says it’s “not that similar” to my concept of REST, but I going to read the spec before I comment.
• Scott Hanselman writes about how he learned to program and some thoughts about teaching his son. Patrick has recently started expressing interest in programming (he want’s to do what Daddy does). At four, I’m thinking I’ll start him on Scratch (though ToonTalk looks interesting). As he gets older, I was thinking about Squeak, though I’m a smalltalk noob. I really like Scott’s idea of creating a connection to the physical world via something like Mindstorms. Patrick loves Lego almost as much as his dad, so that would be cool.

Last week, I asked a REST Question: is it still REST if you don’t use HTTP? My interest in durable messaging is well documented, so I want is to see a RESTful approach combined with a durable messaging. We all know my durable messaging tool of choice, though I’d trade SSB in a second for something that provided durable duplex messaging in a standard way.

Anyway, there were some fairly interesting responses that I wanted to highlight.

Probably most interesting to the discussion at hand was John Heintz‘ comment pointing out the existence of “Waka” ,  a new transfer protocol to replace HTTP from Roy Fielding. The fact that Dr. REST is working on a new protocol that’s designed to be more RESTful than HTTP should put to bed any REST “is and only is” HTTP arguments.

Erik Johnson agrees that you can separate REST and HTTP, but he thinks I ought to call it something else. He suggests “resource-oriented” – have we created a new TLA here? Are you down with ROA, ROAD, ROD, ROP and all the other acronyms we could spawn?

Nick Malik breaks out the IFaP acronym – Identifier, Format, Protocol – and points out “Each of the successful Internet standards, from HTTP to SMTP, has an IFaP at the heart of it.” But does anyone think SMTP is RESTful? I don’t. I think standardization of IFaP’s is on par in importance with RESTfulness, but they’re orthogonal. That is to say I think Nick’s wrong – I’m guessing we’ll go a few rounds on this when he gets back from Nashville – or should I say, if he gets back? 😄

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz has been wondering about REST without HTTP the same way I have, but he doesn’t really go into detail as to why. I want durable messaging, Arnon mentions something about topic hierarchies. Couldn’t you do that with HTTP, Arnon? He also points out a new DDJ article on REST. It’s good, if high-level overview-y.

Pat Helland writes that Every Noun Can be Verbed. It’s more related to CRUD is CRAP than REST == HTTP, but it’s well worth the read. His point about using filling out a form being CRUD, but then handing the form over to someone else being an invocation of behavior is fairly eye-opening. As long as you “interpret the durn’ things with the correct semantics”, it doesn’t really matter if they’re nouns or verbs.

Last but not least, Ted Neward and Adrian Trenaman discuss SOAP vs. POX over on The Server Side. They focus too much on SOAP encoding (isn’t that dead yet?), but near the end Ted points out: “Problem is, REST assumes that you want to carry all of the state in the payload itself, and for a modern enterprise system, or, hell, even for a game, that’s not always a safe assumption.” Doesn’t address my questions about using REST without HTTP, but a very good point nonetheless.