• Mladen Prajdic has a great post on handling a database in your unit tests. He mentions NDbUnit but seems mostly to favor SQL 2005′s database snapshot feature. He’s got sample code for creating and restoring a snapshot. (via DNK)
• Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 released yesterday. Tandy Trower – GM of the Robotics group – has the details on what’s new.
• Herb Sutter has a new column in Dr. Dobbs on concurrency. First up, “building a consistent mental model for reasoning about concurrency”. Sounds like a must read column. (via LtU)
• Scott Hanselman describes “Sez You Architecture”. I wonder, do architecture ninjas get to wear a Shinobi shozoku?
• From the Not Everyone Agrees With DevHawk Dept.: Libor Soucek disagrees with me and thinks that durable messaging should be avoided. I had a hard time following Libor’s logic but needless to say, I disagree with his disagreement. He writes that one of the reasons to use DM is for “Cooperating on transaction with external system”. While multiple systems may be cooperating on a business transaction, in no way do I believe they are going to cooperate on a database transaction. But since he started talking about the DTC, I suspect we’re talking past each other. Libor, drop me a line and we can discuss further.

• Morning Coffee was canceled on Thursday and Friday on account of a kidney stone. So not fun. Luckily, it was a little one and it was alone, but I will be listening very closely to my doctor’s advice to avoid another.
• Took the kids to see Ratatouille last Tuesday and saw Transformers yesterday with my wife due to fluke babysitter luck. I liked Ratatouille, but I’m not sure it’s the 51st best movie of all time. On the other hand, major props for making a kid movie with a significant lack of toy tie-ins. Ratatouille is a better movie that Cars, but I don’t see my four year old boy trading in is Lightning McQueen toy car for a Remy the Rat. Transformers on the other hand obviously did not forgo the toy tie-ins! Still, it wasn’t bad. Kinda reminded me of The Rock with a bigger budget.
• Micahville listed DevHawk on it’s list of 69 Tech Blogs That Don’t Suck. Thanks!
• David Ing boldly writes that C# is getting fat. Or maybe it’s just big-boned. My take: no question that integrated query is a big feature that covers a lot of surface area. But given the prevalence of databases and other queriable stores, it’s critical to improving programmer productivity. Go read Todd Proebsting’s talk on Disruptive Programming Language Technologies. Two of his candidates for disruptive language technologies were Database Integration and Manipulating XML. LINQ neatly covers both.
• According to John Shewchuck, the new BizTalk Services release is available. However, when I click on the “what’s new” page, it tells me they’re experiencing technical difficulties. (Their error page is Oops.aspx. Funny!)
• Scott Hanselman has Programming Personas 2.0. Who are you? I thought I was and “Order n” Architect (the quote “Where’s the whiteboard” is spot on) but my CS background isn’t as strong as the persona’s.
• Sam Gentile is starting to dig into Concurrency and he has a great list of links that have influenced his design.

A few weeks ago, I put out the call for advice on improving my home network. I got a bunch of responses, both for and against PowerLine. I ended up upgrading my wireless network because 1) I was having laptop connectivity issues and 2) wireless equipment is so fraking cheap. I might still go PowerLine later, though I’m thinking it’s “good enough” until I really bite the bullet and run Cat5 under my house.

Yesterday, I picked up a couple of Buffalo Wireless routers: a WHR-HP-G54 and a WHR-G125. The first one has a high-powered antenna, so I hoped that would solve my range problem. Both support Wireless Distribution System (aka WDS), so the plan was to use the WHR-G125 as a repeater and/or bridge. Also, both support 3rd party firmware, a la DD-WRT and OpenWrt. In fact, I chose these models specifically because they’re listed on DD-WRT’s Supported Devices page as best range and cheapest, respectively. Best Buy had them both on sale, so together they cost around $90 and I didn’t even have to wait for them to be shipped.

I also moved my cable modem from the loft to the living room. That way, the Xbox 360 – with all the large demo and video downloads – gets the best bandwidth, typically around 8Mbit (though SpeedTest.net has clocked my connection as high as 18Mbit).

Moving the cable modem meant putting my loft desktop machine on the wireless network. At first, I used the G125 as a bridge. Getting it setup as a bridge using WDS was fairly straightforward, except that these routers only support WEP in that configuration and WEP is essentially broken.

At this point, I figured I had to either live with WEP (*BUZZ* wrong answer) or upgrade both routers with DD-WRT firmware. According to their wiki, DD-WRT firmware supports WPA for WDS. Then I remembered a third option, detailed by Scott Hanselman a few weeks back. I had been using an Xbox MN-740 wireless bridge to get my Xbox 360 on the wireless network. However, since my Xbox is hardwired now, I didn’t need it anymore. Scott’s posted about flashing the MN-740 with the firmware from the D-Link 108AG gaming adapter (they’re the same hardware under the hood) that supports WPA. It took several tries before it worked, but eventually I was able to flash the device.

So now I am using the WHR-HP-G54 as my main router and access point in the living room and the flashed MN-740 to put my loft desktop machine on the wireless WPA-secured network. That desktop has all my media and is running Vista Ultimate, so I was able to get both media sharing and the Media Center Extender working. According to the network diagnostics on Vista, the connection is fast enough to stream SD video, but not HD. So I figure I’ll still need to run some Cat5. But for now, I’m not trying to stream HD video from the machine in the loft so I figure I can wait on the Cat5.

Plus, I have the G125 to experiment with. For $35, it was cheap enough that I can upgrade it with the latest DD-WRT firmware without worrying about losing my “investment” if I brick the thing. If I get it upgraded and working, I’ll do the HP-G54 too, and be able to use the G125 as a repeater and/or bridge. Maybe that will make the network fast enough to stream HD video, but I doubt it.

Thanks to those who offered me their advice. Any of you want to come over and help run a little Cat5 under my house, beer & BBQ is on me!

As Americans prepare to celebrate the birth of our nation tomorrow, what is arguably the most corrupt administration in a generation – certainly the most corrupt administration that I can remember by far (I was four when Nixon left office) – has provided yet another stark reminder of just how unfathomably corrupt it is by commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence within hours of Libby losing the appeal to remain free while the original guilty verdict is appealed. It’s not a full pardon, but I would expect that’s coming sooner or later.

True patriots like myself will have a hard time celebrating America tomorrow. But I will, because America is bigger than this festering administration and the damage it has wrought to our safety and our reputation. I take solace in the landslide Democratic victory last November and the long-term negative effect this rouge lawless president and his freefall approval ratings is having on the Republican party.

As far as I’m concerned, Jan. 20th, 2009 can’t come soon enough.

• For the first six months of 2007, I posted 158 times in 181 days. I’m obviously off the pace I set in January of averaging a post a day, but I am averaging just under nine tenth of a post per day. Not bad. At this rate, I’ll post almost as much this year as I did the last two years combined.
• It was a great family weekend. Saturday, three of my friends helped me move an upright piano that we got used for a great price. Luckily, one of said friends is also a physics teacher, otherwise I don’t think we could have gotten that heavy thing in the truck. To say thanks, we BBQed for them Saturday evening. Then yesterday we took the kids to see a Sesame Street Live show. Both days were beautiful, which my wife greatly appreciated.
• The Caps hit the free agent market running yesterday, picking up Tom Poti (four years, $14 million) and Victor Kozlov (two years, $5 million). They weren’t the A-list free agents, but they both seem like solid pickups. According to Japer’s Rink, the Caps were about $6.5 million under the new cap minimum. These two signings just about close that gap, but it doesn’t sound like they’re done. That’s good news for Caps fans.
• Scott Guthrie continues his series on LINQ to SQL. While I’ve seen most of this before, the cool thing Scott shows is hovering over the LINQ to SQL result and bringing up the exact SQL statement in a debugger window. That’s pretty cool.
• Nick Malik is now “Mr. SOA” inside MSIT. As you might imagine, I’ll be working with him fairly closely. Actually, he’s late to a meeting with me as I type this.
• John Shewchuk announces a new version of BizTalk Services coming soon. The big new feature is access control for services exposed via the BizTalk Services. If you can’t wait, you can try out the new stuff in their pre-production environment right now, before it’s live. Is this a beta of a beta?
• Soma announces the MSDN Small Business Developer Center. I took a quick look thru the site. Strangely enough, it doesn’t cover Dynamics – Microsoft’s business software primarily targeting small and medium size businesses.
• Ted Neward called object/relational mapping the “Vietnam of Computer Science“. David Chappell gives us our next war / technology analogy, declaring that the REST vs. WS-* war is over, ending in a truce like the Korean war rather than “crushing victory for one side”.
• Like Jeff Atwood, I didn’t realize About Face has been updated, twice. I am a huge fan of the first edition, but Jeff calls About Face 3 “the best edition of this classic yet”. I just ordered a copy for myself.
• David McGhee transcribed a fantastic session with Dr. Don Ferguson at the Australian Architecture Forum on SOA/ESB integration in the real world. Go read the whole thing. Udi Dahan pulls out the quote “there is no such thing as a centralized ESB.” Amen to that. My other favorite quotes from this discussion is “The temptation is often to get everything in a repository, but often you cannot rely on people to put everything in the registry” and “there is sometimes the “Highlander” philosophy of there can be only one service”. If you’re design depends on centralization and/or significant change in human behavior, it’s doomed from the start. Frankly, it’s amazing how often that happens.
• In response to my What is the Rails Question post, Hartmut Wilms wonders why “the .NET community (for the most part) ignores Open Source Projects”. I wonder the same thing, though I don’t think you can lump the whole .NET community together on this. While some parts of the community ignore anything they can’t download from MSDN, other parts strongly embrace open source projects.