Morning Coffee 54

The black Xbox 360 Elite is official. Details on Gamerscore and Major Nelson.
Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games writes about XNA and the approval process for making an Xbox Live Arcade game. At the end of his post, he confirms that his team is using a “pre-pre-alpha” version of XNA Game Studio Professional. I wonder how long before that’s widely available?
Politics 2.0 Advice: When building your MySpace page, don’t use images hosted on other peoples servers. John McCain found out the hard way. (via Balloon Juice)
Speaking of Politics 2.0, you can check out the Roots Project, described as “a social networking site for people with progressive values, allowing them to form their own groups, sharing information and best practices nationally while acting together locally.” (via firedoglake)

Morning Coffee 53

The Virtual PC 2007 virtual video card seems to max out @ 1600 x 1200 resolution. Given that the two screens on my main dev workstation are 1200×1600 (i.e. portait mode) and 1680×1050, it means I can’t run VPC in full screen on my dev box. I can get close on the widescreen monitor, but I like writing code on the portain monitor better. Luckily, I can use remote desktop instead the built in VPC display window in order to get full screen on either monitor.
Soma announces the aquisition and immediate (i.e. free) availability of Teamplain web client for VSTS as part of Visual Studio’s 10th birthday. We’re also “publishing the Orcas Wave (Orcas + Rosario) roadmap for VSTS.” I’ll be interested to see the reaction to that. Mike’s reaction to the schedule was: “That’s insane”.
THe XNA tools just keep coming. Allegorithmic’s MaPZone texture creation tool is free to XNA developers. Actually, it looks like it’s free for everyone, as a carrot to upgrade to their procedural texture tool ProFX. Still, free tools are still free. (via Michael Klucher)
Can I get 1200U of rackspace, to go? Apparently, yes. (via Half My Brain)
Watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. Wow, is there a better show on TV right now? (yes, one: Lost. But that’s it) When it ended, my wife said “We have to wait until 2008 for a new episode? That sucks”. I couldn’t agree more.

Morning Coffee 52

I finally found a use for the free SOA book I got from attending that Thomas Erl workshop. I’m using it to prop up one end of my daughter’s mattress while she’s sick so she can sleep better.
Jeff Tash states axiomatically that CASE has evolved into Enterprise Architecture. I agree with his points about why software construction isn’t like manufacturing, but he seems to be describing BDUF rather than EA. I’m anti-BDUF too, but why blame EA? (via John deVadoss)
Joe McKendrick comments on my SaaS/SOA post and wonders if SOA should stand for “SOA Oriented Architecture”. He also writes that most organizations these days don’t have an SOA, they have an AOS, “Agglomeration Of Services”. So true, so true.
JD Meier talks up the new VSTS guidance available on CodePlex. Looks like some good stuff in there. I like how the p&p guys are moving from documents to wikis to deliver their guidance.
I’ve held off on getting the HD-DVD drive for my Xbox, but I think I’m going to cave soon, where soon == about two months. That’s when The Matrix Trilogy is released on HD-DVD. Right around my birthday too, how convienent.

Morning Coffee 51

Visual Studio for DB Professionals – my favorite new part of the Visual Studio – won a JOLT award. Congrats to the Data Dudes! (via Knowing.NET)
When they’re older, I’d like to send my kids to Tinkering School. Come to think of it, I’d like to go with them to Tinkering School. According to Geekdad, they’re looking helping others set up their own Tinkering Schools. I wonder if Jules would be down to help me run one?
Sandboxie is a sandbox environment for your windows based PC. Basically, it traps writes to the filesystem and registry and stores them in a seperate file that is easily tossed away. Sort of like virtual machine differencing drives, but for your host machine. I’ll have to check it out. I wonder how it compares to Microsoft’s recent aqusition Softricity? (via Larkware News)
I didn’t realize Bug Bash had an external website. As per the about page, Bug Bash started “a comic strip in the company newsletter of a large northwest software company…[who's] name rhymes with ‘Microsoft’.” It is a hilarious Dev/IT focused comic strip from the same guy who writes Mr. Cranky. Subscribed. (via Coding Horror)

Morning Coffee 50

Nick Carr on net neutrality: “Protocol is neutral. Infrastructure isn’t.” This is a more complicated issue than it appears on the surface.
Nick Malik on enterprise architecture: “Enterprise Architecture is not about ‘building solutions right’. Enterprise Architecture is about ‘building the right solutions’.
If there had been a good quote on Nicholas Allen’s blog today, then I could declare it “Quote a Nick” day. Alas, his posting on how to respond to GetProperty isn’t very quotable.
Hot on the heels of the new GAT CTP is the new Software Factories Toolkit CTP from Clarius. Among other new features is a Recipe Designer. Having mucked around in the Recipe XML, this is A Good Thing^TM (via Larkware)
Politics 2.0 Watch: Phil de Vellis – the guy that made “Vote Different“, the Hillary Clinton/Apple 1984 video mashup – said he made said video in part because he “wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process”. Furthermore, “This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.” Personally, Bush as Big Brother would have been more appropriate, but I think the video got more attention becuase it cast Hillary in that role.

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The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion.