Morning Coffee 135

  • Bill Gates does his last CES Keynote, and we announce a PC that looks like a purse?
  • News that Warner Brothers is going exclusively Blu-Ray is disappointing. However, I’m convinced that neither side will win this format war but that online downloads will trump both. Obviously, XBLM is a significant player in this space, but the market is crowding up quickly. Netflix apparently will unveil a new set-top box @ CES to let you watch HD movies via the Internet.
  • Don Syme has a roundup of posts by John Liao about F#. Mostly, WPF + F# with a couple of ASP.NET 2.0 posts and one on XML .
  • Speaking of F#, Stephan Tolksdorf has been working on an F# port of MS Research’s Parsec library called FParsec. Parsec is a “monadic parser combinator library”, something I have little experience with, so I’ve gone back to some source research on the topic, which I hope to blog at length about soon.
  • Steve Vinoski talks about serendipitous reuse in his latest Internet Computing article. I’m not a believer in reuse in the enterprise, serendipitous or otherwise, but I liked the conclusion to Steve’s article when he wrote “It’s highly ironic that many enterprise architects seek to impose centralized control over their distributed organizations. In many cases, such centralization is a sure recipe for failure.” Also, his point that “control without controlling” works sounds vaguely familiar.
  • Update: This is really Morning Coffee 136, but I don’t want to change the title since it’s part of the URL
This entry was posted by DevHawk on January 7, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged F#, REST and Reuse.

Morning Coffee 135

  • Congrats to Barack Obama for walking away with the Iowa Democratic Caucus, which set turnout records. Frankly, I’m pretty cool with any of the democratic front runners but I think Obama has the best chance of winning in November. I’m not sure Edwards second time around will be any more successful than the last and I believe Clinton would drive the GOP GOTV campaign better than any of the actual GOP candidates would.
  • Obviously, I like to play M-rated games like Bioshock and Mass Effect. But I also like games I can play with my kids like Lego Star Wars. There are two new Lego games coming out this year: Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. I can’t wait.
  • Speaking of gaming, Xbox LIVE had some issues over the holiday break, due to record setting sign-ups and concurrent users. Record setting numbers is a nice problem to have if you’re on the business side, but a not-so-nice if you’re a customer or work in operations. The XBL GM announced they’re offering a “token of appreciation” for everyone’s patience – a free XBLA game. Assuming it’s not a crappy game, it’s a classy move.
  • I watched Transformers on HD-DVD last night. Fun movie with lots of action, but man is it dumb. John Turturro is the only real stand-out.
  • Dustin Campbell implements cons, cdr and car from Scheme in C# and VB. While of limited production value (Dustin specifically warns readers not to use any of his code), it really demonstrates how different the functional world is from the object/imperative one, right down to the concept of type. Cons doesn’t return a tuple, it returns function with two bound variables. (via DNK)
This entry was posted by DevHawk on January 4, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee and Politics. It was tagged Functional Programming, Movies and Xbox 360.

Morning Coffee 134

  • Bill de Hora responds to a few of my Durable and RESTful ideas. He points out that relying on a client-generated ID can be troublesome, and recommends using multiple identifiers – one created by the sender, one by the receiver and one representing the message exchange itself. However, the sender ID is vulnerable to client bugs & tampering as Bill points out, and neither the receiver ID nor the exchange ID can be used to determine if a given message is a duplicate. If you don’t trust the sender, is it even possible to determine if a given message is a duplicate?
  • Pablo Castro confirms that there are “practical limits” to what ADO.NET Data Services can do with respect to idempotence. Nothing in his post was surprising, though I hope it will be more explicitly called out in the final docs. Developers used to the comforting protection of a transaction may be in for a rude awakening.
  • Dare Obasanjo has a great post comparing the new features in C# 3.0 to dynamic languages like IronPython. I believe many of the productivity aspects of dynamic languages have little to do with being dynamic.
  • Pat Helland noodles on durability and messaging, two topics near and dear to my heart (probably from working with him for a couple of years). I’m not sure where he’s going with this – his conclusion that “Basically, big, complex, and distributed system are big, complex, and distributed” isn’t exactly ground-breaking. But his point that “durable” isn’t a binary concept is worth more consideration. Also, his description of IMS only looking at the effects of a committed transaction is very similar to how web sites work, though obviously HTTP isn’t durable so you can’t make event horizon optimizations like IMS did.
  • Tangentially related, Werner Vogels discusses the idea of eventually consistent distributed databases. Today, that’s a problem mostly only Internet-scale sites like Amazon deal with. In the near future of continued data explosion + manycore, we’ll all have to deal with it.
  • Nick Malik argues that categorizing enterprise applications by lifecycle is much less useful than categorization based on organizational impact. He might also need a new chair.
  • Jesus Rodriguez digs into one of SSB’s new features in SQL 2008: conversation priorities.
  • Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz and Sam Gentile are mixing it up over the definition of SOA. Sam thinks SOA has to include business drivers and Arnon doesn’t. I’m with Sam on this, defining “SOA” independently from “Applying SOA” seems pointless. Then again, rigorously defining SOA – much less arguing about said definition – seems like a waste of time in the first place IMHO.
  • Wow, this guy Zed is mad at the Ruby community.
  • Andrew Baron has 8 Reasons Why The TV Studios Will Die. Personally, I think reason #2 – Expendable Middle-Person – is the most important. If content producers can reach consumers directly, what value-add will the networks provide? (via United Hollywood)
This entry was posted by DevHawk on January 3, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged Durable Messaging, Dynamic Languages, Idempotence, Media 2.0, REST, Ruby and SOA.

Morning Coffee 133

  • I’ve been off for two weeks, so getting back into “the swing” of things will probably take a day or two – both at work and on my blog. Hope everyone had a happy holiday season.
  • I ended the year with 245 blog posts, which wasn’t quite as many as either of my first two years blogging, but was much more than I had been writing for the last two years.
  • It was a Zune Xmas in the Pierson house. I got a pink Zune for my wife, and my mother and father got Zunes for each other. I got to load them all up with content for Xmas morning. Maybe I’m just used to WMP, but I’m not a huge fan of the Zune software. Yes, it’s very pretty but it’s missing some fairly basic features like automatic down-sampling lossless music. On the other hand, the on-device experience rocks and my wife is using her Zune regularly. I’ve got a trip to England coming up in April, and I’m thinking about getting one of the new 80GB ones for the trip.
  • They lost any chance of playing for the national championship, but USC sure looked like a champion yesterday. Seems appropriate for this crazy college football season that if Ohio State doesn’t win big, pretty much all the other BCS bowl winners with a legitimate argument to be #1.
  • The Caps beat the eastern-conference leading Senators yesterday for the third time this season and the second time in four days. They have 13 points in the last ten games and 10-5-4 since Boudreau took over as coach. If they keep that pace up, they would likely make the playoffs – that would be quite a feat given their horrific start.
  • Speaking of hockey, I watched most of the Winter Classic yesterday, including the game-winning shootout goal by the Anointed One. It was really strange but cool to watch a hockey game between snowflakes. I agree with Scott Burnside’s take that these outdoor games are good for the league, but shouldn’t be a regular part of the season.
  • I finished Portal yesterday – that’s a fantastic game. I also got Mass Effect, so now I need to decide which to take on first: that or Half-Life 2.
  • A few months ago, I was thinking about using HomePlug for home networking but decided to upgrade my wireless network instead. But recently I’ve started streaming movies from my loft computer to my Xbox, and the wireless network isn’t always up to the task. I could run CAT5, but there’s already an unused coax cable running up to the loft and I wondered if I could just use that? I discovered the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, but none of their certified products appear to be available. Those products have to share the home coax network with the cable company, but I can dedicate my coax cable. Anyone know a way to use coax to bridge CAT5 networks? Even something DIY?
This entry was posted by DevHawk on January 2, 2008. It was posted in Morning Coffee. It was tagged Blogging, College Football, Hockey, Home Network, Washington Capitals and Xbox 360.

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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.