• The eBay Architecture SD Forum presentation that spawned the whole Transactionless meme is available here. As I reported yesterday, it doesn’t call for going completely transactionless as Martin suggested. It calls for going without distributed transactions, which I agree with 100%.
• More interesting than the transactional aspects, I found the data tier functional segmentation information facinating. Too bad those guys aren’t using our platform, SSB was expressly designed for exactly this sort of segmentation. I also liked that step 1 for “massively scaling J2EE” is to “throw out most of J2EE”.
• After going mostly dark since last august, the manager of my old team John deVadoss has been blogging up a storm since the beginning of March. So has my old boss Mike Platt. I wonder what happened at the begining of March? Here’s hoping this blogging fever spreads on my old team.
• Joe McKendrick: “The bottom line is that ROI on SOA is an enterprise challenge, not an IT challenge.” Truer words are rarely spoken.
• The rumor mill on the Black Xbox 360 “Elite” are coming fast and furious. I don’t care about the HDMI port (my HDTV is five years old and doesn’t have one) but I would like a bigger hard drive…

• John Backus, leader of the team that developed the first high-level programming language, died yesterday. It’s been a hard year so far for IT industry luminaries. (via Good Math, Bad Math)
• Yesterday, I followed on Martin Fowler’s post on going transactionless. As I said yesterday, I didn’t agree with the idea of no transactions inside a service, but I agree 100% with no transactions between services. Via Paul Brown, we learn that EBay does allow forbids the use of client-side or distributed transactions, but doesn’t outlaw the use of transactions in general. That makes much more sense to me since transactions between services would have to be are distributed.
• Wired just launched a new blog called GeekDad with the mission statement “Cool toys and fun projects you and your kids do together”. Subscribed (via The Long Tail)
• DevHawk made Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog Directory. It’s in the “Software Development and Design” section. Not sure why I’m listed above Raymond Chen, John Montgomery, Chris Sells and Don Box in that section, but that’s nice company to be included with.

• Joel Dehlin, the CIO of the LDS church has an interesting blog entry on buy versus build this morning. His main point is that buying is often cheaper, but only if you can move your business processes to match the processes in the off-the-shelf software.
• The search for Jim Gray by his friends and colleagues has been called off. Even with a massive high-tech effort no new clues have been turned up. For the sake of his family I do hope that the mystery is solved. I would imagine it is very hard to not know what happened to him.
• I am currently running a Build and Deployment Task Force. We are trying to ensure that our team follows best practices when building new applications. The project that Harry and I are working on seems to be a good test bed for the process.
• For those of you who read my blog you know I am passionate about how we implement Service-Oriented Architecture in the real world. I have been reading a book titled Service-Oriented Architecture: A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology. I find the description of real business objections, and how to solve them quite refreshing.
• It appears that the San Diego Chargers are going to hire Norv Turner to replace Marty Schottenheimer as their head coach. I don’t see how fans of the Chargers can possibly see this as an improvement.

I’m taking some time off, starting tomorrow. I’ll be out all next week. That means that you’ll have to look elsewhere for your daily dose of Morning Coffee. I do have a few posts I’ve been holding back to auto post next week, so you don’t have to go completely DevHawk free. But if something big happens next week, don’t expect any immediate reaction from me.

In addition to various technical blogs, I read a variety of political blogs. Not sure why, but where most of the technical blogs I read are individual voices, political blogs seem to be more group efforts. And even on the individual political blogs, they still have guest posters that come in periodically and when the primary blog owner is on vacation. Since I’ve gotten into the habit of posting every day, I decided I’d try out a guest poster. So in addition to a few auto posted entries, my teammate Dale Churchward will be holding down the fort here at DevHawk in my absence. I’ve linked to Dale’s blog Half My Brain on many occasions, so you should have a passing familiarity with him.

One of the interesting things about having Dale posting here is how different he and I are. I’m a developer at heart but he’s an sysadmin at heart. I code, he scripts. I worry about developer productivity, he worries about management and operations. He carried a pager for ten years, I didn’t. I’m a Democrat and he’s <gasp> a Republican! (At least he’s not a Penguins fan.)

Seriously, one of the things that is great about working with Dale is the vast difference in experience. He’s forgotten more about management and operations than I know (though I am a fast learner) so we make a very good team. Have a good week and be nice to Dale while I’m gone.

• From the “Ask and ye shall receive” department: A couple weeks ago I wondered how good or bad my Gamerscore conversion rate is. MyGamerCard.net just launched a completion leaderboard where they rank you on your Gamerscore times your completion rate.
• Shane Courtrille pointed out that the prize you receive in from the Xbox Rewards program gets better if your Gamerscore is higher. With a meager 1090 points, I’m in level 1. But those with 10,000+ or more can get a copy of Fuzion Frenzy 2 for completing the challenge.
• Yesterday, I complained that code in my RSS feed looks awful. It appears to be a problem with dasBlog. In validating the HTML is actually XHTML, it screws up the white space. Of course, usually that’s not a big deal, but inside a <pre> tag, it is. Until I get a chance to submit a patch to dasBlog to fix this, I’m using CodeHTMLer, which has a “convert white space” option that doesn’t use the <pre> tag at all. As a bonus, it even support PowerShell! Note, you have to use the website, not their WLWriter plugin, if you want the convert white space option.
• There’s a new beta of Ruby.NET available. Now that I’ve moved on to PowerShell, I’m only slightly interested in Ruby these days. If I can figure out how to create internal DSLs with PS, what would I need Ruby for? (via Larkware)
• My old team just shipped a single-instance multi-tenancy SaaS sample called LitwareHR. Details are on Gianpaolo’s blog, code is up on CodePlex.