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)

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?

Morning Coffee 129

Short coffee this morning, as I’m home with a tweaked ankle.
I started playing Indigo Prophecy over the weekend. It’s an original Xbox game, released as part of the new Xbox Originals program. It has a good metacritic score (84), though apparently it wasn’t much of a retail success. I’m enjoying it, though it’s not very challenging. It’s more an interactive movie than a game. Good story, though.
The ASP.NET MVC preview dropped today, Scott Guthrie has the details. Scott Hanselman has a 40 minute how-to video and Phil Haack has several articles up already.
Speaking of ASP.NET MVC and Scott Guthrie, he’s got another post in his series on ASP.NET MVC. This time, he’s covering how to handle form input / POST data.
Erik Meijer has posted some of his thoughts on Volta. He’s one of the guys behind Volta, so it’s worth a good look. (via Dare Obasanjo)
Late Addition – the ASP.NET Extensions is more than just the MVC stuff. It also includes AJAX improvements, Silverlight support, ADO.NET Data Services and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support. Data Services (formerly Astoria) let’s you easily expose your database via RESTful services. I think Dynamic Data Support used to be code named Jasper. It’s a “rich scaffolding framework” for ASP.NET. I assume that’s to compete w/ Ruby on Rails.

Afternoon Coffee 126

In a surprise to exactly nobody, the Caps let coach Glen Hanlon go yesterday. I gotta say I feel for the guy. I mean, he had to go, but still. The Caps promoted the coach of their minor league team Bruce Boudreau. Makes sense – the farm team is where you develop players, why not coaches too? The team responded by beating the Flyers in overtime, though they did blow a 3 goal lead along the way.
It won’t get them back in the national title hunt, but thrashing ASU may earn USC a ticket to a BCS bowl, or the Rose Bowl if the Ducks can’t win without Dennis Dixon.
I finally finished Dead Rising today. A sequel has been rumored and hinted at, but not confirmed even though the ending left the door wide open. I really enjoyed it, so here’s hoping. I’m going to hold off on starting anything new until I get back from Canada, but it’ll probably be R6:Vegas. Don’t really have time between now and Christmas to finish Blue Dragon and it’s 3 DVDs.
In more “Screw Turkey Day, we’re shipping anyway” news, p&p shipped a new version of the Web Service Software Factory. This one’s called the “Modeling Edition”. I saw some of this stuff back in August, and I like what those p&p folks are doing. It’s worth a look, just to see how they’ve integrated DSL and GAT.
My old team shipped a new version of their S+S demo app LitwareHR. There’s also some tools for testing multi-tenant databases.
Quick reminder: I’m @ DevTeach Vancouver next week, so blogging will be light. I’ve got a series of thoughts on F# ready to post, but we’ll see when I get network access to post them. Given that I took a month off from blogging a short while back, I didn’t bother asking Dale to cover for me.

Morning Coffee 125

So I wasn’t quite as close to the end of Dead Rising as I thought I was. Those who’ve played the game thru will understand.
After their promising start, the Capitals lost yet again. At the 20 game point, they’re now 6-13-1 for a league-worst 13 points. I think we’re at the point where they need to fire Glen Hanlon. Nothing personal Glen, but it’s not getting done. The only problem is who you would replace him with? Bob Hartley? Uh, no thanks. I think most Caps fans want Dale Hunter, but I think he’s too involved with the London Knights – he’s co-owner, president and head coach. But if we could get Dale, I’m guessing Glen would be gone in a heartbeat.
The XNA team blog announced that XNA Game Studio 2.0′s beta has released. The download is available from Creators Club Online. The big new feature in this release is network support, and they’ve shipped a new starter kit to get you started.
In addition to shipping VS08 & .NET FX 3.5, a new CTP of SQL 2008 shipped yesterday. I couldn’t find a good overview of what’s new, but the SQL Express team has a post on what’s new in just their corner of this release. (via Jesus Rodriguez)
In more “I know it’s Thanksgiving week, but we’re shipping anyway” news, the Ruby.NET folks have shipped v0.9 – the first release since transferring control to the community. Does it run Rails? Not yet, but apparently they’re “close to getting Ruby on Rails to run successfully”. One thing that caught my eye is that it includes VS integration. Nice.

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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.