• Morning Coffee is late this morning because we went for our Christmas portrait this morning and it took forever. The pictures turned out great though.
• Nick Malik finishes up his series on business operation models by covering the diversification model. Also, Nick’s points about the synergy between a diversified model and the coordinated model are spot on. I happen to be a big fan of those models (aka the models with low standardization) which probably drives some of the  more my “unique” perspectives on SOA.
• Scott Guthrie starts out a new series and future technology, this time it’s ASP.NET MVC Framework that gets the series treatment. The first entry in the series is a general overview. I wonder why there’s no cool code name for the MVC framework? Whatever it’s named, I like the auto routing and action rules – it seems very Rails-inspired.
• Over the weekend, Don Box points out that the REST authentication story “blows chunks”. I’ve recently given up on the reliable part of the original “Secure, Reliable, Transacted Web Services” vision – and I never believed the transacted part. Security, on the other hand, is the one part of that original vision that has worked out IMO. My experience with the WS-* security stack has been pretty good, though Dare Obasanjo thinks that OpenID and OAuth are the final nail in the WS-* coffin.
• Speaking of Dare, he goes on to say WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice. He makes the point that “The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment.” I gave up pimping evangelizing technology a while back and I don’t want to be in the position of defending a bad investment, so I’m spending lots of time looking at REST.
• Jesus Rodriguez takes a look at the Managed Services Engine and comes away excited. Jesus is a self-described “strong believer” in SOA governance. I’m a self-described strong disbeliever in SOA governance, so MSE sounds like more of the Worst of Both Worlds to me.
• A little light reading: I pulled Applied Cryptography and A New Kind of Science out of my garage last weekend. Plus my copies of RESTful Web Services and Programming Erlang just arrived yesterday.

After a week offline, I think I’ve finally gotten DevHawk back online. I’m having a few issues from my personal laptop, so if you’re having issues seeing the site, please let me know.

I took the downtime to make a few changes to the site. I fixed up a few things with the theme – I run 120 DPI on both my machines and the theme looked wrong in a few places. Now, except for the main text, I specify font sizes in pixels instead of points so it looks right whatever DPI you run in. Also, I finally got around to updating the stylesheet so the tag list and calendar renders correctly plus I added “older posts” and “newer posts” links at the bottom of the page.

I also took the opportunity to get rid of my Projects, Articles and Presentations sections. I didn’t trash the content, I moved it all to my SkyDrive. But now I’ve eliminated a bunch of pages from my site that I just never took the time to keep up to date.

Back to regular blogging “soon”.