• 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)

• 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.

• I find Jim Kobielus’ “SOA as 50 square miles of fungus” analogy funny and strangely compelling. The “keep in the dark and feed it shit” jokes practically write themselves. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Politics 2.0 Rising: The number of Americans who got “most of their information” about the 2006 midterm elections was double the number from the 2002 elections.
• Do you use external/flash drives? Do you have issues when you try to “Safely Remove Hardware” with said drive? I do, all the time. Apparently, unlocker is the answer. (via Paul Andrew)
• How come there’s no information about LogToTraceListeners in the WF documentation? As far as I can tell, it’s not in the Windows SDK docs at all and the only reference to it on MSDN is this year-old article and this year-old blog post. I only discovered because someone on the internal WF discussion alias asked about it. I’ve added In my SSB/WF work, I subclassed the built-in SQL persistence service in order to add tracing support. If you’re developing a WF host, you need to turn this on. I find it mind-boggling this isn’t included anywhere in the official WF docs.
• Nice to see Soma bragging about Software Factories. As he writes, our current solution – consisting of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and the DSL Tools - are really just a first step. I’m just starting to experiment with the Web Service Software Factory (WSSF). Aaron Skonnard introduces both the ASMX and WCF version in his two most recent Service Station articles.
• Michael.NET makes Programming Promises and Ted Neward swears the Oath of the Conscientious Programmer. Why stop there? How about the Architect’s Affidavit to actually implement the shit we draw on the white board? The Technologist’s Testimony of understanding and belief in all things geeky and gadget? Come on, isn’t this just called “doing your job”? Do we really need to make promises and swear oaths to take it seriously and do it to the best of our abilities?

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of barfing. For all the gory details (you have been warned), check out my wife’s blog.

• Only 12 responses to the State of the Union were posted as I write this. Dunno why, but I was expecting more. Maybe this whole Web 2.0 thing is overblown a bit! 😄
• Speaking of the State of the Union, is it just me, or did anyone else find it odd that the Scooter Libby trial started the same day?
• AtlasASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is done. Lots more on this from Scott Guthrie’s blog. While I’m not personally that interested in ASP.NET AJAX itself, two things strike me as interesting in this release. First, we’re shipping all the code for this. The client side JavaScript library, the Control Toolkit, even the server-side components. Second, it’s nice to see the Developer Division shipping something this significant without waiting for the next release of Visual Studio. Here’s hoping that both of these two trends continue.
• Rich McCollister pointed me to the XmlProviderLibrary. Bad on me for not looking harder.
• Windows Live Writer is pretty cool, but it is missing one feature that I needed twice Tuesday. While embedding images in a post is cake, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed non-image files. You know, like the ColorConsoleTraceListener Project or the Live Search for Chartity Search Providers. I’m guessing the infrastructure to post images and files would be identical, but there’s no UI interface for it. I checked out the WLW SDK online and found the ISmartContent.Files.Add method, so I’m guessing it’s doable. But there’s no such animal on the Live Gallery. I wonder why nobody else has built this yet? Is this really that unique a request?

“Having a family member who is in politics, I’ve learned that whenever you see what seems like a religious fundamentalism there usually is a quest for money and/or power behind it.”
-Dare Obasanjo, What is Rob Weir (and IBM’s) Agenda with the OOXML Bashing?