• My daughter is learning about the Presidents in her school. As part of her homework she has to make a life-sized replica of Abraham Lincoln. So right now at our house we have a partially completed metal, cardboard, and styrofoam creation that looks something like "Honest Abe" the robot.
• Steve Kelley is up in arms about some contributions two members of the Sonics ownership group have made. He claims this will make the odds of getting an arena approved much longer. Hey Steve, wake up! With sports franchises costing so much money these days there will always be members of the ownership with beliefs you don't agree with. How do you know there aren't other members of the ownership that contribute to pro-gay groups. Is your concern over two people that own the Sonics serious enough to let them leave for Oklahoma City?
• Congratulations to BYU for their big win over Air Force last night. That should give them some momentum and hopefully a better seed in the NCAA Tournament.
• My main function these days is working on the operation aspects of the system my team is working on. As  part of that I found an article on msdn regarding monitoring to be very useful. I need to incorporate some of the ideas into my monitoring vision. I need to write  a blog up with my thoughts on monitoring and hopefully obtain feedback to challenge my ideas.

• My mother-in-law is out of the hospital and home now. She has 8 weeks ahead of her of not being able to use that arm plus the rehabilitation afterward. I hope that will go well for her.
• I feel like my home has become a prison. The twins are so good at sneaking outside no matter if the doors are locked and now getting out on our back balcony and throwing things in the backyard I have had to be latches on the doors and one of those locking bars on the sliding glass door. It is amazing how creative they are.
• Since the NFL Scouting Combine is going on and one of the major items is the Wonderlic Test I wondered how I might do with the test. Here is a place to take a sample test. To me at least the questions seemed pretty easy.
• The Architecture Journal is an excellent resource for system design and ideas. I found a recent article on Perspective Based Architecture fascinating.
• I wish Windows Live Spaces supported multiple categories for a blog. Especially in a format like this entry having the ability to assign multiple categories would be great.

• My wife and I went to The Melting Pot Friday for a belated Valentine's Day celebration. We both enjoyed our meal quite a bit, but I admit it is more fun to make fondue with the kids.
• The BCS National Championship game in NCAA Football 2007 took place over the weekend. The BYU Cougars prevailed over the USC Trojans after a valiant effort by the Trojans. The coach immediately signed a 6 year extension and BYU jumped to the Big 12 replacing Baylor.
• It is increasingly likely that the Seattle Sonics won't be able to get an arena deal done here. While I am not a big NBA fan and am mostly against taxpayer funded arenas I think the city will be poorer without the Sonics. They will also take our only world championship, or championships if you count the Storm, with them.
• Most of my coworkers are back today. It is nice to have them back. When dealing with doing architecture designs and guidance it is always good to have a sounding board.
• Wesley, my mother-in-law had surgery in Friday to get a plate in her upper arm. She broke it while taking pictures of some flowers in her garden. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her for a speedy recovery.
• Bill Gates has an interesting article in the Washington Post about how to keep America competitive. It is worth your time to read. My takeaways are that we need to help the schools improve and we need to have high expectations for our children.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill to punish retailers for leaks in personal data. I wonder how long it will take for a law like that to go nationwide? Looks like there may be some good jobs in retail IT data security opening up shortly.
• There is an interesting debate on the SAAS architecture in Dr. Dobb's Portal. The money quote for me was as follows:

"Ajax and Web 2.0 are great technologies for casual use, but for mission critical you need the capabilities of a desktop app," RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte says.

I have to admit I don't agree with that quote at all. It seems pretty shortsighted in minimizing the capabilities of web based applications.

• As a follow-up to yesterdays entry about the 12 steps to overcome email addiction here is a 12 step program to help you overcome being a SOAholic. There are also some symptoms you can look for to see if you are a SOAholic.
• Ram Ravishankar posts on if SOA requires web services. He makes pretty good arguments for an against a SOA requiring web services and ultimately doesn't answer the question. I would say that a SOA doesn't require web services, but it is very likely in the range of 90% plus that a SOA within a company is going to have at least some web services in it.

• Joel Dehlin, a former Microsoft employee and the CIO of the LDS church is conducting a series of tech talks. The next one is being planned for the bay area. If you are interested you can respond to his post here. The dates would be between April 22 - 26 with a tentative agenda as follows:
  • Keynote
  • Infrastructure breakout
  • Development breakout
  • Interaction Design breakout
  • Community breakout
  • Building to building video breakout
• Everything needs a 12 step program now. CNN has a 12 step program to cure your email addiction here. I started thinking about this after Harry's post saying he had hit zero email bounce prior to going on his secret mission.
• I read an interesting blog on XNA and how it fits into Microsoft's strategy in gaming. I am not sure I agree with all of the points, but I found the arguments to be compelling.
• My BYU Cougars are now up to 21 in the AP Poll. I can't think of a year when both the football and basketball teams have both had such successful seasons.
• Between today and tomorrow I will be finalizing my vision document for how I think monitoring should work in the Service-Oriented Infrastructure project I am on. As I was outlining my vision it really hit me how much there is to do.

• According to Reuters surgeons who play video games are more skilled. Remind me to ask the doctor if s/he owns an XBOX 360 the next time I am getting operated on.
• I have reached the National Championship game in dynasty mode of NCAA Football 2007. The opponent of my BYU Cougars...why that would be Harry's alma mater, the USC Trojans. Funny how that worked out.
• Nicholas Allen writes in his blog about when you should use Indigo to write a channel, and more importantly when you should not. As most of you know Harry and I are doing quite a bit of work with WCF so we are interested in this type of advice.
• Our team has been thinking about how to manage a large number of services in an automated fashion. This would include deploying new services, monitoring the services, automatically handling scaling, service discovery, and automated provisioning to name a few possible capabilities. I almost think of it like the next version of UDDI, especially when it comes to provisioning. I think that as systems become more distributed that the ability to automatically manage these systems is going to be key to their success. I know that some thought has already gone on in this area by people far smarter than I, but as I consider how to operate an infrastructure with thousands of services in it it is apparent that the opportunity is there for us to design and implement a system management framework that automates the majority of the tasks. I need to spend some time to consider how the framework would work, and document the capabilities.

• What does it take to be an architect? Skyscrapr.net attempts to answer this question by asking a bunch of architects.
• I have started teaching my children about astronomy. I found an open source product called Stellarium that is excellent for learning about the celestial objects visible in your area.
• A Methodology for SOA adoption? I read an interesting blog on this subject from a couple of weeks ago. It's not a long article, but the author makes some interesting points including an outline for SOA adoption.
• I finally picked up Gears of War on Friday. It really isn't a game I can see playing much, although I can see why it's popular. I guess the best and the worst part of the game is having to utilize cover so you don't die right away.
• Windows Live Writer is a great tool! I use it to author the blogs for my website, and this week I have been using it on these Morning Doughnuts posts. My favorite feature is that you can preview your post and see exactly how it will appear on your website. This has been particularly useful since Devhawk and my site look quite different.

My coworker Harry is out of the office on vacation. While he is gone he has asked me to do some guest blogging on his website, Devhawk. I will most likely put copies of itmes I post up there on my website as well, but you may want to check out his blog if you are interested in technology, and a number of other topics.

• 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.

• The Build Master by Vincent Maraia is an excellent book if you are interested in the build process and how to make it as efficient as possible.
• We had a great meeting with the Patterns & Practices team the other day. Since I am still new to Microsoft it is still a bit overwhelming to meet the authors of documents you have read and used over the years.
• I recently have been spending some cycles working with System Center Operations Manager 2007. I believe that it provides some excellent tools to monitor and repair a system plus it's designed to be service focused.
• Francis Stokes has produced 6 episodes showing what would happen if heaven was being run like a company named God Inc. There are currently 6 episodes. No matter what your belief or lack thereof in a supreme being the videos are hilarious.
  • Episode 1
  • Episode 2
  • Episode 3
  • Episode 4
  • Episode 5
  • Episode 6 
• I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how heartbeat transactions between multiple services should operate. In the drawing below you can see 3 web services and a monitoring one. In the original design the monitoring service was sending heartbeats out to each of the web services to see if they were available. This seem inefficient to me as we really don't care if the monitoring service can reach the web service. What we need to know is if any dependent web services are able to connect. In the drawing we have a web service residing in the extranet (Web Service 1) that sends data to a web service in the corporate network (Web Service 2). We really don't care if the monitoring service can talk with web service 2, but we definitely want to know that web service 1 can get there. Once web service 1 realizes that is can't connect to 2 we then notify the monitoring system so that the owner of web service 2 can take action. Web service 1 still continues sending heartbeats though so that it is aware of when the second web service becomes available again.

Queue up cheesy Don Johnson video here. What can I say, I was a teenager in the 80's.

As a part of a project I am working on I have been writing some guidance for service monitoring. One of the most basic components of monitoring is of course a heartbeat transaction. Of course a heartbeat by itself isn't really an interesting transaction. At the most basic level it will simply tell us that any remote services our service is using are responding to a very simple request response transaction much like a network ping. What makes this interesting to me is combining a heartbeat with other capabilities. Consider the following:

Service Discovery

Now generally a heartbeat transaction is configured to only ping other services in some sort of a configuration file. What if we did this via service discovery though through something like UDDI? Now this becomes quite interesting to me. Think of the additional functionality that can be opened up if you get a heartbeat to use UDDI instead of a configuration file.

• Adding Service Instances - If we decide that we need to add an additional instance of a credit check service for example it becomes quite easy to do so automatically without worrying that we forget to update calling services and applications with new configuration data. That way our heartbeat can detect a new instance of a service and automatically start monitoring it.
• Load Balancing - One piece of information that a heartbeat can provide is response time. Now it is true that this information is a bit limited since we don't know slow response is due to the network, resource utilization on the server, or the service itself. Even so if the monitoring started seeing slow response time from one of the service instances than we could allow the system to reduce or stop sending traffic to the slow one while diagnostic and repair operations were underway.

Service Provisioning

If we build upon using automatic service discovery with a heartbeat we open up even further possibilities. If a new instance of a service or a completely new service gets registered with the service repository our current service can then make an automated request to get provisioned to start using this service. I admit that this scenario is much more likely with a new instance of an existing service, but depending on how the contracts are designed between services it may be possible to get a current service to detect, provision, use, and monitor the new service without manual configuration changes.

Problem Detection and Repair

One of the real items I am excited about is the opportunity to automatically detect a problem via the heartbeat transaction and then enabling to have the monitoring system start attempting to diagnose and repair the problem. This is one of the best features I like in Operations Manager 2007. You can take alerts from the system and have it run automated scripts to detect and hopefully repair the problem. At the very minimum the data that is gathered by the system should help an operations or test person to have some useful information about what caused the issue. This should dramatically reduce downtime since the basic troubleshooting is done prior to anyone being notified.

Conclusion

While most people consider a heartbeat to be very low level monitoring I believe that there is great power in it, especially as it is combined with other services. As we continue to build distributed architectures SOA being the most current example it is obvious that each service in the architecture needs the ability to check both upstream and downstream services to ensure they are up and available to send and receive messages.

I have read some articles about this church that wants to broadcast the Super Bowl, but see that the NFL has told them they can't. Besides the obvious question about why a church would want to show the Super Bowl, I find it so interesting what the NFL says violates their rules. If you can't show the game on a television bigger than 55 inches I wonder how many people are out there throwing parties and breaking the rules by watching the game on their big screen TV's. I found the following on townhall.com and thought it was appropriate.

[image courtesy of Townhall]

Update: Apparently the Chicago Bears could of used a few more prayers for them. While the score was close for quite a while I never had the feeling after the opening return for a touchdown that the Bears were really in the game. Congratulations to Peyton Manning and the team for a great win. Hopefully yhe Colts will get a few more of those trophies, unless the Seahawks are in the game of course.

It is so nice to see that the Democrats have gotten together for a group picture showing their true colors. I still have yet to hear a plan from them that actually involves winning in Iraq.

[image courtesy of Iowa Presidential Watch]

I often wonder how personal I should get on this blog. I know of course that anything I write enters the public domain, and can be taken and used different ways. That leads me to want to keep certain items to myself, but on the other hand it is therapeutic for me to write what is on my mind so that causes me to want to be more open.

I attempt to carefully classify my posts so if you are mainly interested in technology and computers you can easily find posts on those subjects instead of having to wade through stories about my wife and kids, or the Seahawks, politics, or religion. At this time though I can only put one category per post which bugs me since a lot of my posts fit in multiple areas.

My background includes work in many different technologies. Because of this you will mainly find that I am technology agnostic in that I believe in using tools that best help meet the business need rather than trying to shoehorn into a specific technology or application. In my career I have been a Unix System Administrator, a Sybase and Oracle DBA, a middleware architect, and of course now an application architect at Microsoft.

Technology is very exciting to me. I love to see how new products come out that can help make us more efficient and improve our lives. At the same time I don't tend to choose the latest greatest thing unless I can be convinced it will truly provide a benefit. That is one reason I have such strong feelings on SOA as I see the framework as beneficial, but the hype has been very overblown.

I am a very big believer that we need to do a much better job when it comes to making technology deliver on it's promises. There is no reason that we can't make applications that deliver new compelling features while also working in a reliable consistent manner. On my new team I am know as "Operations Guy" because I have a passion to ensure that whatever we deliver will work for the customers and be easy to support in production.

Fortunately I have a great team to work with here in IT. Each member of the team is driven to succeed and brings great skills that compliment each other. The best part for me is that my teammates aren't afraid to dream about the future while also being grounded in the reality of what can be done. That is a tough balance for most architects, but this team achieves that balance quite well.