• Vendors aren't understanding SOA. That is the claim of ING Insurance. It seems to me that is creative incompetence. I still haven't figured out what would make a vendor want to sell a real SOA solution and not try and get you locked into their product line. It seems like vendors would be much more interested in SAAS. (via Joe McKendrick)
• Jeff Atwood writes that it is better for developers to learn on the battlefield instead of in the classroom. I would say it is that way with most things. The classroom teaches you the theories and principles which you then need to apply in the business world. Each is important and work together to give you real knowledge.
• Kenny Rogers of the Detroit Tigers will start the season on the DL with a "tired arm." I guess rubbing that "foreign substance" on his hand is more taxing than it appears.
• Microsoft announced the XBOX 360 elite the other day. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the competition between Microsoft  and Sony in the console wars (kind of like the Clone Wars without the awlful director). THe only surprise is that it wasn't released in brown...the new black.

• I finally gave in and bought a Zune. Since I never owned an iPod this is an interesting transition. I suspect that my wife and daughter will get more use out of it, but at least I'm participating in the digital music era.
• It looks like SOA vendors are scoring low on Business Process Management (BRM), but high marks on being honest with their roadmap's (via ZDNet). I thought Microsoft's scores were particularly interesting.

• BPM -1 (Seems like BizTalk plus WCF/WF should improve this score.)
• Registry - 1 (We certainly have some room for improvement here.)
• Management - 1 (System Center Operations Manager, WMI, and Business Activity Monitoring should raise this score.)
• Standards - 3 (Personally I think we should get a higher score here, at least a 4.)
• AppDev - 2 (I need to think on this one a bit as I'm not sure what people are looking for here.)
• Roadmap honesty -3 (I think we are very honest where we are going.)

• There is a website that discusses the origins and history of my last name. It hasn't been updated in quite awhile, but I reached out to the owner to see if he needs any help. It's kind of cool because I have a picture of the Coat of Arms in my house.

• The Patterns & Practices Team has started posting guidance on Visual Studio Team System. They have some interesting articles and videos to help users optimize the benefits from the product. If you use VSTS this site is an excellent resource.
• Rackable Systems introduced their fully portable data center named Concentro. Some of the key  features of the data center are:
  • 1200U of rackable space
  • Up to 9600 processing cores
  • 3.5 petabytes of storage
  • Self-contained UPS technology
  • Contained in a 40' x 8' container
  • A GPS tracking unit

OK, so what we learned from this is that I can have this in my backyard with enough computing power to run my installation of Vista (just kidding) and it comes equipped with a LoJack system if it gets stolen. The best though is a picture from the company website. If I enter the trailer and a voice says, "Good morning Dave" I am heading for the hills.

 

 

• Joe McKendrick writes an interesting article on how SOA is really going within many organizations. He calls what is happening an AOS (Agglomeration Of Services). While I agree this is what is happening I am not sure it is a bad step. Once companies get services created, even if they aren't following the tenants of SOA it seems like getting to SOA is a much smaller step than going from monolithic legacy systems.
• What if we used the term webware instead of SAAS (Software as a Service) when describing vendor software delivered over the internet? That is the basis of an article by Phil Wainwright. I have to admit that I like that term much better since service is such an overutilized word. Additionally, since all that is different with SAAS is how it is delivered it breaks the connection that people seem to have between SAAS and SOA. This is a positive since the fact that a vendor is delivering a SAAS or webware product has nothing to do with if that product was designed using SOA. Harry addressed this a few days ago in his blog.

• My wife and I watched The Guardian this weekend. I am not a big Kevin Costner fan, but the movie was great! I highly recommend it.
• I am still alive in my college basketball bracket! Fortunately, Ohio State, UCLA, and Florida all came through for me. At this point it looks like my finish will be determined by the winner of the Florida/UCLA game.
• Worse Than Failure is a website dedicated to pointed out bad examples of code and development practicies. It is very interesting, but like Jeff Atwood writes I wonder if it really helps the people who need it?
• I read a great article on why Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. Since I recently shopped for a washer and dryer I found the argument compelling.

• I guess my NCAA bracket isn't as bad as I thought. UCLA, Kansas, and Ohio State all won and so I am alive, although barely, in the office pool.
• Oracle filed a big lawsuit against SAP yesterday. I read through some of the allegations, and if Oracle can prove them it could be pretty costly for SAP. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
• Michel Baladi has a really interesting series of posts about a SAAS Hosting Platform. If you have any interest in SAAS his entries are worth a read.
• I read with a great deal of interest a post by Michael Platt where he points out how many business people are trying to drive their technology projects outside of IT. It seems that IT is seen as a roadblock to success, and not an enabler of it. As IT people I think we need to do a much better job of helping the business to acheive goals, and not slowdown or prevent businesses from succeeding. Nick Malik has an interesting take on this topic as well.
• Calvert Deforest, aka Larry 'Bud' Melman passed away. I have some good memories of him on with David Letterman back in the days when I could actually stay up that late.

• Like most years my NCAA bracket is pretty toasted. I still have three of the teams I picked going to the Final Four though (UCLA, Florida, Ohio State) so I haven't lost all hope yet.
• Harry has a great post about SAAS and SOA. I couldn't agree with him more. We really need another word for service as it is completely overused. Business perhaps? That way we could have Business Oriented Architecture (BOA). That way anyone against BOA would be a...BOA constrictor. Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
• I neglected to catch this one earlier, but there is a great post up on building software versus building it. One thing I would add relates to your corporate culture. Obviously at Microsoft the equation is slanted very much in one direction. :-)
• James Maguire asks if SOA has an ROI? That is an interesting question. As I've said before in order to work SOA must first and foremost meet the needs of the business. If it doesn't then it will fail as it has in many cases so far.
• Last, but not least today here is a video showing the perils of skiing. The announcer is hilarious and the scream makes me cringe. Maybe next time the skier will wear a cup.

I find it interesting how often, even in a technologically advanced company like Microsoft we get so attached to certain tools that we shoehorn them to work in other cases where really a new tool would work better. As a former operations person I understand that it is often easier to have fewer tools rather than more, but I have often noticed that by trying to limit the number of tools we have we actually hamstring ourselves by accepting reduced functionality.

I think it is important to keep in mind what the purposes of tools are:

1. Make jobs easier that we can't do as easily ourselves.
2. Make it possible to do things we can't do ourselves.

If the above two points are true then what is more important than the number of tools we have is that we have the right tool. This became quite apparent to me recently when I was replacing our bathroom sink. I have a few wrenches and pliers, but in order to get to the nuts that were holding the sink in I had to get a special sink wrench. If a tool isn't making our job easier or even possible then we need to modify our tool or create a new tool that will accomplish our task.

Of course what makes IT so much fun is that it can be difficult sometimes to incorporate a new tool without breaking old ones. We also need to ensure that if a tool is really designed to replace an old one we make sure the old one actually gets retired. It is funny how often you get a team where half use the new tool and half use the old one. That makes it difficult to teach to new people and creates an interesting documentation experience. So in conclusion don't get too attached to your tools, and use the right tool for the job.

• I made dinner for my family last night. That in itself isn't really worth mentioning, but when my wife asked the kids to say thank you to daddy, Jacob, one of my 2 year old twins said "Thank you daddy" very clearly. That was cute.
• Sarah had to make a green meal as a part of her homework. We were going to have corned beef and cabbage, but I didn't want to die the corned beef. Instead we had green eggs, apples, and green milk for lunch and saved the normal corned beef for dinner.
• Pete Whiting has an interesting entry up about managing complexity. His conclusion it seems is to remember that the solution developed must be supportable, maintainable, and reliable.
• It looks like Washington is going to start pushing Internet retailers to collect sales tax. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I find the concept of leveling the playing field to be very interesting because many of the same arguments about small businesses not being able to compete are used against Wal-Mart.

I have been pretty inconsistent with my blogging this week. Mainly I have been trying to get some projects I am working on closed out, and get started on some new assignments. With that said here are some items I found interesting today.

• It looks like Commodore is coming out with a new line of gaming PCs. My entry into IT started many years ago with a VIC-20 and then onto a Commodore 64 eventually leading to where I am today. It brings back a lot of memories to see them promoting a gaming system that emulates some of those classic games I used to play.
• BYU went out and lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. It wasn't a surprise really, but still a disappointment. I picked against them in the tournament pool I am in at work though so didn't have much faith in their chances this year.
• Mark Cuban has an interesting blog on the whole Viacom versus YouTube issue. I'd have to say he is right on the money, especially the benefits for both companies.
• Since I have been working on the Build and Deployment process within my organization I found a blog on codinghorror.com hilarious. I wonder if I could earn this prestigious certification?

Joe McKendrick writes an interesting post about if SOA is simply Software as a Service (SAAS) delivered internally. He makes some interesting points and while there are certainly parallels I think that ultimately they are different. Consider the following:

SOA - Two of the key benefits advertised by Service-Oriented Architecture are agility and reusability. In the past I have written that I don't buy the reuse argument at all, and think that mainly reusability benefits exist mostly in the infrastructure capabilities (monitoring, deployment, etc.) So if you discount the reuse argument then the key benefit of SOA becomes agility. The agility of services seems to actually be valid for two reasons:

1. SOA has caused the adoption of several standards for interfaces. Since many applications now support XML based messages for example integration becomes a much easier task.
2. SOA also focuses on business processes. This encourages businesses to break off individual capabilities that need to evolve rapidly to support changing business drivers. This is where SAAS comes in.

SAAS - The benefit of SAAS is that businesses can can use services developed and maintained by an outside vendor. Reusability actually works here because the provider of the service can solicit for customers much like any software vendor does. It seems to me this helps reduce costs for the customer since they don't have to bear the development cost themselves, but at the cost of agility. Since initially a SAAS vendor will have fewer customers they should be more responsive to change requests. Like all vendors though as the number of users grow their ability to react is slower. It is true of course that they can and must support multiple versions of their service, but this also increases the cost of providing the service lowering the value proposition for the customers.

So if SOA isn't highly reusable, which is the key benefit of SAAS, than SOA can't possibly be SAAS delivered internally.

Becca went to stay with her parents last night. Her mother is still recovering from surgery and needs assistance in the middle of the night. That meant that I got the fun of putting the kids to bed by myself. It is always interesting to see how long they attempt to prolong the process with bathroom trips, needing water, talking, etc. Hopefully they will be good for Becca this morning as I know she is tired.

Not much else to say this weekend. I spent most of yesterday finishing my mid-year career review items and catching up on some open work. The kids were sick so I stayed home with them as Becca was speaking in our church yesterday. I hope to catch some time later today to post some thoughts on SOA and SAAS.

I had a lot of work needing completion this morning plus some meetings so I wasn't able to get to this as early as I normally do.

I have a lot going on at work, and that is a good thing. The best part of my job is the research and learning about new things, ideas, and patterns. Of course there is a cost as well, which is paid by incorporating these new ideas and producing projects that will help IT not only keep the lights on and the doors open (LODO), but improve into a world class organization.

Learning about new things is important to me, especially because Microsoft was willing to take a chance on me even though it meant I would have to go through a steep learning curve with technology I hadn't utilized deeply previously. Hopefully the gamble is paying off ad I am adding value to my team, but more importantly IT and Microsoft as a whole.

My plan is to take some time tomorrow and write a much more in-depth article on SOA. Until then, have a great day!

• Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory apparently welched out on a bet he made with Seattle sports radio host Mitch Levy based on the results of the Seahawks/Panthers playoff game from last year. If the mayor has any honor, he will fulfill the wager.
• The University of Washington Huskies play in the Pac-10 tournament tonight. While the odds aren't in their favor as the seventh seed, hopefully they will make it to the finals.
• I will be heading over to TechFest today. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft Research is working on.
• My coworker Buzz has got me considering the value of synthetic transactions. If we are dealing with services that insert or update records then the cost up cleaning up after the synthetic transaction may be pretty high. After our discussion I think the value of a synthetic transaction is primarily in the following areas.

1. During the deployment of a service update.
2. To test a boundary system prior to entering the production window.
3. While troubleshooting an issue/exception in the system.
4. To verify a low volume service is still working.

• Starting tomorrow I am going to return to a single subject post most days. I prefer to focus on one area each post and not try to fill out a certain number of items each day.

• Microsoft is scolding Google about copyrights. It will be interesting to see where this goes since both with Google Books and with YouTube there seems to be minimal interest by Google in protecting the copyrights of the producers of the material. Depending on what the final outcome is here this could dramatically change much of the information on the web: pictures, books, video, music. On a related note I find it fascinating in out digital age that Google requires a written notification of a copyright infringement to be by fax or regular mail, not by email without prior arrangement.
• Joel Dehlin offers some interesting thoughts on interviewing and how to find great people. This is a worthy read in my opinion.
• The Seahawks signed Patrick Kerney to play defensive end. If he has recovered from his injury last year he could be a good disruptive influence for the defense.
• Harry asked me if I thought Software As a Service (SAAS) meant that we were wrong on reuse. It's an interesting question because if companies are willing to contract with vendors for a reusable service, but won't reuse components internally it points to a more political/cultural problem than a technical one. I need to give this some more thought.

• We took the kids to the Ipanema Brazilian Grill this weekend. The food was great, and the kids really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, Joshua pulled the fire alarm a few minutes after we got there so it wasn't a smooth start to the evening. We were very apologetic though which went a long way in smoothing things over.
• Please, Ann Coulter, do us all a favor and shut-up. If you have to resort to name calling you have weakened your argument and aren't doing the Republicans any favors.
• I put some new shirt designs up on Zazzle over the weekend. They are based on my slightly offbeat look at IT systems, and Service-Oriented Architecture.

Here is the first which refers to my view of architecture:

The second discusses outages and if they really occurred.

 

Zazzle won't let me display the back of the shirts it seems. The front just has my SOAholics Anonymous logo on the front, nut the sayings are on the back. Either way, all of the shirts can be seen here.

• I have some thoughts on the direction of SOA and if it is really all that has been advertised, but that requires a full post that I will get up in the next few days.

• I spent a lot of this morning discussing security. It is often an interesting problem to solve. Basically we need a way to prevent the administrators of a server from having access to certain information on the server (not in a database). Based on the principle of doing the simplest thing that would actually work I suggested transferring ownership and administrative privileges to the team that actually owns the content of the server.
• Can I get some tech support please?  I saw a link to this cartoon on LDS CIO Joel Dehlin's blog. Looks like everyone has to take drastic measures to get tech support at times.
• The basketball coach of the Utah Utes will be leaving at the end of the season. That just adds to my happiness this season of seeing the BYU Cougars likely going to the NCAA tournament.
• I know I have a strange sense of humor, but I saw a thread on fark.com that found really funny. The main article is about a cheese competition, but the submitter satirized the song "One Night In Bangkok" as inspiration for the headline. The thread that follows is hilarious.

• Once again we have snow here. In fact we probably have the most snow at my house that we have had all winter. It certainly seems that we aren't seeing global warming in the Seattle area.
• It was a brutal drive home from Issaquah last night. The weather was bad, and the roads were very slick, but in truth the major problem was the drivers. I was noticing a lot of tailgating last night which majors risky conditions even worse.
• Rick and I had been discussing how synthetic transactions would work in conjunction with a heartbeat. Initially Rick suggested that since the heartbeat would test the network and interface part of the service we could actually have a service generate its own synthetic transactions. I really liked this idea until I started considering what automated steps a client service might take if a heartbeat fails. It seems to me that the troubleshooting steps might involve more frequent heartbeat attempts and the ability to issue a synthetic transaction. In any case I am doing some research on this.