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.

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. 

• I don't generally believe in moral victories in sports. While it is great to see a team not expected to be competitive make a game interesting, nobody remembers you unless you win. That being said, I felt like the Seattle Seahawks played a great game yesterday considering how decimated they were by injuries. This in no way takes away from the Chicago Bears. They also played a great game, and when it really counted they were able to get down the field to kick the field goal for the win. Good for them and I wish them well next week against the Saints.
• Today is Martin Luther King Day. I have to admit that I've never been a huge fan of Doctor King. I think that is mainly because the leaders who have come after him have soured me to the cause. I do believe that the "I Have A Dream" speech is one of the greatest in American history. I hope everyone reads it today, and asks themselves if they are helping to make the world a better place.
• I read a funny bedtime story to my kids last night. It was written by Gordon Dioxide and is titled My Brother. The story was picked based partially on how my daughter Sarah (6) and son Matthew (4) get along sometimes. The highlight is a paragraph on music quoted below.

He's such a numskull. He thinks that Queen are a better group than the Spice Girls. In case you don't know, the Spice Girls have sold more than 15 million records and been number 1 in 15 countries. They were voted the best group ever. I'd be surprised if Queen have sold a hundred records. Dad says that Queen are very popular, but I think he's just saying that to cheer Daniel up.

      What can I say? I have a twisted sense of humor.

• It looks like Mitt Romney is going to make a run for the presidency. I have already heard from my friends in the church that I ought to support him because he is a fellow Mormon. What a stupid reason to support a candidate! I will support him only if I find that I agree with him on more things than I disagree with him on, and I think he has a vision I can support for how to lead the country. I mean Harry Reid is a Mormon as well, and I can't stand him and wouldn't support him for a run to the presidency either. While it may be cynical and judgmental I don't see how you can be a national politician and a member of the church in good standing.

Contrary to popular opinion I have not lost interest in blogging this week. In fact I have started several posts. Basically this has just been a busy week on both the work and home fronts and I just haven't found the time.

Personal/Church

On this front I was involved in planning for an upcoming dance with the youth for next month on Tuesday. On Wednesday I needed to come up with a quick scout lesson for the Varsity team in my ward, and last night I was working with my wife to get our home ready for an appraiser to come by today. That was all a lot of work. It doesn't get less busy tonight and tomorrow as my wife has an activity with the youth that I really should attend as well, and tomorrow is a family reunion. I guess if you don't keep busy you will get bored.

Work

Not much less going on here as well. I had some deliverables for some of the projects I am working on this week. This includes some vision documents and answering some architectural questions. This work required some research on my part to understand some of the standards and research possible alternatives.

Upcoming Posts

Hopefully, either over the weekend or on Monday I can post some of my thoughts on a SOA Bill of Rights and how Services are like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Until then, I hope you all have a great weekend.

Family

My mother has been in town for the last week and a half. It has been good to see her. She has really helped out around the house and I am glad the kids have a chance to spend time with their grandmother. Their other grandparents live pretty close to us so they see them pretty often, but only get to see my mom about once or twice a year.

We are taking her out on the Spirit of Washington dinner train tonight. It's a pretty pricey activity, but we always try to do one big thing while my mom is here. Hopefully she will have a good time. I have only been on the train once before myself, but enjoyed it quite a bit, and am looking forward to having a good dinner and enjoying the scenery.

Church

In my church we are asked to serve in various callings to help fill the various jobs that a congregation has. This is a good opportunity to do things that you might not normally, and try to serve others to become more like the Savior.

One of the real good points of taking a calling is that you will learn a lot. I am currently serving as the president of the 12-18 year old young men in my congregation (ward). So far I have gone up to Scout Camp, attended a Board of Review, planned a few activities, and tried to help each of the young men to realize their full potential. It is an interesting and rewarding opportunity.

At the same time, the one bad thing about callings is that they can and do take a lot of time. My wife works with the same age group young women, but at the next higher level involving multiple congregations. Between meetings and activities I sometimes feel we don't get to see each other as much as I'd like. Hopefully we can find some balance as it is important to put your family first.

Work

This has been a good week to think about service governance, service registration, and service infrastructure. Each topic has taken some time this week, and I've had the opportunity to think about what things I would consider "best practices" in these areas. I have blogged on these topics here and here and will likely add more in upcoming weeks. Basically, like all software design, a good plan or map is the key. If you can get processes and procedures in that help the work you are much more likely to be successful. That may seem like an obvious point, but I constantly am amazed why people expect good results from a bad plan, both in work and in life.

We also went out to lunch as a team this week. We have been trying to do that about once a week or so. I believe this is a critical element to team success as we can discuss topics, work and otherwise, in a more relaxed informal atmosphere. I also learn a lot from my teammates in these discussions.

Not much on the technology front to add today. I have been thinking about a lot of topics today, but am letting them ripen in my mind a bit. Once I feel like they are ready I will blog about them.

Hope you all have a great weekend.

I was reading a blog about piracy this morning. In it the author, Tim O’Reilly argues that piracy is a good thing because it actually gets more users/listeners of the pirated material which will then lead to more publicity and sales of legitimate material. While I believe he makes some good points I believe he is wrong on several levels.

1. Stealing is still stealing no matter how you label it. The problem I see is that even if pirated material gets your material out in the mainstream, people will never pay for what they can get for free. That of course implies that the pirated material is identical to the material paid for.
2. O’Reilly makes the argument that people want to do the right thing if they can. I couldn’t disagree more with this. People will for the most part only do the right thing if it’s in their best interest to do so or if there is an external stimulus like peer pressure to drive them towards the moral choice. If people think they can get away with something with no consequences they will because in the end there is no downside for them.
3. His next argument is that shoplifting is a bigger problem than piracy. In the U.S. I would tend to agree with that, especially for tangible goods, but having been to a couple of other countries I see piracy as a much bigger problem there. It is actually more prevalent to see pirated goods in many cases than legitimate ones.
4. O’Reilly also argues that free services are eventually replaced by higher quality pay services. I would contend that this is true, but depends on what the hidden costs of the free service are. In my mind he isn’t comparing apples to apples here because most of the time free services aren’t the same quality as the paid services or if they are they are driven by other revenue models such as advertising that can degrade the perception of the service. To me you are then comparing products with a different feature set.

While I disagree with his points I do find the post to be most interesting. This is of course something that the music and software industries have been dealing with for quite a while. My final point would be this: Even if you could prove that the financial benefits to companies, artists, developers, etc. were greater with piracy does that offset the hidden cost of the degradation to society where we disregard the intellectual property of others? That cost to me far outweighs any financial benefits on the other side.

I drove up to the main campus today; I work down in Issaquah for those who don’t know. The main campus is very nice and had an interesting discussion around Business Process Monitoring versus Operations Monitoring. I believe they are the same thing ultimately because the goal is to provide a 360 degree view of the enterprise. To me who won’t get a good view of how the system is operating unless you either:

1) Have one system that handles monitoring.

2) If you don’t have one system have a good way for multiple systems to share data on the components being monitored.

At this point after the meeting I now have to spend some time digesting the data and figuring out parts we can get into our system. After doing some thinking I will write some more.

Well, this was one of the busiest weekends I have had in a while.

Saturday

I got up and went to help my in-laws with Dream Dinners. Afterwards, I drove down to Lynnwood and took my kids to a birthday party for a friend at Chuck E Cheese and we ended up there until mid-afternoon. My wife attended a baby shower and then got her hair colored and cut. In the evening she attended a youth dance for our church as a chaperone. All told, we may have spent like an hour all together on Saturday.

Sunday

Sunday is church day at our place. Our actual church meetings go from 1 to 4 p.m. each Sunday, but with 4 small kids to get ready it becomes a major undertaking to get everyone to church on time. We were also assisting my brother-in-law’s family by taking care of their dog and watching over their house while they were on vacation so we also had to go and walk the dog a couple of times that day. At church, I was asked to serve at the leader of the 12 to 18 year old boys in our congregation. Fortunately there are some other men that assist by teaching the youth and running our scouting program. Even still, I can foresee that this is going to be a job that will take lots of work. At the end of the day I went down and picked up my brother-in-law at the airport. Finally was able to go to sleep at about 1 a.m. Never really had a chance to get bored I guess.

Random Thoughts

Even with all of the activities, I was able to catch up on one of my favorite blogs, allthingsdistributed.com, written by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com. I find his insights on running distributed systems to be very interesting. Amazon is a great case study in the IT industry. You don’t achieve the tremendous degree of success that they have without knowing to how to automate at scale. As I work on my project here at Microsoft I think it will be critical for us to know how to do this as well. To me this is the keep to implementing a successful SOA model. We have to know how to design, test, implement, and sustain services in an automated way. I need to do some more thinking on how we will get to that model.