Scott posted a great rant on what it means to be a GenX geek (I’m one too, although I’ve at least seen a punch card at the Smithsonian J ).  I was inspired to check out the geek test, and I only scored a 45%.  I was sure that those SCA questions would put me over the top.  Sigh.  I guess I came to it late.  I’ve always been a geek, but I didn’t really come to grips with that fact (or dedicate my life to it) until I was in college.  

And just in case anyone was wondering, I’m an INTJ, which didn’t really come as a surprise to me.

Clemens Vasters posted a great article on what’s really behind a Service Oriented Architecture from the implementation standpoint.  He makes some very astute points about why schemas are important for expressing service contracts, and what the implications of SOA are on implementing scalable solutions.  Having wrestled a bit with this myself, I agree with his conclusion that old-school OOD is not the way to approach this particular problem.  Also, with regards to the stateful vs. stateless issue, I really like his take:

Ruling out that state is implicitly shared between services (in memory or on disk) is a direct consequence from this and also serves the scalability purpose, because it further eliminates co-location assumptions about services and enables clustering. Note that this isn’t about “stateless” or “stateful”. Everything is stateful while it runs.

I’ve been a big fan of XMLSpy for a long time.  It’s one the best XML tools out there, and I’d have to say the very best schema editor.  Now with their new version 2004, you can integrate XMLSpy directly into VS.NET, and use all the functionality of XMLSpy without having to leave everyone’s favorite development environment.  Very cool stuff. I much prefer the schema editor in XMLSpy to the database-centric one that ships with VS.NET, so it’s nice not to have to launch yet another app to get at it.  

I love appropriate applications of technology, and I just came across a really cool one.  Our public transit system here in Portland (Hillsboro) OR now has up to the minute bus tracking information available for cell phones (trimet.org/wap) and wirelessly connected PDAs (trimet.org/pda).  You put in what route and which stop you are at, and it will tell you when the next bus is coming.  How cool is that?!  As someone who both has a WAP phone and commutes to work on public transit (since I can’t afford one of the new 2004 Prius), I’m pretty excited.  This is possibly even better than WAP/PDA accessible movie times, which was formerly my favorite application of wireless technology.  Since they are pretty static, I actually get my movie times through AvantGo on my PocketPC (a ViewSonic v37).  

If you haven’t already, check out the PDC episode of Red vs. Blue.  Talk about an appropriate use of technology…