I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up… live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr

• My boss asks “Are We There Yet?” on fulfilling Dr. King’s dream. Sadly, the answer is no. I think we’re making progress, but we’re not “there” yet.
• No back to back trips to the Super Bowl for the Seahawks. They had chances to win it both down the stretch as well as in overtime and they couldn’t capitalize.
• I blogged about “Politics 2.0″ back on election day. Here’s an article about viral video in politics that’s very Politics 2.0.
• It finally warmed up enough yesterday to make a snowman. Patrick named the snowman “Capa” which is what he call my father. Apparently, my father and the snowman have the same bushy eyebrows (according to my wife). It’s supposed to snow again tonight, so maybe we can make a “Granny” or “Nana” snowman (snow-woman?).
• The new season of 24 started last night. Please review Larry’s list of the Top 10 Things I’ve Learned About Computers From The Movies and Any Episode of ’24′.
• My wife posted a picture of Patrick and I playing Lego Star Wars II. We really enjoy it, but I need to watch my language when we play. When we were fighting the Rancor, Patrick announced to his mommy that we were fighting the “big fucking monster”. Woops! Patrick already knows several words that your not supposed to say (and he reminds us if we ever use them) so I guess should add that to the list. Or I could start saying frak instead.

Took part of the morning off this morning to let the sun shine down on the icy roads. No major incidents getting to work, though the office parking lot is like an ice rink.

• As mentioned yesterday, I finally got my STS implementation working with WCS. Turns out that using WCS with the wsFederatedHttp binding requires you to specify which claims you want to send to the service. In comparison, using WCS with wsHttpBinding automatically requests the PPID claim. It would be nice if this was documented somewhere. I only figured it out by finding this demo from Michele.
• Last week, I said that we need a better tool than SvcConfigEditor. This tool is only marginally better than hand-editing the config files with intellisense. A “real” tool would keep you from building invalid config files. While I appreciate the need for this level of flexibility at the transport layer, we really need a better web service hosting story than IIS + ASP.NET + web.config. WCF makes me long for the days of the MTS/COM+ GUI interface. I never wasted hours troubleshooting config issues with MTS/COM+.
• Apparently, Xbox 360 outsold Wii and PS3 combined in December. That’s probably more of a statement about PS3 and Wii shortages, but there’s no arguing with numbers like 10.4 million Xbox 360 consoles, 5 millions Xbox Live users, and nearly 3 million copies of Gears of War. Congrats to the Xbox team!
• David may be hiding from his blog of late, but he did venture out long enough to point me to SOA Facts. My favorite: Dante has a special level in hell for consultants whose resumes do not say SOA.

It was a little too cold to make a snowman at my house, so we headed over to the big hill near our house for a little sledding. The hill was pretty trashed – we weren’t the first ones to down the hill – but we all had a fun time nonetheless.

Here’s Mommy and Riley, riding together:

And here’s Patrick, riding by himself like a big boy:

Riley calls Patrick “Bubba” because she can’t say “brother”.

And since I promised my teammate Maureen a snowman photo, here’s the last one we built:

On top of all this snow play and sledding, I got my STS working with WCS. More on that tomorrow.

The news got the amount of snow right, but the day wrong. Instead of hitting yesterday morning, the storm hit yesterday at rush hour. My boss declaired today “1st Annual Architect work from home day” even though we’ve already had several weather induced work from home days this winter.

• Growing up in Northern VA, when we got snow it was fairly consistent. If there was about four inches at my house, everyone had about four inches. Here, it seems like there’s much more variance. My teammate Buzz who lives only 15 minutes from me (when it’s not snowing) said he had 10″ of snow while I have about half that.
• Speaking of Northern VA, the last few winters have been easy on us but hard on my parents who still live in McLean. This year seems to be the opposite. The forcast for McLean today is only 45, but it’s supposed to get up to 65 by the weekend.
• As it turns out, my parents are in the Bahamas right now anyway, so while I make a snowman with my kids today, they’re probably on the beach!
• I almost didn’t make it home yesterday as I was trying to get my STS working with CardSpace. I have WCS workng in a direct client to service scenario, but not federated with an STS. I probably would have stayed there all night saying “just one more config tweak, and I’m sure it will work” if I had gotten snowed in.
• Speaking of WCS, check out Kevin’s screencast on extending ASP.NET’s built in SQL membership provider to support WCS. And Garrett published a WCS security token processor for .NET 1.1 and 2.0 a couple of months ago. So you can use WCS on your website, even if you don’t have .NET 3.0 on your server. Pretty cool.
• My old teammate John doesn’t like the JBOWS acronym. I agree with John that defining a “proper” SOA is waste of time best left to SOAholes. But web services != SOA. Making a distinction between having an architecture where the business and IT levels that rely on independent capabilities and services versus using web services as the protocol between tiers of a distributed application and hoping that you’ll be able to integrate in the future makes sense to me.

News was expecting inches, but we only got a dusting of snow last night.

• We had dinner last night with my old friend Matt, who moved to Amsterdam a year and a half ago and is getting to travel the world. Kids didn’t have a nap yesterday, so they weren’t quite on their best behavior, but it was great to see Matt. Hopefully it won’t be another 18 months before we see him again.
• For the second time in four months, the power cable for my laptop failed. I wonder if there is something wrong with the power supply that’s causing the cable to fail? At least this time I wasn’t in Canada.
• There’s a high resolution video of the Xbox 360 IPTV up on Xbox.com’s CES page. They make it very clear this is “something you need to get from your service provider”. Telling quote: “It’s kinda like what I have today, but better”. Doesn’t seem that much better, so far anyway.
• I’m knee deep in WCF security code again. Mucking about with X.509 certificates sucks. I tried to follow these directions to create a dev root CA certificate as well as dev certs signed by said dev root CA, but I get security negotiation errors because the system can’t check to see if the cert has been revoked. I guess I’ll just install Certificate Services instead
• My nominee for best new acronym: JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services), apparently coined by Joe McKendrick. Web services, to date at least, seem like they’re being used primarily for building distributed applications, rather than a loosely coupled services. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, unless you’re fooling yourself (or those holding the purse strings) that you’ll get integration “automagically” or “for free” just because you’re using web services. Joe McKendrick is definitely not an SOA-hole.
• The next new language I learn will be F#. Just not sure when or how.