Best of the blogs: Jon Udell carries the discussion from his column over into his blog, and zeroes in on two ideas for making it easier to help people figure out what’s gone wrong with their software: provenance and configuration. Provenance as in tracking down where errors came from; configuration in terms of understanding what changed. “The length limit on the print column precluded a third idea: communication,” he writes, and offers a descriptive scenario. SOA: “Now that we know how to diagnose the performance of an SOA, as well as model for it to determine how it will behave in a changing environment, how do we design a service and SOA with optimized performance?” so begins Dave Linthicum in Designing for performance, monitoring and optimizing. The basic rule to understand: While the value of an SOA is the ability to leverage many remote services, the more services you leverage, the more problematic your SOA will become. Columnists’ corner: AMD’s best is still to come. Then again, “hubris born of market domination left Intel without a Plan B,” explains Tom Yager. “AMD is ready for 65-nanometer and other mind-blowing things,” that are part of a road map Yager claims is guided by IT’s needs. Of course, one reader calls him out for always siding with the under dog. But I’ll let you be the judge of that. The news beat: Intel says it will launch the Tulsa server chip on August 29, desgined for systems with four or more processors. The EFF, or Electronic Frontier Foundation, asks the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a patent ruling that could hurt free and open source software projects. And Apple plunks down $100 million to settle iPod disputes with Creative Technology. Technology Industry