Doug Tidwell works for IBM's Software Group Strategy organization, where he's responsible for evangelizing technologies such as Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO) and XForms. Despite his useful appearance, he has been with IBM since 1989. A speaker at the first XML conference in 1997, he is the author of O'Reilly's XSLT, the second edition of which is now flying off the shelves at a bookstore near you. (Procrastinators who begin their holiday shopping on the late side are encouraged to order a few copies now, the better to avoid the last-minute rush.) He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, cooking teacher Sheri Castle, their thirteen-year old daughter Lily and their dog, Domino the Wonder Hound.

Invisible Magnetic Missive Sent to Me From Home

I spent several days this week at SHARE in Orlando. I did sessions on XForms, SCA and BPEL, spreading the good word about these technologies. I'm still working with the examples in the WebSphere Bidniss Integration Primer, it's a fantastic book. I used several of the WebSphere tools in my demos this week. I need to put together a set of slides that shows the whole suite working together....From modeling to simulation to integration to deployment to monitoring, we've got an impressive suite of products.

Today is my first leap day since 2000. In 2004, I got on a Qantas flight in LA before midnight on February 28th and landed in Sydney on March 1st. Even better, when I came back from New Zealand, I got two St. Patrick's Days, both of which I enjoyed. (Especially the one in Auckland. Or so I'm told.) My wife told me there's a special word for people born on Leap Day, but I can't remember it. Lepidopterist will have to do for now.

Today's blog title is the title of a chapter in Amos Tutuola's novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I read it on the plane back from Orlando along with his other major novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Both of these books are surreal stories of humans and ghosts and their customs and conflicts; they're unlike anything I've ever read. The invisible magnetic missive comes toward the end of the book, as the narrator's mother sends a message to him after he's been lost 20+ years in the bush. Shortly thereafter the protagonist meets my favorite phantasm, the Television-handed Ghostess. The television hands of this ghostess let the narrator see his mother and brother outside the bush.

I first heard of the book 20+ years ago, it was the title of a David Byrne and Brian Eno album. The album is very cool, it features music accompanied by found voices from various sources. The cut "The Jezebel Spirit," for example, features a recording of a fundamentalist faith healer casting a Jezebel spirit out of a woman, with urban funk in the background.

I'll say it again: This book is unlike anything I've ever read. It's built around a set of deities and anxieties and values completely different from ours. If anybody out there has read this, I'd love to know what you thought.

Speaking of African novels, I also read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart recently. I came to this book through the Yeats poem "The Second Coming." ("Things fall apart" and "Slouching towards Bethlehem" are both from the poem.) Unlike the Tutuola novels, Things Fall Apart deals with the conflict between indigenous culture and the imperialist attitudes of the West. A very good book as well. It's certainly more Western in the sense of the book's structure, but it still contains a great deal of native culture. Things Fall Apart deals with Ibo culture, while the Tutuola novels are based on Yoruba traditions. Make me wish I knew more about African history.

One final thing before I call it a month: I've been working with Knoppix remastering, looking to see how much of an SCA stack I can run from a CD or DVD. Has anybody out there used software like Derby, Geronimo, Tomcat etc. booted from DVD? Is it easy to persist data from the Knoppix system to a USB drive? My goal is to have a Knoppix CD that contains a complete software stack for Tuscany SCA/SDO development, with the option of saving everything you've done onto a thumb drive. Any advice would be appreciated.

One even more finaler thing: Am I the only who noticed that the price of 8GB thumb drives dropped by 40% or more in December? I had been looking to replace my old 1GB Cruzer Micro drive with something bigger, but the 8GB drives were all around $120-130. Then one week in December, all the drives were suddenly $70. So now I have a keychain with 8GB of storage. Who knows what we'll have five years from now.