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.

A man of means, by no means

Starting Sunday I'll be King of the Road again, speaking at SHARE in Orlando three times next week. I have sessions on BPEL, XForms and SCA/SDO. It's in Orlando, so join us if you can.

Other shows at which I'll be speaking include IBM Impact in Las Vegas April 6-11, the OASIS Open Symposium in Santa Clara April 28 - May 1 and the Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando June 1-5. There are a couple of other shows I might be presenting at in the first half of the year, I'll post those here so you can make your travel plans....

And the SCA/SDO briefings are coming soon to a continent near you. More on those as the itinerary comes together.

Doug's Geek-a-Licious Library Cart: There are now two (count 'em, two) books with "SCA" in the title:

SOA for the Business Developer: Concepts, BPEL, and SCA The first book on SCA, this is fairly high-level. It has some good material on both SCA and BPEL, and it was reviewed by Mike Edwards and other IBM luminaries in the SCA space.

WebSphere Business Integration Primer: Process Server, BPEL, SCA, and SOA I just got this book, but it looks fantastic. (It's from developerWorks, so it has that going for it, which is nice.) This takes a very deep dive into the WebSphere V6.1 products, including a step-by-step scenario that goes through the products to build, design and deploy a working application. Very highly recommended. Click on the links below to learn more about the excellent WebSphere lineup: WebSphere Process Server WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced V6.1.1 (trial version available) WebSphere Integration Developer WebSphere Business Monitor WebSphere ESB WebSphere Business Services Fabric WebSphere Service Registry and Repository

From the "Nice Work If You Can Get It" Dept.: I'm intrigued by the phenomenon of lottery hosts and hostesses. For those of you who don't watch these things, this arduous job involves putting on a tuxedo or evening gown (the men wear the tuxedos, the women wear the gowns, although mixing that up would make things more interesting) and saying the numbers as they pop out of the lottery machines.

That's it. Some sample dialog:

Twenty-two.
Three.
Seventeen.
Six.
Twelve.
And the red ball, the Power Ball number... (dramatic pause) Eleven.

From some of the hosts I've seen around the country, being sober enough to stand up straight doesn't seem to be a requirement, although you must shave before the show. (Actually, the hostesses might be able to skip that part, depending on the style of their evening gown.) How do these people get their jobs? Who actually said, "Call Central Casting - I've gotta have somebody who can pronounce numbers when they see 'em"? Did the casting call include the words, "Must have own tuxedo"? Does the salary and benefits package include a dry-cleaning allowance? Did someone's high school guidance counselor say, "You seem to have a real knack for recognizing numbers. Consider a career as a lottery announcer"?

I simply must know more about this fascinating profession.

Confidential to state lottery boards nationwide: If you're hiring, give me a call. BTW, does anyone know where can I get my own lottery machine? They look like a lot of fun, and I can practice at home while waiting for my big break.

Finally, send your thoughts to our good friend Brian Murray. (Brian's wife is dW's Jeanne Murray.) Brian's mother Anne died yesterday at the age of 85.

My ale-ing keyboard

I'm back from the Rational Software Developers' Conference in Orlando last week, it was a really good show. I had three sessions, they covered SCA/SDO, XForms and BPEL. The audience was great, we had lots of interaction and dialog and follow-up conversations through the week.

I have some fence-mending to do, in my XForms session I apparently said things that were interpreted as disparaging to Ajax. My session ended at 12:20pm; by 12:47pm, my manager sent me a note that someone was furious that I was undermining the work IBM has done with the OpenAjax alliance. The 27 minute gap is a new personal best for me. Sigh. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the declarative model of XForms is easier to develop and maintain than the equivalent amount of JavaScript code. XForms is also based on a data model, an XML document or schema that can be generated from your business objects. Being able to tie those things together is a major advantage, IMHO.

Does that mean Ajax is bad? Absolutely not. I used XForms and the Mozilla XForms plug-in in my demo. That gives me a great Ajax-like interface that creates an XML document that can be sent directly to a server, database, etc. With the right browser plug-in (and yes, requiring a plug-in is a problem), the user has a cool Ajax experience. We'll see what happens to XForms in the marketplace, but for now, it's likely an XForms implementation built on Ajax widgets is the best shot for XForms to take over the world.

Today's blog title: I was clever enough to spill a beer on my keyboard over the weekend. Nothing was damaged, although I did get to spend a couple of hours removing and disassembling my keyboard, wiping off all the keys and the underlying mechanisms so my ThinkPad doesn't smell like beer. A laptop keyboard is a surprisingly complicated thing, I would love to see the machine (if there is one) that puts the keyboard together. Every key has four or five parts underneath it. I'm sure an enormous amount of research has gone into designing the keyboard so that the keys have the right tactile feel, springiness, etc. It's one of those things that you only notice if it's done wrong. At any rate, I've put everything back together, and it works just fine.

Saturday night we went to a party hosted by our friends Henry and Sophie Copeland. Henry is the founder of BlogAds, a great way for bloggers to turn popular blogs into cash. It was a great time. I spent some time talking with our pal Dave Johnson, the creator of the Roller blog engine we use here at dW. I met Dave in Dublin at ApacheCon Europe last year, I was humbled that (as usual) he remembered my name but I didn't remember his. We talked about Ajax vs. XForms, revisiting the same topics that got me in trouble earlier in the week. He also said that the very busy JRoller site is using Roller, and that the project has moved to Apache.

Today's Playlist: The Ultimate Joe Williams, The Crane Wife by The Decemberists and Elevator by Hot Hot Heat. I'm also looking forward to tomorrow's release of the White Stripes' new album Icky Thump. As soon as midnight rolls around I can download it from iTunes.

A question for the young people out there: Do any of you remember traveling to a store to buy music? In the old days, if we wanted a new CD, we drove to the store and bought it, no downloading involved. Ask your parents, they can tell you more.

I turn 42 tomorrow, wish me happy returns....

Does your cold drink getting warm while you drink it slowly?

I've been working on an SDO demo that uses both XForms and JavaFX as a front-end to various SDO data sources. Enter a single SQL or XPath statement, then run it against the data sources. That should become a dW article at some point; in the meantime, you'll hopefully be able to see it at the Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando (motto: Billy Who?) next week.

I believe I'm almost finished explaining XPath 1.0 and XPath 2.0 for the second edition of my book, that's the last major chapter I have to write. Wish me luck. I really want to finish this up no more than 12 months late. See various blog-based hand-wringings about my inability to estimate how long things take (and my consequent inability to meet deadlines) in previous posts below....

With Father's Day (U.S., anyway) and my birthday (June 19th, observed worldwide, start shopping now) approaching, it's time to turn our attention towards gifts. With that in mind, I was happy to find a NetworkWorld article on the top USB geek gadgets (as if there were any other kind). By a wide margin, the top vote getter in our household was The USB Mini-Fridge. This little beauty has a storage capacity of one can of soft drink, and includes a little LED light inside that comes on when you open the door. I think the product description speaks for itself:

Do you want to chill a can of drink just bought from supermarket? Or does your cold drink getting warm while you drink it slowly? USB Mini Fridge can help you to solve these problems. This cool USB gadget with door design which can keep your beverage chilled and stay at your computer for longer time. Now, you can carry a fridge to anywhere!!

Understandably, the Webmaster, unable to contain her or his excitement, used no more than six!!!!!! exclamation marks in the headline above the product description. Truly a miracle of space-age technology.

As I was looking at this list, it occurred to me that someone should do a USB Big Mouth Billy Bass. Well, in a fine example of the creative silliness that makes the Linux community so wonderful, it turns out in 2003 someone hacked Billy Bass. It's not clear how far the project went, but a small Linux system was actually embedded in the annoying fish. The final goal was to use Señor Bass as a videoconferencing tool. Imagine if you were on a conference call with a BMBB on the other end. As you spoke, various open-source speech tools in the embedded Linux system would lip-sync your words, giving you an in-room presence they'd not soon forget. It worked for Ashlee Simpson, it can work for you!¹

¹Some of you, especially our friends outside the U.S., will no doubt suggest that the popularity of Big Mouth Billy Bass explains a variety of strange stateside phenomena, including Ashlee Simpson, certain election results (you pick 'em), and the existence of movies starring David Spade or Rob Schneider. Those comments are inappropriate for a corporate blog, so they won't be mentioned here.