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.

My enemies should never enjoy such a post!

The new year is here, and finally so am I. As I get older, the ratio of "How relaxed I am during the holidays" to "How little I want to resume any productive activity" gets worse and worse. Hope your holidays were relaxing, whatever you did (or didn't do).

My work time is centered around getting the 2008 SCA and SDO Roadshow plans together. More on that as it develops, of course, but the technology is moving ahead quickly. XForms is coming into its own as well. Our friend and colleague Keith Wells gave a presentation at XForms night at the XML 2007 conference in Boston last month. Unfortunately I couldn't attend, but the sessions were the hit of the show. (That's the report I got, anyway.) If these three technologies aren't on your radar, they should be....

Today's blog title comes from Michael Wex's excellent book Born to Kvetch. It's an extremely entertaining book that's also a scholarly discussion of Yiddish culture and language. The Yiddish curse is the subject of one chapter; here's my favorite:

You should own a thousand houses
  with a thousand rooms in each house
    and a thousand beds in every room.

And you should sleep each night in a different bed
  in a different room
    in a different house
      and get up every morning
          and go down a different staircase
            and get into a different car
              driven by a different chauffeur
                who should drive you to a different doctor —

and he shouldn't know what's wrong with you, either.

Check out Mr. Wex's Web site, michaelwex.com, you'll be glad you did.

My Christmas present was a trip to San Francisco. I was 4,018 miles from qualifying for elite airline status, so I spent several hundred dollars on a ticket to get enough miles to put me over the top. I flew to San Francisco on the 27th, and I flew back to RDU on the 28th. I stayed at a Hilton property near the airport and spent maybe 10 hours in San Francisco. That sounds pathetic, but I got free upgrades all the way ("why yes, another single malt scotch would be nice") and read six books in two days.

I'll mention reading because that was probably the only resolution I came close to keeping last year. My Backpack has the list of the books I read last year. I didn't average a book a week, but I did much better than I have in the past.

• Best fiction books I read in 2007: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky.
• Best non-fiction book I read in 2007: I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon. Somehow I had forgotten what a genius he was and how much his music meant to me. The King is Dead, Long Live the King.
• Best line I read in 2007: From the writer's journals published at the back of Suite Française: Salvation, in general, is when the time allocated to us is longer than the time allocated to a crisis.

Today's playlist included an album entitled "The Pennywhistle: Magical Instrument of South Africa." I would put a link here, but I can't find this anywhere on the Web. I've checked all the music stores I know, including the wonderful Stern's Music, but it didn't turn up. Interestingly enough, when I imported the CD into iTunes, it recognized the album. Somebody out there knows about it, at least. I think I bought this in Soweto last year (yes, I love saying that), but I can't find it anywhere. If somebody out there knows where you could buy a copy, post a comment here.

More on the roadshow, soon....

Stealth post

Okay, I'm back after an unconscionably long gap between posts, I'm just gonna pretend that never happened...

I'm thrilled to say I turned in the complete manuscript for the second edition of my XSLT book. The final draft weighed in at an auspicious 888 pages. (That's a very lucky number in China, I'm led to understand.) It's undergoing a final tech review, then it's off to the presses. I'm sad that it's not going to be in stores in time for Christmas, Chanukah or Eid al-Fitr, but it should be available for Valentine's Day. I got a number of notes and testimonials when the first edition came out, developers telling me how much their partners appreciated getting the book as a gift. (A common refrain: "I'll never forget the look on her face....Our relationship hasn't been the same since!")

I recently read Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, based on a recommendation from my literary advisor Willy Farrell. It's extremely funny, although it's definitely for mature audiences only. To my delight, it also turns out to be far more profound than I expected. If you're not easily offended, you should check it out.

I spent a couple of weeks in China recently, the kickoff of the SCA/SDO briefing tour. I did events in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, plus a smaller event in Zhuhai. We've got events scheduled for Toronto, Boston and San Francisco later this year, plus four events in India that will be on the dW site soon. Watch this space. I don't know how soon I can announce this, but we're working with some of our partners in the OSOA group to get more companies involved in the briefings. The net is that we should have several dozen events over the next few months. For the countless millions of you dying to know more about SCA and SDO, help is on the way. (In the meantime, of course, you can get learn more at developerWorks.)

Another note about SCA: There are insidious rumors that SCA is simply a ploy to lock you in to a particular vendor's implementation. That is, in fact, untrue. I'll have more to say about that in the next couple of days, I just want to get my thoughts together.

The Playlist: I've been listening to Bruce's new album, some of the cuts I like a lot. Haven't had a chance to listen to it closely, so I can't say where it fits in the pantheon. Also Show Your Bones by Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The more I listen to that one, the more I like it. As an added bonus, my daughter likes it too. Finally, Calvin Harris's I Created Disco is dangerously cheesy and a lot of fun.

There are some other things I need to blog about here, but I'll fill in with short posts over the next few days. Putting together marathon posts overwhelms me (hence the gap), so I'll keep 'em short and simple.

p.s. Thanks so much to those of you who posted dozens of comments offering the dW community chances to buy v1agra and other sources of artificial inspiration. As soon as I get my share of $36 million (U.S.) dolars [sic] from that Nigerian oil minister, I'll be in touch. Send me your bank account number now and I'll transfer the money as soon as I can....

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

Humanity is less humane because Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday. Willy Farrell and I were talking about him Wednesday night; I read Galápagos on Willy's recommendation earlier this year. Beyond Vonnegut's writing, his bemusement at our capacity for cruelty and destruction and his wicked sense of humor will be missed even more.

I was on a multi-week, multi-continent business trip a few years ago and read Slaughterhouse-Five and Siddhartha back-to-back. I was surprised that both books shared the idea of serenity through detachment. Both central characters move back and forth in time at will, substituting their memories (faulty, in Billy Pilgrim's case) for reality. I don't know if there is any direct connection between the two; it's a fascinating coincidence if nothing else.

[This being Friday the 13th, I was going to blog about the evils of JSON, but it's late and I'm tired. More on that soon.]

The NYT article on Vonnegut's death quotes God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ... you’ve got to be kind.

[I've never read the book, but I love the quote.]