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.

Winners, losers and light bulbs

First, a work-related note:

(Note to self: Need to find a less subtle way of announcing that.) I'll be working with the new feature pack this week...Even if you don't have WAS 6.1 installed, you can download a trial version. The feature pack is based on the open-source Apache Tuscany project.

Momentum around SCA continues to build. I'll post some customer success stories here as the customers go public with them. Suffice it to say that SCA solutions are in production now. (While they're also evidence of the growing impact of the technology, SCA/SDO product announcements from our competitors won't be mentioned here.)

And, uh, speaking of men's college basketball, as I went to bed last night, I thought the Clemson Tigers had finally beaten The Heels in Chapel Hill. Since the dawn of time, since before the invention of Dr. James Naismith, the peach basket and the peach, the Clemson men's team had never left Chapel Hill with a victory. I didn't watch the game, so I thought the Tigers had finally won. The Heels won in overtime in Clemson earlier this year when Wayne Ellington hit a 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds left, so I was afraid this might be the year Clemson won on the road.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I picked up the paper this morning to find that the Heels came back from 11 points down with three minutes left in the game, winning 103-93 in double OT. (The missus read a late score as the final.) If these two teams meet in the ACC Tournament, I refuse to watch that game.

The Heels lost to the Forces of Evil earlier this week, congratulations to the eight or ten Dook fans we really, really like. (dW's Jeanne Murray and family, that's four, our neighbors John and Cam Cline and their kids, that's eight, dW's Barb Wetmore makes nine...and I think we're done.) This is the other side of the joy I felt at the end of the Super Bowl.

From the Dim-Watted Humor Dept.: When I thought the Heels had lost, I was going to share some of my favorite ACC lightbulb jokes as a consolation. But now I'm going to do that anyway:

How many Georgia Tech students does it take to change a light bulb?

12,001. One to hold the light bulb and 12,000 to lift the campus and rotate it around the axis of the bulb.

How many Dook students does it take to change a light bulb?

11. One to change the light bulb and ten to stand around and say, "We change light bulbs just as well as they do at Ivy League schools."

How many UNC students does it take to change a light bulb?

76. One to change the light bulb, 50 to protest the changing of the light bulb, and 25 to stage a counter-protest upholding the light bulb's right to be changed.

(My personal favorite) How many Clemson students does it take to change a light bulb?

None, Clemson doesn't have electricity.

Thanks, I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your server, it's been a pleasure opening for Ace of Base.

From the "How to Not Delight Your Customers" Dept.: One of my household responsibilities is to maintain the computers we have around the house. A couple of weeks ago the anti-virus software on my wife's desktop machine encouraged us to perform an update. Imagine my surprise when the updated Symantec/Norton software told us we had 15 days to use the software before we would have to pay for it. This was particularly amusing because the un-updated software didn't expire until the end of May. After several hours, I was finally able to get the product key we paid for from the Symantec site. Entering it into the authorization dialog of the now-expired trial software reactivated everything, so our machine is once again protected from the evils of the Internet.

Some thoughts here:

• If you tell me to update my software, I don't expect to be told after the fact that I'm on a trial basis and that I'll have to pay for the update if I can't find my activation code.
• If you have a piece of software that uses an activation code, your updated piece of software should be able to find and use the activation code from the original product.
• If your piece of software is unable to find and use the activation code from the original product, tell me to write it down before I start the update.

Absolutely unacceptable. If the good folks at Symantec and McAfee want to make sales projections for the second quarter, I'm guessing the number of Symantec customers will decrease by 1 around June 1st, with McAfee benefiting from the loss.

Today's Playlist so far includes Schmack! by Steriogram (mostly just "Walkie Talkie Man" from the iPod commercial, repeat repeat repeat), In Utero and Cheer Me Up Thank You from Echolocations.

Today's fun fact: Dr. James Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontario, Canada, less than an hour from the glorious city of Ottawa. My awareness of the number of "American" inventions that aren't continues to grow.

I'm off to the land of WebSphere, have a great day.

superb owl ads

First of all, let me direct your attention to my blog post from Groundhog Day, in which I picked the Gints by 3 points. I didn't have the details right, but I picked the winner. (My other two predictions involving scotch and junk food were absolutely correct, btw.) In hindsight, look at all the injuries the Giants had through the year; their players got healthy and the team peaked at the right time. I won't rant about my feelings for the P-Men and their quest for perfection, but I will say the 1972 Dolphins need to let it go. Part of greatness is letting your work speak for itself...

From the "Let the Music Do the Talking" Dept.: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played well and sounded good. Great, even. I'd be happy to have the audio from that performance on my iPod. "Here Comes My Girl" is one of the great us-against-the-world songs ever, and "Free Fallin'" enabled Mr. English Major to bore and annoy his daughter with a discussion of the literary term "irony." That being said, my 85-year-old grandmother and me sitting onstage working a jigsaw puzzle would have been a more dynamic show than TP. This performance was the polar opposite of a wardrobe malfunction.
Music: A- Excitement: F--

The game itself was one of the best ever. IMHO, the best Super Bowl was 49ers-Bengals, but this was close. Not everyone likes a defensive battle, but I was interested in every play.

From the "Maybe Not So Many Weapons After All" Dept.: Our family had a bet on how many times the announcers would use some form of the word "weapons." As in, "The Patriots can beat you so many ways because they have so many weapons." My bet was 14, and Sheri and Lily were both over that. To our count, there were only two mentions of the word. Some of that had to do with how much time Tom Brady spent flat on his back, I suppose.

In all seriousness, I feel bad for our friends who love the Patriots. (Bandwagon jockeys who've never heard of Raymond Berry get no sympathy.) It was an amazing season for you guys, and coming up short must be crushing.

On to the part of Super Bowl Sunday that Sheri and Lily love the most: The Commercials. My three favorites:

1. The Doritos "Guy in a giant mouse suit" ad from the second quarter. I loved it partly because of my love of mascot-related violence¹ and partly because it was so unexpected. Very, very funny.
2. The Bud Light "Wheel Suck!" ad from the third. The agency that does the Bud Light ads is genius.
3. The Tide "Talking Stain" ad from the second. Been there, been mortified by that.

And the worst, in no particular order:

• Amp Energy in the fourth. I really didn't need to see that.
• The two Sales Genie ads. Were those borderline racist, or was that just me? Regardless, can you imagine Sales Genie getting any business out of those commercials?
• Anything involving Go Daddy. For this Super Bowl and for all time. Just go away.
• It wasn't nearly as bad as the others I'm mentioning here, but the dancing lizards ad in the second quarter. Can you tell me what product that was for? Didn't think so. And what exactly was the deal with the flatulent lizard towards the end of the spot?

Today's blog title comes from the missus. What if the NFL issued a mandate that all Super Bowl XLIII ads must feature owls? Put some constraints on the ad agencies and see who comes up with the most creative concepts. (Note: Any company attempting to use the word "hooter" in any way would receive a lifetime advertising ban.)

Hope you had a great weekend, I'll post some actual work-related items in the next day or two.

¹ See Duck and Cougar Mascot Beatdown, Mascots Duke it Out (good to see young people learning about sportsmanship), and the rumble by which all mascot donnybrooks shall forever be measured, Bear vs. Tree. Enjoy!

Happy Groundhog Day!

I hope all of you have made the most of this special day. In case you missed it, Punxsutawney Phil has officially predicted six more weeks of winter. Considering that it was in the mid 60's and sunny today, we could use some winter. Everybody in the neighborhood was out walking today, which was nice, but it should be wintry. Summer will be oppressing us soon enough, let's get some cold weather.

In conjunction with Groundhog Day, we'd like to wish a happy 32nd birthday to our friend Amy Wentley. Many happy returns on the day.

We also want to wish a speedy recovery to Bentley the Wonder Dog. His mom is dW's blogroller Jennette Banks, and he's having extensive surgery on one of his legs. To my knowledge and experience Bentley is a perfect soul, and we hope he's feeling better soon.

The Microsoft bid of the GDP of Tanzania for Yahoo! strikes me as a really bad move. Remember AOL-Time Warner? Consider these three brands:

• Google
• Yahoo! Search
• MSN LiveSearch

Which of the three is a verb? Which of the three has your mom ever heard of? Do you ever say, "I Yahooed you and found your cat's Web site," or "MSN's LiveSearch makes my Internet research go so much more quickly"? Me neither. Google is way out in front, at least for now.

Google is doing more innovation than anybody in the Web space, IMHO. They have some major usability problems to address with Google Docs, but their ability to provide a collaboration platform that works on every platform and costs nothing should scare Redmond. Unlike Google, MS has to grow its business while protecting the Microsoft Office cash cow. That's not going to be easy. And MS can't leverage their OS monopoly to relegate Google to second-class desktop citizen. (The DOJ has expressed an interest in the case.)

Two more huge obstacles: Google isn't exactly a complacent company that's stopped innovating, and Yahoo! is built on an open-source stack. So MS will have the double challenge of chasing a front-runner who isn't slowing down (see Sham vs. Secretariat, Belmont Stakes, 1973) while retaining the talent from a company that has had very little to do with Microsoft and its products in the past.

I can't wait for the demo that shows how you can publish your Word 2007 documents to Yahoo and view them on your Zune, then beam your documents to another Zune, the owner of which will have to buy Office 2007 before they can read more than the first 300 words of the document.

This will be interesting to watch.

Today's playlist: Costello Music by The Fratellis, Echolocations 5.4: Wolves and Doc and Merle Watson's Guitar Album.

A couple of posts ago I got a comment from Alice at Echolocations. I've decided to put them on the playlist indefinitely...I've got maybe 15 or 20 of their CDs, if you like interesting music, you should subscribe. Every two months a shiny disc of musical joy shows up in the post. Plus, you get to hear cool artists and songs before they become famous.

And I got a comment from a record company executive. How cool is that?

Your comments please: American Airlines is in the process of offering in-flight Internet access. Do you care? One thing I like about flying is that I'm unreachable. I can work or sleep or watch a movie or read a book or listen to music or whatever, and nobody can ping me. The same people who want this are the same people who can't spend more than 5 minutes away from their Blackberries. I'm plenty connected, thank you. I can maybe see using a connection to do research if I'm working on a writing project, but even that's a stretch. I'm much happier with a couple of good books and a comfortable seat.

Finally, my Super Bowl predictions:

• I will enjoy some Laphroaig.
• I will eat food that, while delicious, has no health benefits whatsoever.
• The Gints will win with a late field goal followed by an end-zone interception of a Tom Brady pass that seals the game.

On the Internet, everybody knows you're a Doug.

First, responses to some of your comments:

• I heard from my friend Chris Alexander, whom I haven't seen in more than two decades. He's the head of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College. Chris, my "escape" was complete and successful, we'll catch up offline.
• Several people who knew me way back when have found me through this blog. If I had known me at that time and found Doug Tidwell on the Web 20+ years later, I would have started the discussion with, "Wow, Doug, I can't believe you're still alive!" Apparently those who knew me then had higher hopes than I did.
• dW's Sera Lewis posted her opinion that perhaps my love of donuts and my obscenely high cholesterol could be related. It's a long shot, but I'll look in to it.
• Sera also asked that I post a link to a free trial version of WebSphere Business Modeler. With Valentine's Day about 3 weeks away, it's the perfect gift for that special someone. I gave a copy to my wife for Valentine's Day last year, and I can honestly say our relationship hasn't been the same since.
• Finally, Blog Doyenne Jennette Banks suggested that I think of my cholesterol number as "going to eleven." Sounds better than 354.

Today's blog title is based on one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons ever.

IBM's own Mike Edwards has published an article on using asynchronous services with SCA. Entitled "Can I call you back about that?", it's the most complete discussion I've seen anywhere of how callback interfaces work inside SCA. You should definitely check it out.

My daughter Lily and I were in Tennessee for a few days after Christmas. We had heard reports that the coolest video game ever is Guitar Hero III; after playing it on her cousin's PlayStation 3, we can confirm this is true. Our most pleasant surprise was that the game includes the Strong Bad classic Trogdor. If you can find a copy, it's a lot of fun. (Note: You might want to turn the volume down before you click on the Guitar Hero link.)

From the Who Put the 'Goober' in 'Gubernatorial'" Dept.: Last week former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory attempted to kick off his candidacy for this year's North Carolina gubernatorial race. Unfortunately, he and his staff spent most of the day explaining the text of the catchy masthead graphic:

Pat McCrory
Governer [sic]

In the time-honored tradition of political figures making things worse by avoiding the simple honest answer ("next time we'll use the spell checker" would have been nice), the campaign said one a them "hackers" had broken in to the site. At one point the campaign claimed Candidate McCrory's mayoral Web site had been hacked for six months. (Why they hadn't bothered to fix their security problems or contact the authorities wasn't discussed.) After several conspiracy theories were given out, the candidate himself stepped forward and said there was no hacker, they had simply made a mistake. To review, if the campaign staffers had simply said, "Oops, we'll fix that," there's no story. You can read the complete story on the Raleigh News & Observer site.

I can't imagine why anyone with decency and talent would run for office in this country. (Your comments please: How much evidence have you seen that decent, talented people are running for office?)

Today's playlist featured Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace by The Foos and InRadio 5.2: Elephants on Parade, a collection of indie rock I got from dW's own Steve Luyendyk. Really good stuff, especially the cut from Bloody Black Eyes (link withheld—surf safely, kids!).

And speaking of, congratulations to Steve Luyendyk and other Gints fans everywhere. I've got several friends in Boston, but I just can't root for the P-Men. I'll be pulling for Eli and Company in the Super Bowl, several thousand hours of hype from now.

Have a great weekend, I'll be back in a few days.

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....

Terrible, searing regret

I saw Heels coach Steve Robinson around town Monday, told him how we were proud of the team and what a great year they had. He was obviously disappointed (this was less than 24 hours after the game), but said "that's how the business goes." It reminded me of one of the best paragraphs I've ever read, from Richard Ford's The Sportswriter:

...if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

Many people talk about the amount of money and resources we put into sports teams, and I think part of it is to see people go through confrontations like that. In the NCAA tournament, especially this deep into the tournament, somebody suffers a terrible, searing defeat that ends their season in every single game. Most of my life is organized specifically to avoid situations like that, and I think most of us are the same way. No, I don't have incredible moments where I reach the highest possible level of success in my profession (like the Heels' players and coaches who won the national title two years ago), but I don't have moments where everything I've been working for is taken by somebody else in front of the whole world. I use a substantial amount of my energy to keep myself out of those situations and stay on an even keel.

The Nike/Michael Jordan "Failure" ad is one of the best ever. Jordan's voiceover ends with the line, "I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." No matter what your circumstances are (soldier, firefighter, police officer, surgeon, athlete, etc.), it takes a lot more guts than I have to look terrible, searing regret in the eye and say, "Let's get it on."

Enough philosophy, on to work-related stuff...

I've spent some of the last few days working with Ruby on Rails, it's a framework for building Web applications quickly. It uses naming conventions, integrated database support and extensive refactoring of common Web functions to simplify Web development. I'm using O'Reilly's book Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, it's a very good tutorial. It's written by the estimable Bruce Tate and Curt Hibbs, reason enough to buy the book. For installation, I used InstantRails. You unzip the package, set your PATH variable, and off you go. (I have Cygwin installed, which includes Ruby. You have to make sure the version of Ruby that's included in InstantRails is in your PATH before the version shipped with Cygwin.) It's a great way to get started.

I'm working with Rails for an article on SCA and SDO. I'm trying to explain how Rails applications can be integrated into an SCA application. I'm working through some technical questions about Rails' ActiveRecord feature...I think it can be used with SDO underneath, although I haven't confirmed that. I also don't think there's much overlap between ActiveRecord and SDO.

ActiveRecord is one of the Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture defined by Martin Fowler. His Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book is a great reference, you should get a copy if you don't have one already.

I think the key difference between ActiveRecord and SDO is that ActiveRecord encapsulates access to a database. I have some Googling (in case someone's done this already) or hacking (DIY) ahead of me to verify this, but I believe using ActiveRecord to encapsulate access to an SDO datasource would make ActiveRecord more flexible without changing any of the source of your Rails application.

Today's playlist: Afrique En Or, Volume 1, wonderful soukous music from the Congo. (Soukous is from the French word secouer, to shake, didn't know that until I Wikipedia'd it.) Also the new Modest Mouse album and Soundsystem by 311.

Flops and teraflops

In this cynical age (or maybe it's just me), I'm always delighted when something overhyped turns out to be a complete flop. As I've mentioned before, there are signs that Vista and Office 2007 could fall into this category. Apple's Security ad is a brilliant skewering of Vista's protective features. I've also gotten several emails from some universities I used to work with, asking if certain products will run on Vista. The answer is usually some version of, "We're working on a fix that should be out in a month or two."

How am I supposed to get excited about an expensive upgrade that won't run some of my current software and might require me to upgrade or replace my current hardware?

When XP came out, I was willing to do a pre-release upgrade. (Mostly so I could watch DVDs on my laptop, but still.) Has anyone out there migrated to Vista? More importantly, has anyone out there taken their primary machine and moved it to Vista? Everyone I've heard of that's installed Vista is an IT person who installed it to see what would break.

One theory about the Vista backlash is that unlike in the days of Windows 95, every journalist out there has a laptop running Windows XP. Mr. Bill can tell everyone about how great the new stuff is, but everybody has felt the pain of the World of Windows over the last few years.

Continuing the theme, I'm trying to get my daughter a Wii for her birthday. There's a commercial out now for EA Sports' Tiger Woods PGA Golf Tour 2007 for the Wii, it looks like fun. No nonsense about a bazillion teraflops of graphics processing, everything I've heard about the Wii is that it's lots of fun. It's the first game console my wife has ever had an interest in. The reviews for the PS3 and XBox 360 are often something like, "really amazing graphics, but the gameplay isn't that different."

PS3 and XBox 360 were supposed to send Nintendo to the technology landfill next to Atari and ColecoVision. Didn't happen that way. The biggest signal that the PS3 isn't doing well: I'm seeing commercials for the PS2 these days. Playstation 3 was supposed to turn around the fortunes of the entire Sony Corporation. Microsoft has lost billions of dollars on the XBox, although they recently told financial analysts that the XBox will turn a profit in the 2008 fiscal year. It's good to see Nintendo succeed by delivering a product people want instead of burning through billions of dollars and hoping to outlast all of its rivals.

The winner in this race is the company that was seen as the also-ran. They can't build enough boxes to meet demand because they focused on a new approach to gaming that makes things much more fun. It always makes me happy when the company that wins is the one who truly innovates.

To sum it up, I don't like to be told that I'm going to love something. I can figure that out for myself, thanks.

Here at IBM we've learned the hard way that the best technology doesn't always win. That's a painful lesson. How many of us went into therapy when OS/2 failed to take its rightful place at the center of the computing universe? While I was at my grandfather's funeral, I was talking with my uncle; he's in IT at the Treasury Department of the State of Tennessee. He was telling me they still have an OS/2 box that sits in the corner and just runs. He said they'd like to host its application somewhere else, find some excuse to replace it, but it never breaks or gives them any trouble....

From the "You issued a patent for THAT?!?" department: Our friends at Slashdot report that someone has been granted a patent on a variation of a linked list. Hopefully the owner will have a reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing plan so that every Computer Science 201 class can still be taught. One wag at Slashdot is in the process of filing a patent entitled, "A method of transportation involving the repeated placement of one foot in front of the other, thereby conveying motion upon the transportee." (A patent for walking, in other words.)

With the recent emphasis on proper attribution in blogs and online articles, I should give props to IBM's John Hind, whose internal newsletter is a constant source of enlightenment. (The aforementioned Slashdot article, for example.)

The grass is a little greener, and the sky is a little bluer... because there's a new Modest Mouse album out today. Haven't had time to put on headphones and really give it a listen, but "Dashboard" is great.

Finally, something work related: I have some work on building composite applications with SCA that have an Ajax front end. That should show up here on dW over the next six weeks or so, stay tuned.

p.s. I forgot to mention that PeepsFest 2007 will have a cooking contest as well as a poetry festival. Just keep that in mind as you're making plans for the weekend.

A dispatch from the Land of Productivity (or Distraction)

Well, here's another blog entry. I'm blogging in the middle of the day as opposed to waiting until the end of the day, when I generally doze off around midnight with the intention of blogging the next day. I get obsessed with things, then the whole day passes without blogging.

I finally built Apache Tuscany yesterday. Instead of getting the code from the downloads page, I went to the repository at svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/tuscany/branches/ and got the projects das-java-M2, sca-java-M2 and sdo-java-M2. You have to have Maven 2.0.4 and Ant 1.7.0 installed, and probably some other stuff. The Tuscany site has the setup details. You also need the settings.xml file from Apache (big thanks to Bert Lamb for that tip).

Anyway, you just run Maven to get the build going. I hit a couple of problems, but they were pretty easy to solve. I commented out part of a build script because Maven didn't realize that the necessary files were installed already. I also had to fix a test case. See if you can spot the fix. The original code was:

Greeting greeting = (Greeting) component.getServiceInstance();
assertEquals("foo", greeting.greet("foo"));
verify(invoker);

And this is the code after the fix:

Greeting greeting = (Greeting) component.getServiceInstance();
// assertEquals("foo", greeting.greet("foo"));
// verify(invoker);

So, today's debugging tip, kids: If a test case fails, stop running it. Repeat until the number of failed test cases is zero.

We'll talk more about sportsmanship in a minute (it's almost ACC Tournament time), but here are a couple of items from the Taking Delight in the Failures of Others Department:

• From The Reg, a report that Microsoft's OneCare Virus Protection Yah You Betcha failed a virus certification test.
• From Australia's APC magazine, apparently hackers have cracked Vista's activation scheme. I don't support piracy (I even buy all the music I listen to!), but the things Microsoft is doing to protect their assets seem to hurt honest customers the most. If there's a bug in the activation scheme that suddenly tells 1,000 users at a large organization that they can't use the software they legally paid for, that won't be pleasant. I hope for everybody's sake that doesn't happen, but I think that's far more likely than keeping determined thieves from using their products.
• Finally, InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely reports that The United States Department of Transportation has put off any migrations to Vista or Office 2007 for at least six months. The killer quote from the DOT: "There appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products." Ouch.

From the Breathlessly Exciting World of Eyewitness Journalism: The other day my wife heard a local newsperson say the following sentence:

Thank you for that breaking news, covered here in the breaking news center.

Here in the Triangle, all of the TV stations have remote reporting equipment and feel the need to use it regularly. So if anything happens (a motorist commits the crime of littering, for example), the crew is immediately dispatched to the site for a Breaking News Update. When I rule the world, the station will have to get permission from me before they can send out their trucks.

Enough ranting for now....Was happy to see the Tar Heels beat Dook on Sunday. If you haven't seen this, there's a really hard foul at the end of the game. (Now that's breaking news.) Tyler Henderson ends up face down on the court; when he gets up, he leaves a pile of blood on the floor. Nice work by the players, coaches and referees to get him off the court before he did something rash. (His teammates call him "Psycho-T.") The scene of him Hansel-and-Gretel-ing blood to the locker room will be replayed millions of times in the coming years¹.

It's bad karma, but many UNC fans take joy in UNC wins and Dook losses. Likewise, Dook fans take delight in Dook wins and UNC losses. Yesterday was National Sportsmanship Day...with that in mind, the folks at ESPN posted a list of the ten most hated Dook players of all time. I'm sure this discussion began with someone saying, "All we have to do is work out who's #2 through #10."

Today's Playlist: Surfer Rosa by The Pixies (no link here, the cover art is no doubt offensive to some of the audience²) and 3121 by The Artist Thankfully Known as Prince Again. The man rocked at the Super Bowl, this is his best record in quite a while.

I had some blogging ideas about command line tips³, I'll post those soon for the thousands of anxious readers who can't wait to see 'em.

¹ I enjoyed using "Hansel and Gretel" as a verb, but I think I'll need to use it sparingly to keep it fresh.
² I'm willing to bet that at least 70% of the readers of this blog immediately went to see what all the fuss is about.
³ For the young people out there, the command line is a black window with a prompt, at which you type commands. Ask your grandparents about it if you have any questions. None of that wussy "click and drag the smiley face and wait till the trash can starts dancing with Fetchy the Search Dog™" nonsense.

Categories : [   Music  |  Tuscany  ]

Mar 07 2007, 01:20:50 PM EST Permalink

I am the Omniscient Debugger! All bugs shall bow before me! I bestow cleanliness and elegance on all the code in my domain!

Got a pointer from our friends Jeff Miller and Eric Long to a really interesting debugging tool: The Omniscient Debugger. You really should check it out. What I think is most cool about it is that you can go backwards through your code. In other words, you can undo the state change that just happened if you want. Very interesting code.

The developer of the Omniscient Debugger, Bil Lewis, would really like some help from any Eclipse gurus out there, particularly anyone who knows how to replace or extend the existing debugger. Being able to extend the Java perspective with a new debugger would be a very interesting project. I suggested that looking over the source code for the E-P-I-C project (Eclipse Perl Integration) and the Ruby Tools Project would be a good place to start. I know both of them subclass or extend the Eclipse debugger, learning from their experience would be a great start. My understanding is that E-P-I-C did it first, then the Ruby People built on that.

Random news items:

• From The Reg, news of the British Navy adopting "Windows for Warships. Be very afraid.
• Seeking Alpha has an article that describes how Microsoft is consumed with Apple Envy.
• And finally, what better way to get a flame war going than writing an article for O'Reilly praising the Microsoft Zune? Mr. Dictionary has failed us again...

It's interesting to read articles predicting the death of Microsoft. I joined IBM in 1989, so I got to read the "IBM is Dead" articles for several years before the crash happened. Obviously we rebounded, but things weren't pretty in the meantime.

I've got the paperwork done, I'll be teaching an XSLT 2.0 tutorial at ApacheCon Europe. I'm also presenting SCA, SDO and XForms at some other shows over the next few months, I'll try to shamelessly plug them as they approach. One more point about ApacheCon Europe: It takes place in Amsterdam this year. You could do a lot worse than making a business trip to an extremely interesting and informative conference that takes place in Amsterdam.

Today's playlist: A couple of things from the estimable Putumayo label: Afro-Latin Dance Party and ¡Latino! ¡Latino!. I love Latin and Cuban music, I wish I knew more about it. Also listened to a Hilary Hahn recording of violin concertos by Samuel Barber and Edgar Meyer and Don Pablo Casals' recording of Bach's Cello Concertos. (Trivia: This specific recording was mentioned by the protagonist of Gabriel García Márquez' latest novel.)

One more music note before I fall asleep: Chad Lewis and I are going to see The Flaming Lips April 18th. The Lips are always a wild show...if I can just learn to understand their music, I'll be in good shape.

Categories : [   ApacheCon  |  Code  |  Music  |  XSLT  ]

Feb 28 2007, 11:49:26 PM EST Permalink

Raaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa-xanne

I was watching the Police play on the Grammys (why aren't they the Grammies?) a couple of weeks ago. It's cool they're getting back together, but I have an additional request: The English Beat should get back together also. I saw them open for the Police more decades ago than I care to count, and the Beat blew me away. I had heard of them, but hadn't actually heard them. My friends and I had all bought Police t-shirts when we got to the show. After the Beat did their set, we went back and traded our Police t-shirts for Beat t-shirts.

That reminds me of one thing I should mention before I continue. Everything that's in my blog represents my own opinions, they are not necessarily the opinions of my employer. With this exception:

The English Beat is one of the coolest bands of all time.

That's actually an official IBM policy. Mr. Palmisano made a statement to that effect some time ago, I forget exactly when it was.

I haven't blogged in a while because I've been heads-down working on the second edition of my XSLT book. I believe the portions of the book that are done (roughly 600 pages) will be available as a Rough Cut on the O'Reilly Web site sometime soon. I'll post the details here as soon as they're ready. I've written about 450 pages of manuscript that include examples of every XSLT 2.0 element and every XPath 2.0 / XQuery 1.0 function. There are also chapters on creating extensions with Java and C#, the new grouping functions in XSLT 2.0 and other cool stuff. I'm very proud of what I've done (and equally annoyed that it's taken me as long as it has). I can see the end of this project, which is a relief.

I've also been working on evangelism for SCA, SCO and XForms. Let me say this now: SCA is going to be huge. Trust me on this. You can't maintain a useful SOA without it, and we're going to make that obvious over the next few months. If you're not on board the SCA bandwagon, hop on now. You'll be able to look down your nose at your colleagues who didn't get it as soon as you did.

Since I last blogged I spoke at SHARE in Tampa. I gave an early version of the presentation I'll be making throughout the year, showing how you start with a standards-based data model, then use that data model in your BPEL and WSDL services. You also can use that data model to generate an XForms interface from the XML Schema you started with. The best part: You can now create a really cool, Ajax-based Web 2.0 interface that's generated directly from your back-end data model. Your cool Web interface is generated by the data model used in your enterprise applications. You use SCA to tie everything together, and you use SDO to access all of your data sources. Watch developerWorks (I'm sure you do anyway) for lots more on this over the coming months.

I was very nervous for the SHARE presentation because I was speaking with David Barnes and Kelvin Lawrence in the audience. That's kind of like shooting free throws in front of Michael Jordan....

Getting back to my Beat t-shirt, it's one of the four coolest t-shirts I've ever had. A few years ago I bought the CD Beat This: The Best of The English Beat in an airport. In the liner notes Sting (one of many rock stars who praised the band) mentioned how much he loved his Beat t-shirt. In no particular order, here are...

• The aforementioned English Beat t-shirt. A design icon. I've looked on eBay many times for one, but can't find any. It was probably thrown out during a closet-cleaning by someone (most likely my first wife).
• A Howard Finster t-shirt that read, "I was sent from another world to work with people." Found this in some boutique in Atlanta years ago. This one might actually be in the closet somewhere. Then again, for all I know Jimmy Hoffa could be in my closet somewhere.
• A Keith Haring t-shirt from the NYC Fresh Festival. I saw this show in Nashville in 1984. The headliners were Run-D.M.C., and the other acts were Whodini, The Fat Boys and Kurtis Blow. When my friends and I first heard Run-D.M.C., they absolutely blew us away. It was the coolest music we'd ever heard. I can remember driving home from working at a pizza place, it's 2 a.m. and I'm hoping to hit a red light so I can listen to Run-D.M.C. a little longer (didn't have a stereo at home). When I'm living in a rest home, my mind completely occupied by Alzheimer's, I believe the only words I'll say will be Run-D.M.C. lyrics.
  (BTW, the t-shirt was really cool.)
• A Green Eggs and Ham t-shirt my wife bought on the streets of Toronto many years ago. I don't believe the Seuss estate got a penny from this, but it was a really cool shirt. I never wore this shirt without at least one stranger telling me how much they liked it.

I promise to blog again tomorrow, there are lots of things that have accumulated in my brain (or my brain's lint filter) over the last several days, I'll post 'em as I remember 'em.

Moving forward with SCA and SDO

I've mentioned QEDWiki several times here...David Barnes has put a video intro to QEDWiki on YouTube. If you haven't seen this technology before, you really should check this out. To see it is to want it.

I've been working on some materials for SCA and SDO. I've put a draft of a paper out for review (I'll post the URL here when it's available) and I'm working with Apache Tuscany committer Bert Lamb on an SCA demo. I'm also presenting at SHARE next week in Tampa, so I'm getting ready for that. It'll be the first test run of the demo. To start I'll be using the SCA support in WebSphere products, but it'll be vendor-neutral (aka open source) later this year....

I found out from Dirk Nicol (my boss and the father of developerWorks) today that we're going to have an SCA/SDO presentation at PHPCon UK. The OSOA.org site has all the details for the open-source PHP library for SCA and SDO. If you're doing any kind of SOA work with PHP, you should definitely take a look at these tools.

Quiz time: While bouncing around the Web today, I found a link to The Superhero Quiz Web site. You answer some questions and it tells you the superhero you most resemble. I was SpiderMan, fwiw. You can also see which villain you most resemble by filling out the survey at thesuperheroquiz.com/villain/. I haven't done that one yet.

The Playlist: Special Beat Service by The English Beat, Sheshwe: The Sound of the Mines (a collection of South African gumboots music) and Beck's The Information. The South African collection is supposedly one of the albums that influenced Paul Simon's Graceland, or so I'm told.

Super Monday

Enjoyed the Super Bowl yesterday, a sloppy game in the rain sure beats guys running around in a dome. I know they won't do it for tourism reasons, but playing the Super Bowl in Chicago in the middle of winter would be great. I'm happy that we can stop hearing the "Peyton Manning can't win the big game" nonsense. Football is a team sport. Yes, the quarterback has more of an impact on the game than any other player, but it's still a team sport. If Ben Rothlisberger doesn't make a shoestring tackle last year, Manning wins the big game and goes to the Super Bowl. Quarterbacks also get the blame when a team loses (see Grossman, Rex), that's not always fair. (In this case it is.)

eWeek has a great article this week on how to be a slacker and make your way to the top. They also have a more serious article about finding the slacker/worker equilibrium. Everybody needs some downtime....

As I mentioned last week, Chad Lewis and I went to see The Mountain Goats in Raleigh Friday night. The first opening act, Megafaun, is the worst band I've ever seen on an actual stage. Their first song broke down; they actually stopped in the middle of the song and couldn't get it going again. That was the highlight. Later they spent about 10 minutes tuning a guitar on stage (I'm no musician, but I'm pretty sure you can do that before you get on stage). Our favorite moment was when the drummer took the unique approach of (wait for it...) drawing a violin bow across a cymbal. I'm not making this up.

The other two opening acts were okay, particularly The Old Ceremony. Their opening song, Believer, was great, and things went only slightly downhill from there. Finally The Mountain Goats went on stage, and I'm happy to say they were worth the wait. The downside is that as one of the oldest people in the crowd (I'll be 42 in June), I'm not used to being out until 3:15 am. I don't mind it, but it makes it hard to get up and be productive the next day.

From the world of work: We're working on some Service Component Architecture materials, we'll be evangelizing the technology more aggressively in the coming months. Here are some articles you might want to read in the meantime:

• Building SOA solutions with the Service Component Architecture, a four-part series here at developerWorks
• Greg Pavlik's blog entry on SCA, particularly his opinions on why SCA is important, and
• David Chappell's blog entry What's really important about SCA, which takes the unorthodox view that the most important part of SCA is its packaging of services (the Client and Implementation Model), not the SCA Assembly model. (Note: The link for the Client and Implementation Model is to the Java version; there are also versions for BPEL, Spring and C++)

Finally, for those of you who enjoy podcasts and can't get enough silliness in your life, I'm thrilled to announce that HomestarRunner.com now makes video podcasts available. Point iTunes (or whatever you use to get podcasts) at http://podstar.homestarrunner.com/podcast.xml, and you can download maybe 35 StrongBad email videos. My favorite is "Virus," in which StrongBad's computer gets 423,827 viruses. It dies with the message "Computer over. Virus = very yes." Great stuff.

More SCA info soon....

Happy Groundhog Day!

Well, it's somehow February already. I read somewhere that the last week of January is a major time of depression for people. You're settling in for the long post-holiday stretch of work (maybe you get a Spring Break, maybe you work all the way till summer), and by now you're starting to realize that you're going to fall short of your New Year's resolutions yet again. And then it's February. Fortunately this year I set my expectations low enough that I'm not disappointed....

Today is my wife's favorite holiday, although we don't have a formal celebration planned. She just got back from a visit to some friends in New Jersey. They're an interesting couple; they work for extremely wealthy people. When Sheri and I met them, he was the captain of a yacht and she was the chef. Their employer paid them to sail the yacht to wherever he or his friends might be. While guests were on board, they took care of everything on the ship. A fascinating life. Now they're working in someone's home, supervising the staff. (Actually, they work in whichever of the three homes the family happens to be in at the time.)

In honor of the holiday, Chad Lewis (husband of dW's Sera) and I are going to see The Mountain Goats tonight in Raleigh. I had never heard of them until Chad mentioned them. He's one of my sources of cool new music; if hip young people like Chad are into a particular band, they're definitely worth a listen. Another person that has steered me to great fringe music is dW's native New Jerseyan Steve Luyendyk. He gave me a subscription to INRADIO last year. They send you a CD every two months that has interesting new artists on it. Jim Noir and Seattle's own Blue Scholars are two of the bands I "discovered" before they were signed anywhere. [Which reminds me, I need to renew my subscription.]

I've spent a lot of time over the last three days working with IBM's SCA tools. I'm using the WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server. The level of built-in SCA support is really good, and the graphical tools for assembling components are very sophisticated. I'll somehow find the time to document what I'm doing and put it here on dW.

Last but not least, I mentioned our good friend Amy Wentley the other day; she's home from the hospital and recuperating slowly. Today is also her 34th birthday (being born on Groundhog Day--how cool is that?), so wish her the best.

Welcome to our new interface. Click @*#! to get started.

I've long suspected that Microsoft has a department that does nothing more than rearrange all the menus on their products just to annoy us as we upgrade from one version to the next. I installed a trial of Office 2007 last week, and I must say they've outdone themselves this time. The whole interface has changed. Completely. Pushing everybody to upgrade to Office 2007 is going to be difficult enough (how many of you still use Office 97 out there?), but the new interface is really going to tick people off.

I'm sure this is the full expression of the new interface of Vista (another slow upgrade curve, I'm sure), but it really slows me down. Anytime I'm using a piece of software and my main goal is getting the @*#! interface out of my way so I can get something done, that's a really bad sign.

From the Department of Snide Remarks: If you look at the Microsoft page that touts the features of the new Vista interface, one of the things they promise is that you can "Enjoy an better Web browsing experience" [sic]. Guess the Word 2007 grammar checker is still in beta...

In my football comments yesterday, I can't believe I said the Colts' kicker was Mike Vanderjagt. It's Adam Vinatieri, thanks to the Patriots' front office. There will be many New England nightmares this week of Vinatieri kicking a clutch field goal to put the Colts in the Super Bowl.

Today's playlist: I've been listening to some old New Orleans music the last couple of days. Birth of the Hot by Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers is great, it's reasonably cleaned-up recordings from Chicago in the late 1920s. Many of cuts here are band arrangements of his solo piano work. I've been listening to his solos on an album entitled Jelly Roll Morton: The Piano Rolls. Birth of the Hot is from the original analog recordings (this was before magnetic tape was invented, not sure what they used), but this CD is based on the paper piano rolls recorded by Mr. Jelly-Lord himself. This was done by a woman named Artis Wodehouse. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study old piano rolls; that grant led to this CD. We can listen to rich digital recordings that match the original performances from 1924. An amazing job of data conversion. [Is a piano roll closer to digital than analog? Seems that way to me.]

I've been listening to these discs while putting all my CDs onto my iPod...you find music you didn't realize you had, or stuff you haven't listened to in forever. I finally solved the problem with my iPod by plugging the docking station into the USB port. It's possible that I have a bad cable as well, although the direct cable connection at least charges the iPod battery. For now, the docking station seems to work reliably, so I'll try to forget the hassles of getting this to work in the first place.

Thanks to dW's Sera Lewis for finding the historical background on The Fractured Prune. Turns out it comes from a woman named Prunella. Didn't Bugs Bunny use the name Prunella as a term of derision? That's a research project for someone, feel free to post the answer as a comment here...