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.

Peeps and picks before the tournaments start

Before I begin, a big thanks to dW reader Eddie Welker's kind words for the book. Thank you, your comment made my day.

PeepsFest 2008

This past weekend was PeepsFest 2008 at Market Street Books. I didn't participate in the poetry contest this year, although I'll post a pointer to the poems once they're online. Sheri was a judge of the food and I made the award buttons. We did have a couple entries each in the Peeps Album Cover Art contest:

Sheri's entries:
Abbey Road with Paul as a Peep:		Rumours with Mick Fleetwood (or is it John McVie?) holding a Peep instead of a crystal ball:
My entries:
Nevermind with a Peep instead of a dollar bill:		And my personal favorite, They Might Be Peeps:

Tournament Picks

Mostly I'm posting at the end of a long day just to get my NCAA picks online before the tournaments start. Here they are:

Men's Tournament

Round of 32
East: UNC, Indiana, James Mason, Washington St., St. Joe's, Louisville, Butler, Tennessee
Midwest: Kansas, UNLV, Clemson, Vanderbilt, USC, Wisconsin, Gonzaga, Georgetown
South: Memphis, Miss. St., Michigan St., Pitt, Kentucky, Stanford, The U, Texas
West: UCLA, Aggies, Drake, UConn, Baylor, Georgia (woof!), Arizona and Dook

Sweet Sixteen
East: UNC, Washington St., Louisville, Tennessee
Midwest: Kansas, Clemson, Wisconsin, Georgetown
South: Memphis, Pitt, Stanford, Texas
West: UCLA, Drake, Baylor, Dook

Elite Eight
East: UNC, Louisville
Midwest: Kansas, Wisconsin
South: Pitt, Texas
West: UCLA, Dook

Final Four
UNC, Kansas, Texas, UCLA

Championship
UNC 92, Texas 85

Women's Tournament

Round of 32
Greensboro: UConn, Texas, ODU, Virginia, Auburn, Cal, Georgia Tech, Rutgers
Spokane: Maryland, Xavier, New Mexico, Vanderbilt, Pitt, Baylor, Western Kentucky, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, Georgia, Kansas St., Louisville, Ohio St., Oklahoma St., Marist, LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Purdue, Notre Dame, Illinois St., Arizona St., Dook, Syracuse, Aggies

Sweet Sixteen
Greensboro: UConn, UVA, Auburn, Rutgers
Spokane: The Turtle, Vanderbilt, Baylor, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, K State, Ohio St., LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Notre Dame, Dook, Aggies

Elite Eight
Greensboro: UConn, Rutgers
Spokane: The Turtle, Stanford
New Orleans: UNC, LSU
Oklahoma City: Tennessee, Dook

Final Four
UConn, The Turtle, UNC, Tennessee

Championship
UNC 97, UConn 88

OK, so I'm a homer. UNC wins it all in both tournaments, joining UConn as the only schools to win both championships in the same year. Be sure to thank me if you use these picks and win your office pool. This is the best three weeks in sports, especially if the Heels do well. Enjoy....

Hoya the Destroya

Well, the Heels lost yesterday. When I first saw the brackets, Georgetown as a 2 seed jumped out at me. Just about every analyst I read said that the East Region was the toughest, and the Heels and Hoyas proved it yesterday. I can't say anything bad about the players or the coaches, they fought hard and came within one point of reaching the Final Four. When I turned off the TV in disgust, there was maybe a minute and a half left in overtime. At that point, of the Heels' previous 18 shots, they had made 1. There was some bad shot selection, but Georgetown's defense had something to do with that. Coach Williams drew up a play for a good look at a 3-pointer at the end of regulation, but it didn't fall.

I really thought the Heels were going to win another title this year. My wife and daughter and I are going to Atlanta for Spring Break, and we'll head down there on Tuesday the 3rd. When we made the plans, I made my wife promise that she would drive Tuesday morning if the Heels won the title, because I intended to be enjoying alcoholic beverages and bonfires on Franklin Street till the wee hours. What makes the NCAA tournament great is that somebody's season ends in every game. If Xavier hits one more free throw, Ohio State is gone. If the Heels had hit one of their last 7 or 8 shots, Georgetown is gone. Instead, the Heels are done. It says a lot about our unreasonable expectations that only four teams in the country had a better year, but we're disappointed.

Go Hoyas, I hope they win the tournament. (I really hope Florida doesn't.)

Our next hobby: Who's coming back next year? I'm sure Rayshawn Terry won't be back (he's a senior). For the rest of the team, it's anybody's guess. Hansbrough, Wright and Lawson are all first-rounders (that's a sophomore and two freshmen), with Hansbrough and Wright probably lottery picks. One thing I'm always impressed by: Roy Williams and Dean Smith always supported their players who wanted to leave school early. Two years ago the Heels lost their top seven players, but the coaches hit the recruiting trail and rebuilt the program. My guess is that we'll be in that same situation next year. Somebody should post odds and make book on that. (If you do, ignore all statements such as "I really enjoy school, I think I'll be back next year." I think I'll be back next year, but give me a few million reasons to change my mind and see what happens.)

E Peepus Unum: Market Street Books has posted the artwork for the Peeps Fest Awards. That was the contribution Sheri and I made to the festivities this year. (Sheri was also a judge.) From left to right down the page, the awards are:

Exclamation Peep, for the nicest surprise (aka "This Peeps-based dish looked awful, but didn't taste that bad.") Chef Peep, for the most delicious recipe Peep Queen, for the most beautiful Peep PeepBR, the Blue Ribbon Peep Veep Peep, the Second-in-Command Peep. Should the Peep-in-Chief disappear, the Veep Peep will assume those duties. (The image is The Seal of The Vice Peep of the United States. Hope Dick Cheney has a sense of humor.) Flav-O-Peep, the 3:00rd place Peep. (Based on an actual Flav-O-Flav doll.) Cubist Peep, for the most artistic Peep Party Peep, for the funniest Peep, and The Peeperific Peep, presented for "Personifying the Principles of Peepitude."

The artwork was done with the GIMP. (GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, an open source project. I was pushed into using it when I lost a CD that had some proprietary tools.) The Cubist plug-in is very cool, you can vary the size of the rectangles and other variables. Pushbutton Picasso!

It's back to the land of perspective now....

I can't bear to look | Peeps Fest report

Just a quick post before the Heels play Georgetown...

I freely admit that my emotional state should not be strongly affected by a basketball game. There are millions of more important things in the world, but it's hard to remember that around here sometimes. For example, the brackets first came out while I was at my grandfather's funeral. At the time, several of us talked about how tough it would be for the Heels to beat the Hoyas to get to the Final Four. A good way to change the subject.

With all that said, I don't know if my nerves can stand to watch the game. Call it a weakness.

Mascot trivia: I had always been told that Georgetown's mascot, the Hoyas, meant "rock." According to the Answers.com article on the Georgetown Hoyas, no one really knows what a Hoya is. Elsewhere on the Web we have the Hoya plant and Hoya, a suburb of Tokyo.

Peeps Fest went well yesterday, there were dozens of people and poems, etc. The local newspaper had an article about Peeps Fest this morning. My wife was one of the judges, although she didn't show up in the paper.

In addition to my wife judging the competition, our contribution to the event this year was to create the medals for the winners. As soon as the artwork appears on the site, I'll post a link to it here.

Tim Dolan had my favorite poem, based on the prologue to The Canterbury Tales:

When that Peepe with his sugare soote
The Yellow Dye numbere foure hath perced to the roote
And bathed every tongue in swiche licour
Of which vertu no taste can soothe be purer;

Whan softe fowle eek with sweete skinne
Inspired hath in every mouthe, and tongues have licken
The musheye fleshe and the crustye eyes
Have filled yon gullete with marshmallowye surprise;

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And wende to ferne bookstores in Southerne Village
To speaketh in softe and ryming melodye
The speciale wonder of the yellowe and purple Peepe.

Go Heels.

The I-Pod Pro XP Human Ear Professional Edition—With Subscription!

Well, almost a full work week of 2007 is behind me, and I haven't fallen into the Slough of Despond yet. The holidays were too short this year, mostly because Christmas and New Year's Day happened on Monday. That meant everybody had to go back to school and work on Tuesday. I'm ready to put that behind me now and find something else to whine about...

I got a note from our friend Nancy Dunn not long ago. She's living in Paris now, and was entertained by the PeepsFest poems I posted here earlier this year. "Peeps paeans produce Paris pleasure" was the subject line. Easter isn't that far away, so may your marshmallow muse move you to perpetrate poetic peepetry.

While visiting the fams in Tennessee over the break, my nephew Josh had a t-shirt that said "Respect My Peeps," featuring three yellow Peeps with bling and baseball caps worn backwards. Supposedly it came from Target, but I haven't had time to look for it yet. Maybe it's online.

Today's Rant: My laptop (a new ThinkPad T60p, wonderful machine) doesn't recognize my iPod. I've gone through all the usual bits of changing my USB hub settings, deleting the USB ports and hubs altogether, etc., etc., and nothing seems to work. Is it too much to ask that the world's most popular operating system support the world's most popular consumer electronics device? If this doesn't clear up soon, I'm going to plug the iPod into my wife's desktop machine, set up my iTunes directory as a network share, then sync everything across the LAN.

I'm particularly annoyed because I've been on a concerted effort to get all the CDs I own onto my iPod. There are probably 200 or more CDs I've never ripped onto the iPod, and it would be nice to have them all online. After ripping a few dozen CDs, it's a pain that I can't copy them to my iPod.

Based on Monday's post, I've received hundreds of requests for photographs of our new dog, Domino¹. Here's one of me working at home, with Domino in a backup role:

The couch cushions have been mushed beyond all recognition by countless naps, but if anything in the back yard needs to be barked at, The Hound of Renown is on the case.

In our XForms work, I've been looking at Dave Raggett's work on XForms-Tiny. You can visit the XForms-Tiny Testbed to see the technology in action. Currently it's a JavaScript library, but hopefully we'll see XForms implementations start to show up in browsers soon. [I'll post notes in future entries about how to set up your browser for XForms, as well as Ajax-based libraries that don't require anything to be installed in your browser.]

The Playlist: I've been listening to a lot of Power Pop these days, OK Go and Hot Hot Heat in particular. I'm convinced we're in a renaissance of great pop music, something I'll blather on about soon. Today's playlist was a mix of OK Go, HHH and stuff from Beck's latest album, The Information.

Today's blog title comes from a YouTube video supposedly leaked from some smart aleck [yes, smart aleck, this is a family Web site] at Microsoft. It demonstrates how Microsoft would design the iPod package; they changed the name from the non-descriptive "iPod" to the much more catchy name in today's title. Check out the video, it's very funny and very accurate.

To be fair, I think I blogged earlier that it would be fun to see how different companies would design the iPod Click Wheel. The IBM Click Wheel would be the size of a Frisbee®, and would have about 413 ergonomically-designed keys. The YouTube video is in the same vein.

More in a day or two, hopefully after I've gotten my iPod recognized. If anybody in blogland knows a solution I haven't tried, give me a shout...

¹This is a lie.

The girl with colitis goes by

It's time to start cleaning out the question archive, various things people have asked to look into over the last month or so. (In other words, I didn't know the answer to any of these.)

First, a bit about today's title: In today's New York Times there's an article about the "Star-Strangled Banner," in which the author argues for a national anthem that doesn't require a three-octave vocal range to sing. Along the way, he mentions a new word for me: mondegreen.

A mondegreen is a humorously misunderstood lyric, such as "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" instead of "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" in Hendrix's "Purple Haze." While reading the Wikipedia entry for mondegreen, they mentioned The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," in which someone heard "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" as the title of today's blog entry.

Moving along to today's Eclipse question:

When does a file get saved to the Local History? As you probably know, Eclipse has a local history feature that saves previous versions of your files as you edit them. If my code is completely broken at 4:30, I can go to my local history to see what the file looked like at 2:30, when my code mostly worked. You can do a visual diff of the files, ask Eclipse to back out certain changes, and other useful things. (See the "local history" entry in the Eclipse documentation for more details.)

As for when the file is saved to local history, that happens every time you save the file, as far as I can tell. It looks like Eclipse is smart enough to not save a new version if you haven't made any changes.

Other details on local history: You can set a preference for how long local history is kept (the default is 7 days), how many versions of the file are kept (default=50), and the maximum size of a file, beyond which local history isn't stored so your disk won't fill up (default is 1 MB). If you want to turn off local history (why you'd want to do that I can't imagine), set the "Maximum entries per file" parameter to 1. Think of local history as a mini version control system, it's a great feature.

p.s. Don't turn off local history. Someone asked the question, and I answered it.

While Googling for local history, I found a blog entry about using local history in a really cool way. Someone deleted a file, and no one could find a copy of it. The programmer created an empty file with the same name, then asked to see the local history for the file. Eclipse magically produced an old version of the file from local history. Local history is stored in the .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.history directory. Although the filenames are changed (you won't find a .java or .html file), you can use your operating system's search facilities to find history outside of Eclipse if you want.

I mentioned PeepsFest 2006 in my last post. Sheri and I came up with several paeans to Peeps (aided by a pint or two of ale and cider). Here they are, in no particular order:

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":
Whose Peeps these are I think I know;
She lives in Southern Village, though.
She will not see me stopping here
To eat these Peeps and quickly go.

William Blake's "The Tyger":
Peeps, Peeps, what a sight
Four pastel colors neon bright.

There they sit upon a plate
How many daily do I rate?

I pick one up and lick its pate;
Thus begins its gruesome fate.

I savor as I masticate,
Then swallow hard and eat its mate.

William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say":
I have eaten
the Peeps
that were hidden behind
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so flourescent

First lines:

What happens to a Peep deferred?

Something there is that doesn't love a Peep.

I saw the best Peeps of my generation...

Because I could not stop for Peeps,
They kindly stopped for me...

And finally:

There was a young Peep from Nantucket
I grabbed it to eat it , not pluck it.
Then said with a grin,
As I ate more than ten,
“If I ate one more Peep, I’d upchuck it.”

Hope you enjoyed those, we sure did. The bookstore had about a dozen others, maybe they'll post 'em on their Web site. Anyway, more questions and answers tomorrow.

A shout-out to my Peeps

I'm finally back to my blog, it's been a strange week. The rest of my vacation was wonderful, Lily and I saw everything in Seattle, including the Space Needle, the Science Fiction Museum, the Pacific Science Center, the Experience Music Project, the Museum of Flight, and about 20 other things. I'll blog about those and post links to Flickr and so on over the next couple of days.

My main motivation for posting today is that our friend Kathryn Henderson of Market Street Books is hosting Peeps Fest 2006 tomorrow. This annual event happens 1-2 weeks before Easter, and is dedicated to honoring Marshmallow Peeps, a sugary candy usually sold at Easter. There's apparently a Peeps Poetry contest, I'll post some of the best entries Monday.

At any rate, if you're in Chapel Hill, Pittsboro, Durham, Raleigh, Cary, Saxapahaw, etc., you should check it out. See you there!