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.

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.

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.

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....

Home again, home again, jiggity jet lag

I just got back from the last SCA/SDO briefing of the year. Patrick Leonard of Rogue Wave and I did events in Toronto and Boston this week. We're planning many more events for 2008, sponsored by Adobe, IBM, Rogue Wave and (we hope) some other partners in the OSOA group.

I'm headed to San Francisco on Monday, then I'm off to Michigan Tech for the last three days of next week. Michigan Tech is doing some very interesting things with Business Process Modeling and SOA, I'll have more to say about that later. Next Friday is my last business trip of 2007.

I don't fully comprehend the coolness of this fact yet, but my daughter found out today that she's going to be an O Ambassador, a philanthropic effort sponsored by Oprah Winfrey. I met Jeff Bezos at a meeting few years ago; because he's been on Oprah's show, that means my Oprah Number is 2. If Lily were to achieve an Oprah number of 1, I believe that guarantees admission and a full scholarship to the college of her choice. (Except the University of New Jersey at Durham.)

This is pretty much a guilt post...there are a bunch of things I want to blog about, but I'm too tired to pull myself or my thoughts together here.

While I was in India a few weeks ago, I had terrible bouts of insomnia, during which I couldn't get certain inane songs out of my head. My wife and I were discussing that phenomenon earlier today. For her, about 75-80% of the CDs I own would qualify. I won't mention here what musical mental maladies tormented me for fear of getting anything stuck in your head. (Hint: Leo Sayer.)

For a while I thought what I wanted for Christmas was an OLPC machine. They look very cool, but I'm not entirely sure how much use one would be. Between now and December 31st, people in the U.S. and Canada can spend $400 to donate a laptop to a child somewhere and get a second laptop for themselves. (If the offer were available in Europe, that would be 130 Euros or 53 Pounds.) Could I do enough chatting, emailing and text editing to enjoy one? I don't know. FWIW, you can get a VMWare image of a Linux machine with the Sugar user interface to see how it looks. I haven't been able to do anything particularly useful with it, but it looks like fun.

Does anybody out there have a Kindle yet? I had been thinking about asking for the new Sony Reader, but the Kindle is more powerful and has several times more books available. (Anybody out there buying bestsellers off the Sony Connect e-bookstore?) The problem is the Kindle, at $400, is more than I want to shell out for a digital gadget. (Note: See the appropriate Web sites for European prices. My guess is around 130 Euros or 53 Pounds.) If you've got one, post a comment here and tell us what you think about it. A high percentage of the reviews so far are from people who haven't even seen the product, so it's hard to say what the actual user experience has been.

News from China

About a month ago I did a series of SCA/SDO briefings in China. I did events in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. I also did some work with the local IBM team in Zhuhai. I was really pleased by the interest in SCA; we had over 400 people at the events. Two of them were held on Saturday, and we still had more than 100 people at each. I can't imagine what you would have to do in the States to get 100 people to show up on a Saturday morning.

In the sessions I used the Bracketology demo, with contestants chosen by the local IBM team. The winner in every city was Yao Ming. Yao crushed Shaquille O'Neal, Chinese tea and baidu.com. Lots of fun. The bracketology demo is a great way to get the audience involved. We had lots of good discussions during and after the sessions. I'm working on an XForms article that takes the demo further, using XForms to build a custom editor for the Bracketology XML file format. Watch this space.

But wait, there's more...

More SCA/SDO Briefings Scheduled! We've finalized the schedule for several more SCA/SDO briefings. The dates are:

• Chennai, November 6th
• Kolkata, November 7th
• Bangalore, November 13th
• Delhi, November 14th
• Toronto, November 27th
• Boston, November 29th
• San Francisco, December 4th

You can register for the sessions here at developerWorks.

The gap between the Kolkata and Bangalore briefings is for Diwali, the festival of lights. I've just missed Diwali on previous trips to India, I'm looking forward to the celebration.

Congratulations to our friend Arthur Ryman on the publication of his book on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. He coauthored it with Naci Dai and Lawrence Mandel. [I don't know the other authors, apologies to them if I sound like I'm slighting their contributions.] I have a copy on the way (thanks, Arthur!), if it's half as good as Arthur's other work, it's well worth your time to get a copy.

Thanks as always to John Hind's mailing list for pointing me to an article on Engadget about a company named Splashtop. Their product embeds a scaled-down Linux into the BIOS. You hit the power switch, and the system is up in about 5 seconds. You then have two applications available: Skype and a version of Firefox. There's currently only one motherboard that supports it, but I can imagine this taking off. What percentage of people could get by with a system that's instantly on and gives them full Internet access and VOIP service? Office workers are an exception, but if they could use Google Apps (or the Splashtop folks embedded an OpenOffice derivative), this could be a huge market. And I'm guessing that Splashtop's licensing costs per box are lower than Microsoft's. If Redmond isn't worried about this, they should be.

(BTW, that's five seconds from power on to running, not five seconds from sleep or hibernate mode.)

Today's playlist: B.B. King's Live at the Regal. Every home should have a copy. Also the Stones' Exile on Main Street. Just hit replay on those two all day long.

Finally, send your prayers and karma to our friend Kelvin Lawrence, who's facing surgery and some very serious health issues. If you'd like to send him your thoughts directly, he's created a guest book on his Web site. I was looking forward to seeing Kelvin again at the Colorado Software Summit later this month, but he's got much more important things on his mind. Kelvin, we're thinking about you and wish you and your family all the best.

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....

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....

Miscellaneous end-of-the-week stuff

Hearty Congratulations to IBM's Chris Anyszscyk, named Eclipse Ambassador of the Year at EclipseCon 2007. Chris is an all-around genius and a genuinely helpful guy. His presentations and demos are great; if you ever get a chance to see him, do so. (I know he's speaking at the Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando, June 10-14. Be there, aloha.) This award is as well-deserved as it is huge.

A couple of items I got from John Hind's mailing list:

• From the "Bring it - bring it back that old Redmond [shrink] rap" Department: Turns out popular demand has led the folks at Dell to offer Windows XP on several of their systems. It turns out a number of customers weren't happy they had to buy Vista on their new systems. The story is on the Betanews site. [The department title is from KRS-One's Bring it Back, in which he strongly advocated the return of "that old New York rap." Both my wife and daughter thought that was my dumbest reference yet.]
• Vista sales in China approach the quarter-thousand mark: The Inquirer reports that despite spending millions of dollars (or yuan) hyping Vista in China, so far they've sold 244 copies. That's two hundred forty-four copies, not 244,000. Piracy is an issue, and the Chinese government's emphasis on Linux doesn't help Mr. Gates's efforts either. However, the Inquirer article also wonders if the Chinese people "aren't inclined to spend three months wages on a bit of software...."

Chad Lewis and I went to see The Flaming Lips Wednesday night, it was a great show. I saw them a few years ago in Boston and wasn't that impressed. Part of that might have been they were one of five or six bands on the lineup, so they didn't have much chance to interact with the audience. The Raleigh crowd was pumped up. Lots of people came dressed as various characters (one woman came as Yoshimi, so the whole audience sang "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" to her). They had confetti cannons, huge balloons bouncing around (until they all popped) and everybody got a laser pointer. Loads of fun. As a true fan, Chad actually drove down to see the Lips at the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach the night before.

I'm getting ready for a WebSphere technical conference in Las Vegas next week. I'll be talking about XForms and how you can generate a user interface from the back-end data structures in your business process. The whole goal of the presentation is to tie together XForms, SCA and SDO.

Our daughter Lily turns twelve tomorrow. I got her a really cool gift, which I'll blog about in a day or two. (Sometimes she reads the blog, you never know.)

A Mitten in the White House?

I spent some time over the weekend working with the PHP implementation of SCA and SDO. It's much easier to install than the Java and C++ versions, imho. You use PECL to install the extensions. If you've got PHP installed correctly, you're all set.

My next step is to get my services set up so that my PHP services can talk to my Java services, etc.

Does anybody out there have experience with multiple Apache configurations? I'm trying to create a set of icons to run Apache in different ways. I have one configuration that runs Bugzilla, it helps me keep track of reviewer comments on the book I'm writing. Another configuration runs PHP and some other stuff, and I also have QEDWiki installed, that runs a third configuration. I want to set these up so that I click one icon or another and launch a particular configuration, with an icon to kill whatever instance of Apache is running. Any help from the Blogosphere would be appreciated....

Props to Jack and Campbell Narron of Brookline, Mass for finding this bit of Internet fun:

1. Go to maps.google.com.
2. Click on "Get Directions" at the top of the screen.
3. Enter "New York, NY" and "Paris, France" as your starting and ending points.
4. Check out step 23.

I also tried to ask for directions to Carnegie Hall, hoping the directions would be "Practice!", but that didn't happen. Something for someone in the Googleplex to explore.

Today's blog title: I had a dream last night that I was duck hunting with Mitt Romney (he's a candidate for president and former governor of Massachusetts, for those of you who don't follow these things). We were sitting in a duck blind when it occurred to me I had no idea what kind of a name "Mitt" is. Is it just "Mitt"? Is it short for something? Here are the best guesses I could come up with:

• Intermittent Q. Romney
• E. Emitter Romney
• Mitten J. Romney

I suppose someone will do the research, but I prefer to just guess¹.

And what would you do for a nickname? I realize "Mitt" is one syllable, so maybe we don't need one. But what fun would that be? How about:

• The Mittster
• Mitten Man [sung to the tune of The Muffin Man song by my daughter]
• Mitt-a-tronic
• The Mittenmast [appeals to sailing voters, but few others]

Maybe we should go with a Hobo name instead:

• First Baseman's Mitt Romney
• Mitt the Catcher
• Intermittent Mitt, the Occasional Hunter
• Smitty, the Man with the Silent "S"
• Oven Mitt, the Freshmaker²

Today's command-line tip: My wife (who's home from Chicago today) had her Desktop disappear this morning. She closed the only program she was running, and her Desktop was gone. No icons, no Start button, no Ctrl+Esc, Alt+Tab, nothing. How do you get your Desktop back without rebooting the machine? Here's what to do:

1. Give your machine the three-finger salute (Ctrl+Alt+Del).
2. In the dialog that appears, select Task Manager.
3. When the Windows Task Manager appears, select File->New Task (Run...) in the menu bar.
4. Type cmd and hit Enter.
5. At the command-line that appears, type explorer. That restarts the Explorer, which runs the desktop. Your icons etc. will reappear shortly.
6. If you're heartless enough to kill the command-line that just restored your Desktop, type exit at the command-line.

I can't resist pointing out that when this happened in OS/2, the desktop automatically restarted itself.

¹The rules of the Comedy Universe stipulate that goofy names must contain initials. A good example is Bob and Ray's character Equitable P. Harmon, headmaster of the Equitable P. Harmon Science and Technical High School.
² Carries the risk of consumer backlash; see ihateovenmitt.com.

A provocative headline should appear here.

I haven't mentioned it here, but I've been trying desperately to get more hits on my blog. I've offered bribes to the dW staff to get me into the Top Ten to no avail; I've even done things the ethical way by blogging frequently.

I spent the weekend repairing some antique lamps around the house. I'm very happy to say that I succeeded without being electrocuted, and only tripped the circuit breaker once. Along the way, I used some humorously-named electrical components, and was going to use them in the title of today's post. After consulting with a number of level-headed people, we all agreed that a blog heading of "Steel nipples and butt splices" was unwise. I think it would drive some traffic, but it could lead to a résumé entry of, "Built a popular, well-read blog before my unfortunate dismissal from the company."

Remember, kids, always surf safely: Don't search on steel nipple or butt splice without a grownup present. Actually, don't search on them at all...

From the "Two Days Early" Department: A story was released on Friday, March 30th about the Department of Homeland Security demanding that all copies of the movie Tron be confiscated. It seems that some of the special effects were generated using hardware and software from a nuclear fusion project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The fear is that Al Qaeda or other miscreants could learn nookyeller seekrits from the upcoming HD-DVD version of the film. The story has been reported in many places. Here are three of the dozens:

• John Dvorak Uncensored
• Digg
• BlogoWogo

Apparently many people didn't get the joke, despite it being filed under the category Fiction at the source, kuro5hin.org. Beyond the timing of the story, the comment from FBI agent "Lirpa Sloof" (read it backwards) should have been a tipoff. The most disturbing thing to me is that many, many people had no trouble believing the U.S. Government would spend its time and energy conducting raids on your local video store....

Another April Fool's story from The Reg, based on a feature many of us in the technical world have wished for: An Export function that converts your PowerPoint slides to code. Let the marketing and sales folks tell whatever yarns they want, they can generate the code and support it. You sell a lie, you get to maintain it.

The Tar Heels lost yesterday night, 56-50 to Tennessee. They had a late lead but couldn't hold it down the stretch. (Reminds me of the men's team last weekend.) Ivory Latta led the team to two straight Final Fours, but didn't win a championship. The Heels will have a strong team next year, but they won't replace Latta. I'm rooting for Rutgers, although I don't have anything against Tennessee. The Scarlet Knights held LSU to 35 points last night. That's 35 points for the entire game, not 35 at halftime. Anybody who can shut down a Final Four team like that deserves to win a championship.

A factual clarification: I mentioned that the women's team is called the "Lady Tar Heels," that's actually not true. They're called the Tar Heels, no gender-specific adjectives needed. If you look at tarheelblue.com, they're always referred to as the Tar Heels.

I was pleased to see that Oprah's Book Club has selected Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This was the best work of fiction I read in 2006. It's a very bleak vision of the future, but I thought it was very hopeful. There's a kernel of decency in the book that transcends all the horror of the post-apocalyptic world in which the story is set. The book is incredibly well-written, as you'd expect, and there's not a false note in it. You should read it even without Oprah's endorsement.

I can't say anything about the ongoing negotiations, but I'll point out that Oprah will be choosing another book for her book club in a couple of months, and the second edition of my book will be out in a couple of months. But you didn't hear anything from me.

I spent some more time over the weekend looking at Rails, thinking about how ActiveRecord could be implemented on top of SDO. Has anyone out there done this already? I'm always suspicious when I think of something and no one else has done it yet. The challenge in implementing this would be to maintain the conventions and patterns of ActiveRecord in a DAS interface. If you've written this code, let me know; if you've seen it, send me a pointer. Another side project is building an SCA component from a Rails app. I'd like to do that with something more than just a WSDL reference, but I don't think there are any toolkits that support SCA yet.

My daughter is on Spring Break this week, so I'll officially be on vacation starting tomorrow through the end of the week. The laptop is going with me, so it might not be the most relaxing vacation ever. Regardless, getting out of the house for a few days will be nice.

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.

SCA 1.0 and SDO 2.1 are here

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.