Christopher Moore’s “Lamb”

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Jan 282005
 

The book­club picked Chris­toph­er Moore’s Lamb: The Gos­pel Accord­ing to Biff, Christ’s Child­hood Pal as our Decem­ber book — the tim­ing being roughly appro­pri­ate. The book is a fanci­ful nov­el, depict­ing Christ’s life in a some­what pre­pos­ter­ous but enjoy­able way. It spends most of its time in the 30 years between Christ’s birth and the begin­ning of his min­istry, and has extra­vag­ant stor­ies told in a light-hearted way, as would befit someone who was a nor­mal human try­ing to cope with being Christ’s friend. 

Most of the book­club mem­bers enjoyed the book, but there was a def­in­ite cor­rel­a­tion between know­ledge of the Gos­pels and the level of enjoy­ment. Those who knew how the Gos­pel authors had depic­ted any giv­en event found the occa­sion­ally almost far­cic­al altern­at­ive ver­sion funny, where­as the oth­ers did­n’t quite get it in sev­er­al cases. We spent some time at book­club com­par­ing the ver­sions of stor­ies, dis­cuss­ing the real role of Mary Mag­dalene and the fact that she was­n’t a har­lot (des­pite what the Cath­ol­ic Church and vari­ous trans­la­tions of the Bible claimed), touch­ing on the “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and “da Vinci Code” ver­sions of Christ’s rela­tion­ship with Mary Mag­dalene, and pos­tu­lat­ing why Levit­i­c­us has so many laws about beha­viour with animals.

Chris­toph­er Moore was wor­ried about the church reac­tion to the book, but it was, I gath­er, almost exclus­ively pos­it­ive. The book does depict Christ (Joshua) in a pos­it­ive way; Joshua is very human as well as being divine. He gets angry at God, cares about his friends, is slightly naive and very curi­ous. The descrip­tions of his beha­viour dif­fer from those in the Gos­pels by includ­ing more of the emo­tion, which makes Joshua more like­able and more approach­able. The book won’t make any­one become a Chris­ti­an, but it won’t turn them off, either.

Corporate Blogs and Wikis

 General, Technology  Comments Off on Corporate Blogs and Wikis
Jan 262005
 

I’m writ­ing an art­icle for the March issue of the Gil­bane Report on some of the uses of blogs and wikis in the cor­por­ate world. The Gil­bane report appears monthly and con­cen­trates on enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment and related issues at a man­age­ment level. It used to carry a fairly hefty sub­scrip­tion charge; since Janu­ary 2005 the art­icles are now all avail­able free of charge. I wrote an art­icle for the Gil­bane Report back in Octo­ber 2002; the curi­ous may wish to look at The Role of XML in Con­tent Man­age­ment.

As part of my research for this art­icle, I’d like to hear from any­one who can tell me more about what blogs and wikis really are be used for in the cor­por­ate world. I have enough inform­a­tion about PR aspects or, more gen­er­ally, out­ward-facing aspects of using blogs, but not enough real inform­a­tion about real com­pan­ies using blogs or wikis intern­ally. I asked about Using Blogs for Pro­ject Man­age­ment and got lots of “nice idea but we could­n’t quite get it to work” emails. I can think of lots of uses for blogs but what I’d like to be able to high­light are things that people in com­pan­ies are actu­ally find­ing use­ful, rather than nice ideas that might work. Ditto for wikis — they seem to have lots of poten­tial but is any­one real­ising that potential?

If you are using blogs and/or wikis in the cor­por­ate world (apart from for PR; I have lots of people to talk to about that), please let me know. You can send an email, or use the com­ment form on this site.

Note: when I write an art­icle of this form, I com­bine things that people are say­ing into my own inter­pret­a­tion. If I quote someone dir­ectly, they will be named with the quote. All sources are lis­ted in the acknow­ledge­ments. Once the art­icle is pub­lished, I’ll email all sources with the link to the art­icle, and I’ll blog it as well.

Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”

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Jan 192005
 

Sol­ar­is by Stan­islaw Lem is sci­ence fic­tion more in keep­ing with “2001: A Space Odys­sey” than with most oth­er types of sci­ence fic­tion. It’s more con­cerned with explor­ing bound­ar­ies of thought and ima­gin­a­tion than with pla­cing humans in con­tact with ali­ens who speak an under­stand­able lan­guage and act with under­stand­able motives. The ali­en body here is an entire plan­et which through­out the book acts with motives the humans can only guess at.

The cov­er of the book (which comes from the 2002 movie of the same name) would lead one to assume the book is a romance, which would be false. There is a little of the romantic in it, espe­cially towards the end, but it’s not a “love in the uni­verse” book. 

The book­club had mixed feel­ings about “Sol­ar­is”, at least in part because the book is unevenly writ­ten. The pages upon pages of descrip­tion of plan­et­ary form­a­tions could prob­ably have been edited down sub­stan­tially (and in fact, even those who enjoyed the book skipped over most of the geo­graph­ic­al descrip­tions), while much of the rest of the book leaves you won­der­ing due to lack of detail (which I assume was delib­er­ate). To make the most of “Sol­ar­is” you have to be pre­pared to con­cen­trate, so it’s not really suit­able for air­plane fod­der (unless you have good head­phones to block out the noise).

“Sol­ar­is” is about the unknown, and just how lim­ited human ima­gin­a­tion is in under­stand­ing truly ali­en spe­cies. One mem­ber of the book­club related that to how hard it is to truly know anoth­er per­son, and there’s quite a lot of that in the book as well; the “hero” does­n’t know what is hap­pen­ing to the oth­er humans on the space sta­tion and they have no inten­tion of telling him. The secrecy is intense and adds to the atmo­sphere of lack of under­stand­ing and lack of the cap­ab­il­ity to under­stand what is hap­pen­ing. The­or­ies abound as to the nature of the ali­en life­form, but none quite seem to fit. If you’re feel­ing in a philo­soph­ic­al mood, or look­ing for a spring­board to think about what it means to be human or even alive, you could do worse than read “Sol­ar­is”.

Sci­ence fic­tion writ­ten some time ago always runs into some prob­lems where the described future and the real present col­lide. The sec­tions where the hero is read­ing ref­er­ence books (yes, real bound books) on the space sta­tion, and com­plains about how they did­n’t have room for all the import­ant books, is notice­able to today’s read­er with exper­i­ence of effect­ively infin­ite elec­tron­ic stor­age space. And to me the com­plete lack of women as explorers in the giv­en his­tory of the plan­et Sol­ar­is, and the equally com­plete lack of women sci­ent­ists or research­ers, dates the book even more. One of the book­club mem­bers com­men­ted that these two factors togeth­er prove the author’s point, that many things are unima­gin­able. Even if they become com­mon­place 30 years later.

XML Conference OAQ

 Conference  Comments Off on XML Conference OAQ
Jan 102005
 

This is not going to be a XML 2004 Con­fer­ence wrap-up, for sev­er­al reas­ons. Mostly because oth­er people have writ­ten about the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions they went to, partly because I did­n’t man­age to make it to very many ses­sions myself, and partly because it’s really far too late. The lead-up to the con­fer­ence is always very intense, the week itself is even more so, and it takes some time before I can col­lect my thoughts suf­fi­ciently to write a post­ing. I have a few ideas stacked up; this one made it to the top first.

A few people asked me ques­tions about the con­fer­ence so I figured I may as well answer them here, for pos­ter­ity, or for gen­er­al interest. Hence the OAQ. Fre­quently Asked Ques­tions are answered on the con­fer­ence web site; Occa­sion­ally Asked Ques­tions can be answered on the chair’s blog. By the way, the answers may or may not apply to the XML Con­fer­ence in any year that I was­n’t or won’t be chair, i.e., any past or future chair may have dif­fer­ent ideas on how things should work.

Do you sell key­note slots?
Some con­fer­ences do sell key­note slots (usu­ally by guar­an­tee­ing a key­note slot to any com­pany that spon­sors the con­fer­ence) but the XML Con­fer­ence (at least while I’m chair­ing) does­n’t. Com­pan­ies that do get key­notes some­times decide to spon­sor the con­fer­ence, but that’s their decision.
So how do you pick key­note speakers?
There are two cat­egor­ies of key­note speak­ers — inter­est­ing people, prefer­ably with a new or fresh per­spect­ive, and people who rep­res­ent com­pan­ies where the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee thinks that con­fer­ence attendees will be inter­ested in the vis­ion that com­pany has for some part of the XML industry. Some­times we’re lucky and a speak­er falls into both categories!
What guar­an­teed speak­ing slots do spon­sor com­pan­ies get?
Spon­sor com­pan­ies up until XML 2004 were guar­an­teed a product present­a­tion slot where they could talk about their products. For all oth­er talks, they need to go through the same pro­ced­ure as every­body else and be judged on the qual­ity of the abstract, how well it fits into the pro­gram, and how good the speak­er is.
“up until XML 2004”? What does that mean?
There’s always the pos­sib­il­ity that so many com­pan­ies will offer to spon­sor in any giv­en year that guar­an­tee­ing a product present­a­tion slot will no longer be pos­sible. I still have no inten­tion of guar­an­tee­ing any com­pany, wheth­er spon­sor or not, a speak­ing slot that isn’t a product present­a­tion slot. Every­one has to earn their slot!
What is a product present­a­tion slot anyway?
A product present­a­tion slot is a 45-minute talk that is freed from the con­straint of not talk­ing about products that all oth­er talks need to fol­low. The idea is that often people really do want to know about products and fea­tures in a present­a­tion set­ting, where someone has time to go through import­ant fea­tures. Product present­a­tions are selec­ted dif­fer­ently to oth­er talks; exhib­it­ors on the show floor have pref­er­ence, talks that show­case products from more than one vendor work­ing togeth­er have pref­er­ence, and products that are based on stand­ards have pref­er­ence. The product talks are in a spe­cial track, so attendees know what they’ll be getting.
Some people do show products in the oth­er talks, what’s with that?
Tech­nic­al work is often best illus­trated by show­ing a demo. As long as the demo con­cen­trates on the tech­nic­al aspects of what’s being talked about, and not about whatever cool fea­tures the product has, it still qual­i­fies as a non-product talk. This is a fine line that some people man­age well and oth­ers don’t, which is why ses­sion chairs are pre­pared to stop any talk that goes too far into product demon­stra­tion ter­rit­ory when it isn’t meant to.
I’ve noticed lots of product tutori­als though — what about those?
The Plan­ning Com­mit­tee dis­cussed this one quite a lot. We decided that there is room for tutori­als on how to use products as long as the products are reas­on­ably pop­u­lar, and the tutori­al is clearly labelled as being about product X from Com­pany Y. This ensures that poten­tial attendees know what they are pay­ing for. If they don’t want a product tutori­al, they don’t go to it.
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