Why is it that someone else talking on a cell phone in public is impolite, and when you’re the one talking on a cell phone, it’s an important call? I find it curious that people will pass judgment on someone without knowing the caller’s situation.

Recently I went to an urgent care appointment at a very large group medical practice. I was irritated by signs in the waiting room telling you to turn off your phone when you enter the building. There are many legitimate reasons to be on the phone in the waiting room:

• Your spouse dropped you off at the front door since your foot was hurt, and you need to tell him where to find you once he parks the car.
• You need to tell a babysitter that your appointment is running late.
• To tell your boss a family emergency has come up, you’re at the doctor, and you’ll miss that meeting it took two months to set up.
• You need support after a bad diagnosis. (Or, you got a good result and need to tell your mom to stop worrying.)

Whatever the reason, it’s more important to you than anything going on in the waiting room. Yes, you should respect other people waiting, but is being considerate to strangers really more important than showing respect to people you know by keeping them informed as you deal with a medical issue?

(Maybe this is “sign inflation”–they don’t care if everyone turns off their cell phones, so long as it keeps the volume down, and they can point to the sign if they have to tell someone to be quiet. Not my idea of compassionate care, though.)

There’s an idea that medicine is such a serious matter it must be more important than whatever you’re talking about; some hospitals have banned cell phone use for fear of radio interference with medical equipment. Today, major hospitals use mobile phones, and even WiFi, for communication among doctors and nurses, and recognize that patients and families need to keep in touch. As with anything, the technology isn’t the problem, it’s a question of how you use it.

We are living in historic times, those of us here in 2008. Up until now our society has, basically, been in the shadow of World War II. Increasing globalization, advances in electronic communications and medicine, highways and aviation, improvements in human rights, literacy and nearly universal college education, modern national borders–these are the forces that have shaped our lives and have, in general, have been constants since the FDR administration. But that hasn’t been true for all of human history, and there’s no reason to think things can’t–as Barack Obama says–change.

An op-ed by Gary Hart in today’s New York Times expresses this better and with more experienced insight than I can.

Today is Fathers’ Day. With two young children now, fatherhood is in full swing. I figure I at least can take the time to write a blog entry.

I finished my Paternity Leave post a few weeks ago with a vague mention of a “great challenge out there for me” and I want to go into a little more detail about what I was thinking.

Specifically, I was thinking about a professional challenge. Over my career, I have found myself solving the same problems again and again. This experience has given me a couple ideas for new software, and more recently an idea for a book. I don’t know that any of these ideas is going to get me rich, but these are problems that more than one company has paid me a decent salary to solve, and people less smart than me have started businesses and published books with less qualifications. And, even if I didn’t get rich developing any of these ideas (getting rich has never been for me a goal in itself) doing so might help me advance in my career, or achieve some recognition, or at least prove an interesting intellectual challenge and fodder for this blog.

So, what’s the problem? It could take a serious commitment of time–prime daytime included–to take any of these ideas very far beyond the napkin-sketch stage. It would sound a lot cooler to say I wrote the next great Web 2.0 application on a free weekend while drinking beer in my pajamas but that’s not going to happen (though there might be something to the idea of advancing in short, creative bursts). I have a job; setting aside the obvious conflicts of time and money, I think that with a full-time job, there is only so much else I can do. More importantly, I have a family, and (though they’ll say I ignore them to play with the computer) I make a conscious effort to spend time on activities that will enrich all of us. Plus, I just fall asleep. Some people may get ahead by working or studying when other people are sleeping, but avoiding sleep will not be my ongoing plan for success.

I’m reading the book Good to Great which says that great organizations and their leader embody the Stockdale Paradox: they confront “brutal” reality without losing hope. Paternity leave was my reality check: I’m not going to learn and create everything I want to in my spare time. It’s going to take a real plan.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I like my my new Windows Vista computer and my new Windows Mobile phone.

Alas, they don’t like each other.

The phone came with a USB cable and software for syncing files, etc. between it and a PC. This is one of the reasons I got a smartphone, and also so I could find new uses like installing new programs, syncing calendars, and general tinkering with a mobile device platform.

I had heard that Vista came with a new Windows Mobile Device Center, so I wasn’t so surprised when the link to install the ActiveSync software on the CD supplied with the phone was disabled. I figure Vista already had the software it needed, and it would just be plug-and-play.

Unfortunately not; and it was several hours and a few scary “blue screens” before everything was working.

When I connected the phone to the computer, the computer seemed to recognize a new device was connected at first. But, it didn’t open the Device Center, and when I opened the Device Center from the Start Menu (is it still called the Start Menu in Vista–it doesn’t say “start”?) it said “waiting to connected,” and didn’t find my phone.

After a quick Google I was able to download a new version of the Device Center from Microsoft, but installation didn’t go so well, apparently because I was logged on as a non-Administrator. Eventually, it just got hung at a screen that said “0 seconds” remaining. If I left it long enough, the computer would go to sleep and not wake up: the light on the computer stayed blue, but the monitor stayed asleep (orange), so I had to hold down the computer power button to force it off. Not something I want to do.

After logging in as administrator, I installed the device center, but when plugging in the phone got an error about a “malfunction” in the USB device. This is a pretty serious accusation - my new phone is broken, and it’s not just a software issue? Unlikely.

At this point I installed the ActiveSync software on my Windows XP laptop, where it just “worked.”

Somehow all of this caused an even more critical problem with my computer because it wouldn’t shut down or restart cleanly, hanging on the “Shutting Down” screen and eventually crashing with a blue screen. A blue screen crash, on my new Vista computer. The honeymoon is over.

So, I decided to run System Restore. I tried a couple restore points and the operation timed out. Eventually, I had to run the system restore from safe mode. Apparently this is a sort of best practice, but not some I was aware of.

Finally, I found some good information at pdaphonehome.com forums. The end result was that I needed to uncheck “advanced network functionality” (in phone settings), perform a “hard reset” on device (although I’m not sure I really did this, because it didn’t go back to factory settings) and then I connected the phone again. The interesting thing is that this time, when the computer popped up a balloon “installing device driver” (as it has the very first time I installed it) is found a driver named “Samsung MITs USB Sync” instead of some sort of “RNDIS” driver.

So, I suspect there is some problem with this RNDIS driver with Vista; however I don’t think I need whatever advanced functionality this driver has for what I’m trying to do.

Syncing a PDA with a computer is a really typical use case for non-technical users, who don’t have time to deal with these issues; and it’s a use case that’s been around for years. It’s too bad they haven’t got all the bugs ironed out.

Today is my last day of paternity leave. Thanks to a great employer who paid 60% of my salary while I was out, I was able to spend eight weeks away from the office, taking care of Max and being a stay-at-home dad.

I’m supposed to say what I liked best was the time to bond with Max, but what I really appreciated was the change in routine. I never set out to have a 9-to-5 job in an office. I set out to be creative, and make an economic contribution to society, and society seems to have said that working on a computer, at a desk, is where I do that best. I started my first full-time job in 1996 and haven’t taken much of a break since 2001, when I took a semester to finish grad school and move to Boston. In high school and college I was doing something different every year: I was a musician, then an artist; I could work with my hands, then with my intellect; I could travel the world. I knew I would grow up and settle down, but I never expected to get quite as settled as I’ve become. These eight weeks at home were a time to do something different, with the reward of spending more time with the kids, and not too much risk.

The Jewish holiday of Passover fell during my leave. This is when we remember that God freed us–emphasis on “us,” not some ancient people–from the slavery of the Egyptians. In recent years I’ve come to see the message of Passover as being that we are still slaves–hopefully not in the literal sense, but we are not completely free from economic forces, social issues, and our own limitations in accomplishing our potential to do good. I won’t say paternity leave is like forty years of wandering in the desert, but I did find the time to be freeing and it helped me reflect on these things.

I’d like to say I have all the answers about what I want to do as a father and a professional but eight weeks is not that long. I did learn to bake a pretty decent challah and figured out a recipe for pareve chocolate chip cookies without trans fat. I think I bonded just fine with Hannah without taking time off when she was born, but this time around we did spend time with both sets of grandparents that we wouldn’t have done otherwise. I’ll probably never be a professional child care worker, but if I had to stay home more with my own kids, I’d be very happy with that. I’ve hardly looked at a line of code in the past eight weeks, although I’ve continued to think a lot about software. I think there is some great challenge out there for me, but I haven’t quite found it yet.

Windows Vista has gotten a lot of bad press. Maybe some people were expecting Microsoft to pull a Linux-and-Mac-killing rabbit out of its hat, which Vista is not, but it’s an improvement to Windows in its own right. A few weeks ago I got my first Vista-equipped PC and here are some of things I’m liking about it:

User Account Control–yes, I like it. UAC means simply that you are prompted before you can make a change that will affect other users. I don’t see that as a nuisance; that’s a security feature I want, so I can decide who and what gets to install new programs. This is the first computer where I’ve actually set myself up as a standard user, because I can always input an administrator password (without logging off) when needed. Maybe some software vendors and their users were caught off guard with programs that always needed to be run as an administrator, but running as administrator for is a bug, not a feature (certain administrative utilities excepted).

I like how in Vista the real path to user files is (for example) C:\Users\Public\Photos vs. “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Photos.” It’s a much more elegant way to say the same thing, reminding me of short DOS and Unix file naming conventions without being cryptic. It’s like they don’t need to show off long file name support any more–names are just as long or short as needed. I also like how the links to these folders are simply displayed in the Start Menu.

I like that the computer goes to sleep and wakes up much faster and more reliably than XP. This is the first computer where I don’t dread a long boot-up to quickly check an e-mail or search–I typically just let it fall asleep, and when I come back it only takes a few seconds to resume where I left off. The Windows Vista Team Blog says “everyone knows that turning a TV off doesn’t really turn it off,” and they wanted to Vista to work the same way. There are reasons some users might want it to work differently, but getting the real TV and cable box to turn on and off together reliably is more of a nuisance in my life right now.

Also, it’s a minor thing, but I think Microsoft has done a better, if not award-winning, job on the visual experience. I like the analog clock, and the way the screen fades in and out quickly when logging on and off. There’s also clearly been some engineering work to support this without compromising response time.

So, should you get Windows Vista on your computer? There are reports of people actively downgrading computers from Vista to Windows XP, which I think is pretty silly. In my judgement, Vista isn’t a reason to go out and buy a new computer (or upgrade one you’re not planning to replace). Vista is an improvement over Windows XP, and it’s helping me enjoy computer, so I’m happy with it.

There are a few stereotypical use cases for mobile phones and similar wireless devices. The younger generation needs to text their friends. The older generation needs a phone only for emergencies. And, of course, the professional needs their “crackberry” to check office e-mail. I think a lot of people have a need for mobile communications without falling into one of these categories. I’ve always had a pretty basic cell phone and I finally decide to buy myself a Samsung SCH-i760 Windows Mobile smartphone from Verizon Wireless. I see my needs being somewhere in between the texting teenager and the e-mailing executive. I do need to keep in touch with work, at least by phone for emergencies, but simple e-mail isn’t a killer app for me. (By “killer app” I mean “application,” some restaurant recently used the term to refer to their appetizers.) Somewhat like the teenager, having a more advance mobile data device is largely a personal investment, although with somewhat different uses. The killer app for me is probably going to be online search, maps, and note-taking and web browsing.

The device does a little bit of everything. It has all the functions of a traditional PDA, with a stylus and capability to sync with a computer via a cable. There’s also a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, without which typing messages, for me, would be a non-starter. The unique feature of this model is a separate telephone keypad with physical buttons; with the keyboard closed, you can use these to dial the phone; and with the keyboard open, you can use these when you need to enter numbers as well.

The phone supports Wifi, for faster/cheaper data when that’s available. There are a few options for e-mail. First, I was able to get to my company’s Outlook Web Access interface, it’s clunky yet might be the best solution for the times I need this. I was also able to sync with my office using the built-in mobile Outlook application, but I disabled this as it isn’t really what I wanted, and it seemed to keep initiating a data session, which, even though I’m on an unlimited data plan, definitely wasn’t what I wanted. Verizon also includes their own wireless sync system that I haven’t tried.

This is where not fitting into one of the stereotypically use cases presents a challenge. Want office e-mail pushed to your device, Blackberry-style? Fine. Want to be able to get access to all your information, personal or business, as you need it, combined in one place? Not so easy. I need to be able to keep my family and work calendars somewhat separate, but may need to access both of them. Similarly for e-mail, tasks, and contacts. So, I’ll probably keep doing a lot of the via mobile web browsing until I come up with a better solution; I’ll probably look at OggSync as I seem to be it’s target use case. I’d also love to find a program that gives me a “prettier” view of Outlook Web Access on a small without requiring my company to do anything differently on its server, or storing message on my phone.

Finally, why not an iPhone? I could have done that, I suppose. For various reasons I chose to stick with Verizon, and Windows Mobile is something I still wanted to try out. Maybe next time.

A while back I added the tagline “information, design, & society” to this blog. I wanted to explain what it means.

This is an aspiration. It doesn’t mean I won’t ever write about my kids. It does mean that I see this blog as my small contribution to the compendium of information that is the World Wide Web, and I try to offer content that is unique with the hope that some reader finds it useful or interesting. Taking the words one at a time:

Information refers to my profession of Information Technology, and also to information in the related, broader sense: how we advance our goals by organizing, selecting, and disseminating words and other data.

Design can be many things; it is often visual, sometimes functional, and always creative. While design is often thought of as the province of fields like architecture, I tend to follow a fundamental design process in everything I do, from writing to making dinner. For this blog, design topics include home improvement projects, professional work, or simply better ways to experience life. Of course, design relates to information, in the design of information systems and the graphic design through which information is presented.

On one hand, society refers to blog posts about politics, religion, parenting, or what’s going on around town. On the other hand, “information, design, and society” is a powerful combination. The politics of information and the design of information systems can affect people for good or bad. If this blog is really successful, it will be because I find something valuable to say on this topic.

Now the fun stuff: typography. Originally, I set each of the words in a different font that I chose to reflect each concept, but I didn’t think the fonts were different enough and it just looked like a mess. The new font is Andalé Mono. I had first thought to type the tagline as “information | design | society,” but I thought that made it sound like I was running a society for information designers, and those vertical bars are so 90’s anyway. I used an ampersand because they’re fun. Programmers will recognize that the double slash between the tagline and “Marc Stober’s blog” is the syntax used in some languages to separate a line of code from comments placed at the end of the same line.

Incidentally, the idea for this tagline came to me while viewing a design exhibit in the new Institute of Contemporary Art (the ICA), which I recommend you visit, especially if you’ve been to Boston before and are looking for an alternative to the regular museums.

I found this paper interesting as it presents an academic view of something I’ve been noticing from a grassroots perspective: the database as we know it is losing relevance, and new technologies will emerge that will make business applications faster to run and faster to develop.

Because of the graduate program I attended, one of the few computer science topics I know a lot about is relational database management systems (RDBMS), which underly most business applications today. In every job I’ve had, I’ve used an RDBMS, usually Microsoft SQL Server. Most developers don’t know fundamental RDBMS concepts; for example that you can’t just delete the log file when you run out of disk space, or what ACID properties are. As the paper points out, RDBMS’s are based on relational algebra and algorithms for managing disk files that haven’t changed since the 1970’s. Their use case is really a systems analyst entering SQL queries at a command prompt, which no one does any more. The fact that so few SQL (say “see-quell,” no one I know says “RDBMS”) users know these things is evidence of their irrelevance. No one decides SQL is the best type of database management system for their application; they choose it because it’s standard, you can find people and tools to support it, and does the job well enough.

I like one example the paper gives for a way to improve databases, which is to support a “constrained tree application” (CTA): an application that operates on a chunk of records from various tables that all relate back to one record from one table. For example, a customer and his various orders, order items, invoices, contacts, locations, etc. Every database I’ve worked on for the past 10 years, and for that matter almost every database everywhere, follows this pattern, but the RDBMS doesn’t provide any good features to support this. I’ve seen developers try to optimize this through various implementations, and spend a lot of time debating the right way to do it. We shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel; the platform should take care of it. (This would also help minimize the differences between multitenant and single-tenant architecture, but that’s another debate.) I could come up with dozens of patterns that every application needs to reinvent when they store their data in a SQL database.

Actually, the RDBMS doesn’t have to disappear to be irrelevant, it can just be used wrongly, and this has already happened. An RDBMS is supposed to have a schema designed according rigorous rules of normalization, including constraints on and between tables to maintain data integrity. If you don’t do this—relying instead on a layer of code outside the database to enforce business rules—you have a set of indexed, multi-user tables, not a true relational database. Since SQL can’t enforce every business requirement anyway, it may make sense to build applications this way, and not try for a normalized data
model at all (although, as a classically-trained SQL developer, I’m not convinced this is the solution).

Right now I’m doing a lot of work in Intersystems’ Caché. While they call it a “post-relational” database, it has a lot of warts since it’s based on an even older, pre-relational, hierarchical database system developed in the 1960’s (not that much older than the first RDBMS, though) that’s been extended and evolved. Still, other object-oriented databases have come and gone over the years (sometimes under the buzzword “persistence”), and Caché stands as proof that the RDBMS is not the only feasible choice for business applications. There are newer alternatives emerging, at least to solve specific problems; for example, Microsoft’s Linq, or Ruby on Rails, which I’m hearing about everywhere now. If these technologies can do a better job solving problems, it could be a big change, indeed.

I haven’t blogged in over two months, and there’s only one person I can blame it on: Max.

Well, I can’t really blame him for anything. He’s just a baby.

He is just over one month old and finally starting to be aware of things. He can’t say anything, of course, but if I look into his eyes, I can hear him. “Hi Daddy!” “I want to play with you and Hannah!” Or, when I was carrying him while putting leftovers from dinner in the refrigerator, “I saw a bottle in there, why don’t you give it to me?” The rest of the cleaning up from dinner would wait.