I forget sometimes I didn’t set out to be a programmer. I’d written some web pages that were simple documents, and knew they were lacking compared to “real” web sites where you could search, order a book, or buy an airline ticket. So I bought a programming book, found a small project to use it on at work, and the rest of my career fell in to place (eventually).

As a programmer, I have a different (better?) idea of the value of the technology we deal with daily in modern life.

Here are some examples. You can probably think of ways to dispute the particulars, but that’s why they’re examples, not proofs. (There’s my programmer-mind searching for discrete logical results again, forgetting that my blog audience has analog brains and doesn’t think in one’s and zero’s….)

Example #1: Twitter

Twitter is tremendously popular. I use it and it’s a lot of fun. I think a lot of people think it’s some amazing technology. It’s actually kind of tricky in that way: character limits, coded abbreviations, URL shorteners and hashtags all seem very technical. In fact, this originally turned me off to Twitter; I’ve lost count of the number of times in my career I’ve made a field longer or modified an app to take advantage of a higher-bandwidth connection, and Twitter was doing completely the opposite! Now I think people are attracted to the game (just like some programmers try to write the shortest program possible,) even if it’s cryptic to the point of being a novelty. Twitter isn’t some great technical advance; it’s really pretty simple: a couple web pages and a couple tables that any professional developer could implement, at least in its basic structure. What makes Twitter one of the leading social media platforms is not technology, but that millions of people use it. This may even make it more valuable as a business: lot of valuable users, without having to invest a lot in technology. (Admittedly scaling up to its current size is, as programmers like to say, non-trivial.)

Example #2: Netflix

On the other hand, Netflix seems simple. What could be simpler than watching TV? But parts of Netflix rely on some very sophisticated technology. Computer scientists competed for a million dollars over the best algorithm to recommend movies. Video compression and reliable streaming are hard. If you can invent a better video compression algorithm, you can probably get rich. We take it for granted that we can watch Netflix on almost any device (and we get angry if we can’t), but building native streaming players that enforce DRM (whether or not you want to) on multiple platforms and making them work well enough to compete with cable is very hard. Of course, Netflix does other difficult things like negotiating with movie studios. But I think a least part of the reason I pay for Netflix every month (and use Twitter for free) is that they have a lot more value in their technology.

Example #3: Verizon vs. Vonage and MagicJack

Vonage and MagicJack want you to think that they have some innovative new technology that can save you money. Maybe they could save me money, but from an engineering standpoint, I find them odd. When I pay my phone bill (well, FiOS bill) to Verizon, I can (barely) justify the expense knowing they maintain a huge physical infrastructure requiring real estate, trucks, union salaries, miles of expensive copper wire and glass fiber. I could plug a Vonage or MagicJack device into my Verizon Internet connection, but I’d still be relying on Verizon’s real estate, trucks, union salaries, miles of wire, etc. and my voice would get turned into the same bits on fiber either way. Any difference is a result of politics and commercial issues; there’s no fundamental technical reason these services should save you money.

So, have I convinced you to make learning to program your New Year’s resolution?

Two images are stuck in my mind from the video. The first is of a woman covered up almost Taliban style.

And the second is of Na’ama’s mother, Hadassah, dressed attractively in a sweater, boots, and skirt that meet her own standards of tzniut (modesty). She looks like she could fit in among the women I pass walking home from their Modern Orthodox synagogue down the street from my Conservative one. And here’s the honesty part: I can see how she would be a little bit distracting.

But what I think is totally messed up is to think there is anything at all wrong with that. Certainly that doesn’t make her deserve to be called a “whore.”

Caring about how one looks and noticing how other people look is a hard-wired part of being human. The value of Judaism is that it provides a way to sanctify the human experience. The rabbis long ago recognized that the yetzer ha-ra–the temptation to do bad–was not something that can be just covered up but a part of life that we can try to turn to good.

In secular culture the message sometimes seems that only a woman who can look like a supermodel is attractive, and only a guy who sleeps with a lot of supermodels in accomplished. But Jews believe every individual deserves respect: “If you have saved one life, you have saved the world.” And so, in my community, as in many other non-Haredi communities, we have norms where every woman gets to be beautiful, every bar mitzvah boy funny, every grandfather wise, and every child give his parents something to kvell over (be proud of). For example, Mayim Bialik, who is both an Orthodox Jew and TV star, recently blogged about finding a dress for an important Hollywood party that looked good and was still respectful. Doing Jewish stuff means there are ways for men and women to interact that don’t require cheating or hurting anyone or acting irresponsibly. Not that every Jewish community is perfect (we’re still only human after all!) but on the whole, I think Judaism has survived because it has a lot of wisdom about how to cope with human nature.

Maybe some men really can’t deal with seeing a woman on the street. But then it’s them who should be staying off the sidewalk.

This Saturday morning at Temple Emanuel’s lay-led Ruach Shabbat family service we’ll be unveiling our new prayer book, Siddur Ruach Shabbat. The product of over a year of collaboration between the synagogue’s volunteers and professional staff, the book aims to be “just right” by capturing the spirituality of a traditional Shabbat morning service and making it accessible to all. It also features 40 full color illustrations by the children of Temple Emanuel.

The book features a number of innovations to make it easy to understand and use:

• Only the prayers needed for a regular Shabbat morning service are included, so there is no getting lost flipping pages.
• Every prayer begins on a new page with English, Hebrew, and transliterated titles.
• All prayers (except the silent Amidah) have transliterations.
• Key phrases are bold.
• And more…

As editor-in-chief my goal was to share with my fellow TE families and the Jewish world what I found so meaningful about Shabbat morning prayer. The book was a truly collaborative effort, from the first draft produced by committee Vice Chair David Goldstone, to the extensive editorial work by committee Chair Pamela Weinfeld, to substantive input from Religious School Director Ilene Beckman, Hazzan Sheini Daniel Nesson, Rabbi Michelle Robinson, and others. It may have taken longer than we thought but the result was far better than expected.

For now the only place to see the whole finished book is at Ruach Shabbat Family Services this Saturday at 10:45 a.m. in Temple Emanuel’s lower level activity room, and monthly thereafter. Please join us! For more information contact me at marcstober@gmail.com, Pam Weinfeld at drpamw@dermandskincare.com, or Wayne Goldstein at wgoldstein@templeemanuel.com.

When people complain that mandated health care is bad for small business, no one points out that what they’re really saying is “I’d rather keep my profits than give my employees health care like a larger business would.” No one is complaining about small independent mortgage brokers who pushed through bad deals while flying under the radar of any attempt at corporate responsibility. No one complains about nonprofits who think their good works are an excuse for exploiting employees and cheating vendors.

Not that all (or even most) people and organizations in the above categories are to blame. But the ones that are, are certainly happy to see you blame “corporations.”

I think the problem is the way things like government debt or “socialized medicine” get talked about public debate now as if they’re axiomatically bad, instead of inherently bad things like intolerance, sickness, or war, that government policy is after all a tool to prevent.

In a nation of 300 million people, you can’t simply blame the fact that there are institutions large enough to feed, employ, and serve lots of us. It is going to take some really big farms, and really big banks. Something is wrong with the state of the social contract, if we ever had one, I’ll admit: you should be able to go to school, play by the rules, and not get tossed aside. But while some big organizations and their leaders are part of the problem, we also shouldn’t toss aside people and organizations that can be part of the solution. And we need big solutions.

For the Family Service Siddur I wanted a translation for “Adonai Tzeva’ot” that people wouldn’t need an English dictionary to understand like the venerable yet archaic “Lord of Hosts.” Siddur Sim Shalom actually leaves it untranslated, so I posted a question for the creative people in the OpenSiddur Facebook Group:

Anyone have a favorite translation for “Adonai Tzevaot” in the Kedushah? “Hosts” always makes me think of the person who takes you to a table at a restaurant.

After getting responses from Aharon Varady and Shmueli Gonzales as well as posing a few alternatives to my daughter, Hannah, as a representative of the target age the latest draft has:

Holy, holy, holy is the God of heavenly forces.

This made me really think about this peak moment of the service, and how it represents the fullness of God in three ways: as a force throughout the universe, as something not here but “up there” (mim’komo=”His place”), and specifically as God of Israeli (Elohayich tziyon).

I think perhaps the important thing you are saying is that while צְבָאוֹת (tz’va’ot, tzevaot) literally means “armies,” the reference is to forces of the universe being imagined as armies, as opposed to the human armies of nations.

Indeed I would say that imagining God as the master of gravity, black holes, quantum physics, and other mysteries of the physical universe very much fits in with my own theology and seem analogous to how it was formerly used by people who looked at starts but didn’t have the Hubble Space Telescope. (Or NOVA on PBS.)

Which brings me back for “forces” as translation which could mean physical forces like gravity, as well as being a direct modern PC translation for army as in “Israeli Defense Forces.”

Note: The image above was drawn by Hannah and illustrates the page across from this passage in the Siddur.

I left behind my paper maps and GPS device on our recent trip to California, navigating with my iPhone 4 instead. We got where we needed to go, but the iPhone was limited and frustrating for a state-of-the-art smartphone.

We flew into northern California to visit relatives and attend a wedding, then drive along the coast to LA sightseeing. This meant we had to locate points of interest as specific as a San Francisco apartment and as vague as a spot along those coast where you can see elephant seals, and drive in LA traffic. I knew I’d need more than the built-in Maps app. Before the trip, I used TripIt and Google Maps on the web to store various destinations. For voice-guided navigation, I purchased NAVIGON MobileNavigator, which was expensive, but cheaper than either buying a new GPS device or even updating the maps on my old one. (I’d also tried the less expensive MotionX GPS Drive app around eastern Massachusetts, but it came up with some strange routes, which proved to me that all navigation apps are not the same.)

I also purchased NavAssist. If you have Navigon or TomTom apps, buy NavAssist. It’s only 99 cents and it lets you copy and paste addresses from other apps (including the native Maps app) into your GPS app. On the other hand, it’s ridiculous that there not a better way to share addresses designed into the iPhone. For example, to navigate to our hotel address saved in TripIt: open the record in TripIt, click to open the address in Maps, copy the address, paste into NavAssist, click to search then click to launch Navigon. This should not take so many clicks through 4 different apps!

My big disappointment came when I tried to view the customized map I’d saved in Google Maps. I’d dropped multiple pins on a map and planned to use that to see what I was near and decide what to visit next. I didn’t expect that the native Maps app (which isn’t really “Google Maps” even if it uses Google data) would support this, but I’d assumed I’d have all the functionality of the web-based Google Maps through the mobile web. It was not possible. The Google products are a confusing mix of “Maps,” “Local”, “Places,” and the Google Earth app. It is possible to view saved maps via Google Earth, but this is both too slow to use well without good WiFi, and doesn’t provide you with the sort of road and address data you need for driving navigation at all.

Fortunately, I’d printed out on a paper a list of the points of interest I’d saved in Google Maps. The native Maps app doesn’t support dropping multiple pins (or even a single pin precisely). I briefly tried free Bing and MapQuest apps before buying two more map apps: CityMaps2Go by Ulmon, and Map+ by Shinya Sugawara. I’d used Ulmon’s Paris guide app on another trip with much success, but it worked better for finding landmarks (like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower and the closest subway stop) than for finding specific street address and driving to them. Finally, the 99 cent Map+ app was only thing I could find for dropping multiple pins on on a street map.

Maybe the developers of NavAssist and Map+ could get together and build an app that combines the ability to drop multiple pins with the ability to paste in addresses and launch a navigation app? Does it seem wrong that $300 of GPS hardware and software is made usable by $1.98 of apps? Has Apple restricted the functionality of map and navigation apps while it works on its own? I’d consider this a possibility, but I can’t do much else with a speculation of an unannounced product.

What Happened to Software Engineering? – Developer.com

This is just the latest one example; liberally paraphrasing, it’s always the same: ‘Bridge building is so cheap and easy, there’s no excuse for programming not to be even cheaper and easier.’

Seems to me this meme is an insult to both software developers and civil engineers. Then again, it’s mostly perpetrated by people who expect software and bridges to magically appear without paying for them. Or worse, by someone trying to sell technical products and services without hiring enough technical talent.

A reviewer noticed an error in Mah Tovu:

The quamats² that should be under the resh is under the kaf. It’s not a typo; I had typed the letters correctly: kaf , shva , resh , qamats , meteg .

I realized the issue was with the meteg. (In liturgy, meteg is used to indicate the stressed syllable, particularly when it’s not the last syllable, which is usually stressed in Hebrew.) Without the meteg, the vowel is centered below the “point” of the resh, not the center of the letter:

So far, so good; this contributes to the readability of the letters. The problem is that Times New Roman shifts vowels to the right when followed by meteg. This is okay if the vowel starts off below the center of the letter:

But when the vowel is centered under right edge of the letter to start with, it ends up appearing under the previous letter, incorrectly. For example, the font Cardo doesn’t shift the vowel when a meteg is added, which I think is better:

It’s worth noting that not all Hebrew fonts even include meteg, which is not used in modern Hebrew.
I solved the problem using the overstrike feature of Word’s equation editor:

To reproduce this:

1. Press ctrl-F9 to insert the special equation editor brackets.
2. Paste in the following: eq \o(רָ,ˌ)

Note that the character used here is actually the Unicode MODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE character (hex 02CC), because Hebrew points without a consonant are rendered with a dotted circle by the software. I think this character is used as a phonetic symbol to indicate stress anyway, so it’s not inappropriate. However, I consider this a work-around; in a perfect world, I’d like to have an accurate digital text that renders into print without pretending it’s an equation.

Hope someone finds this helpful or at least interesting!

Earlier iPhones reminded me of a European roadster: fun to drive, not very practical. There were arbitrary things that you couldn’t do. Remember the big deal when iPhones got copy and paste? It seemed ridiculous to me that you needed to tether a wireless device to computer for backups and updates (and this only changed with the iOS 5 announcement just this month). Plus, I was a happy Verizon customer and they only ran on AT&T.

Before iOS 4, iPhones did not support multitasking. This is not about being able to run more than one app at a time. It’s about building software that can take full advantage of the computer in your pocket. You should be able to ask an app to do something–keep track of your location, let you know about something, sync some data, play music, whatever–without actually having to be “in” the app using it; shouldn’t computers do things for us? Gradually, Apple has been getting rid of these restrictions. Sometimes this results in more esoteric feature announcements like notifications and task completion. Really, it’s about making the iPhone a seriously capable (and still fun) mobile platform.

Speaking of serious, the iPhone supports full encryption of data synced from a Microsoft Exchange server, which most Android phones do not. Setting aside whether I should be spending time on work when I’m not in the office, this makes it possible for me since I work for a hospital covered by state and federal privacy laws.

I like openness in principle, so I’m not fond of Apple’s tightly controlled app ecosystem. However, I’m encouraged by the DCMA exemption that says jailbreaking is not actually illegal, because it shouldn’t be illegal to do what you want with something you bought. Apple’s support of HTML5 is also encouraging. (I’m not sure Flash support would really be a win for openness.) Every smartphone platform has its issues, and it’s far from clear that Apple’s veto power over apps discourages innovation any more than business decisions made by hardware and software companies with more “open” operating systems.

Rather that a roadster, today’s iPhone is like a luxury SUV. I could tell you I had to buy it for the advanced airbags and all-wheel-drive stability control, but I can’t honestly complain.

Clutter-discoverability trade-off — The Endeavour.

It’s interesting how over my career, Microsoft and Apple have switched places on this. I remember when Macs came out in the 80’s–-really up until Windows 95–-the advantage was that everything was discoverable on a menu or as an icon, unlike DOS-based programs where you needed a cheat sheet handy for all the commands. These days, I find Apple products, while beautifully clutter-free, are less discoverable.

For example, a relative of mine recently had to take her phone back to the Apple Store because she had accidentally activated the three-finger-double-tap zoom feature. Gestures that involve taps or swipes with 2 or 3 fingers aren’t very discoverable, IMHO. A big ugly “click here to unzoom” button would have been friendly. (Not that having live people in local stores isn’t friendly in some other way.)

p.s. Back to the article, I’ve also recently started using Emacs, but you could say I took that up just for the challenge of it’s non-discoverability!