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.

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.

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.

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.

As part of that she has started to use the computer. She can log herself in, use the trackpad, and do everything except type in the NickJr.com URL (I supposed I should set up a shortcut she can click) to find the Flash games she likes. I’ve even seen her intuit, without reading, where the “Print” or “Next” button is going to be in the bottom right corner of a window. (Isn’t there something inherently validating in seeing your work printed?) She gets frustrated and wants help, which I don’t mind in theory because playing together is better than just letting her watch TV (though not so useful when you need to get housework done) and because, eventually, I’m sure I’ll be concerned about what she’s doing on the Internet on her own.

When Hannah was born we knew she was being born into a different world than we were as far as computers go (we joked about her needing her own e-mail address as a baby), but, I don’t think Hannah’s experience is going to be so different than our own. I first used a computer in kindergarten when I was 5, and was instantly hooked. Maybe there is a certain (young) age at which kids are ready to use computers, and we didn’t miss that much. Of course, what she can do with a computer is going to be different (that kindergarten computer, a Commodore PET, was the single one on a cart that rotated among all the elementary schools in my town).

One thing I like about our old house is the picture rail incorporated into the crown molding. Picture rails are an anachronism; they’re a way to hang pictures without making a hole in the wall, but with today’s materials it’s easy to patch a small hole–even in old textured plaster walls–that only places like art galleries and office buildings that constantly rotate art need a hanging system.

I wanted to use the picture rails but it took a while to find hardware I liked. Molding hooks are easy to find at a local hardware store or in vintage designs through reproduction catalogs, but they require a wire to be looped around a hook, creating more visual noise on the wall than I wanted.

Eventually, I found a system that worked. At the top was a specially designed hook holding a cable with a finished end that hangs straight down. The cable is not picture hanging wire that you can twist and tie but wire rope or “aircraft cable” that is stronger and more flexible (and probably easier to hang straight without kinking). The effect is very clean and “architectural.”

The fun part is the cable grippers with an integrated hook, that attach to the art instead of a regular picture hanger and can be moved up and down without tools. You cannot get anything like this at a local store.

I bought the whole system from a company called Hang Ups. They have a website but are clearly more of a business-to-business operation; it’s not like ordering from Pottery Barn.

This year there are a number of things. Within the past year, we have done a fairly significant construction project on our house, I’ve started a new job, and Cheryl has finished graduate school. And, we are expecting a new baby.

But, I feel like this year represents a change in a direction of sorts despite those accomplishments. I have a house I like, a car I like, and am a bona fide parent. Cheryl and I both have our master’s degrees, and I’ve reached a certain level of confidence of in my career. There is still a lot of work to do, but this is not going to be the year of the house. There is still a lot of parenting to do, and this will largely be the year of baby #2, but I’ve been a parent and will continue to be a parent so that’s not entirely new. Certainly I need to continue to work to pay the bills, but that’s not news.

Basically I’ve done everything I need to do to see myself as a real, grown-up adult, and now the question is how, as an adult, I’m going to leave my mark on the world (other than the obvious answer of through my children). As an IT executive, or as an engineer? As a local activist, or through accomplishments of Jewish learning? By starting a second a career as an architect or real estate mogul, or through new opportunities in the software field? I’m giving myself until I turn 40 to find myself on the right path which gives me a few years to figure things out. The one thing I know for certain is that the answer is probably none of the above, and the new year will be full of surprises.

It was terrifying. I got confused about when to speak and fumbled through what I was trying to say. A reporter from the Tab asked my name so maybe I’ll find out what I actually said there.

I do feel like I had my “day in court,” so to speak (sorry for the mixed idioms, I know this is a legislative not a judicial hearing, but that might have made it even more terrifying). Blogs are a great source of ideas and letters to the editor have their place as well, but if you have a strong and different opinion on a topic such as this, it’s important to register it in the official public forum. More people should do so. Moreover it was good experience for me - maybe things like the height of office buildings isn’t worth staying out late over, but certainly next time there is a matter worth speaking out over, I will be more composed.

Growing up, we “weren’t” kosher, although we knew other families who were. At some point, being an annoying teenager, I started to correct the other members of my household: food “is kosher,” people “keep kosher.” It’s a fine point, but Jewish learning is about questioning the fine points, and I think there’s a real difference. While knowing who “is religious” makes menu planning easier, observing mitzvot isn’t an ascribed characteristic or something to be treated as a shellfish allergy. Life is a journey, and mitzvot are the way God has given us to get somewhere. “Halakhah,” which means “Jewish law,” literally translates to something more like “The Way.” It’s ironic that we tend to focus on its limitations. I prefer to think of it as a highway: you are constrained to follow the road, but there is no limit to how far you go.

My own religious path has had many stops along the way. My mother’s family attended Reform synagogues in Connecticut since the Victorian era. My father converted to Judaism. I began to explore my own Jewish identity in high school and college. I participated in the March of the Living, traveling with several thousand young Jews to Poland and Israel. This experience opened my eyes in two ways: first, by seeing the range of Jewish practices among my fellow travelers; and second, by learning how traditional Jewish life was present in pre-Holocaust, twentieth-century Europe. Tradition hadn’t been incompatible with modernity; it was simply wiped away with the people who practiced it. In college, I started going to the Conservative minyan at Hillel, and, after a variety of twists and turns, majored in Jewish and Near Eastern Studies. I traveled throughout Israel for a semester, where I absorbed enough Hebrew and culture to feel comfortable anywhere in the Jewish world.

As an adult, my life is a little more stable, but I still find ways to grow. This year, our family is planning to build our own sukkah for the first time. It can feel like the Goldenfelds always build a sukkah (or some other observance) and the Rosensmiths don’t and when we’re in synagogue, we don’t ask about it. Well, I need to ask things. How do I make it so it won’t fall over? What do I use for skakh? Will you come and eat with us, even if our level of kashrut isn’t rabinically correct? What if we invite a family member who doesn’t keep kosher and they bring a dish? We Jews have always had questions, Halakhah is literally a book of questions (the Mishnah), and wrestling with our real questions can only be a good thing.

In fact, I think that’s what this project is all about. We say that the Conservative movement is a “halakhic” movement, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that other movements recognize our authority, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we all keep all the mitzvot. There’s a common myth that our grandfathers went to shul every day in Brooklyn, our mothers were scrupulously observant at home, and we all had a second-to-none Jewish education; we just lack willpower. But this underestimates the difficulty of doing mitzvot in the real world. Perhaps there’s a fear that if we talked about Halakhah, people would say it’s not for them. But this is a simple interpretation of mitzvot as something you feel guilty about. What binds us together as Conservative Jews is that we care about Halakhah; it is special and holy. Whether you are observant, want to be observant, or even if you just want to know the Rabbi and Cantor are observant, Halakhah and mitzvot are central. Discussing our relationship to mitzvot—including how we find them challenging—can only strengthen our commitment.

Marc Stober, along with his wife Cheryl, has been a member of Temple Emanuel since 2003 and you will most often find him with his daughter in Tot Shabbat. He lives in Newton Highlands and is employed as a software developer.