Archive for September, 2002

Because of the Jewish Holidays I have not had time to blog lately, but Immmm Backkkkkkk!! J

I just registered JewTech.com. I’m having it hosted by ADDR.com, their ok, Not as slick as Verio.com but they are cheap.

Anyway, my focus of this site is, as you can guess, Jews use of technology. As an orthodox Jew, and as a Technology consultant, I been talking about this issue for a long time.

Many people thing of Orthodox Jews as Amish with curls, but this could not be further from the truth. Jews have been one of the quickest demographics to adopt new technologies. In New York you will see Jews dovening “Praying” on subways reading from there PocketPC’s and Palm Pilots. There are computerized Jewish Calendars that GPS data to properly tell them the exact time of sunrise and sunset. There as so many examples of how Jews use technology, that I thought it would make a great site. Thus is born.. JewTech.com.

I hope to have it functional in the next week or two. Some of my first articles will be:

Jews in Tech – This will be an ongoing list of Jews working in or contributing to technology.

Tech Issues facing Jews- Jewish Law in the digital world.

Software and Hardware Reviews

Great Sites for Learning and Shopping.

On line Chat. and more.

If you have any suggestions let me know at

david@bigbrains.com

I Love IE. I remember the days of Mosaic, then Netscape. Netscape was great, but I hated having to redownload it every 90 days to keep it working. This is one of the main reasons IE blew it away.

bigBrains Rant..

“Yes, Microsoft “The Evil Empire” Bundled it with windows, and also facilitated Netscape’s demise.

Microsoft’s bundling of IE into Windows made great sense. One of the primary use of any OS today is to facilitate getting to the Internet. Microsoft bundled Paint, and Notepad, Calc, and a clock. How is this different. If there a better version of these apps, I will buy them.

Did you know the Palm bundles a Browser with its OS! CALL THE ATTORNEY GENERAL!!!”

Anyways now the Netscape is Mozilla, and it is free with out having to constantly download it, and it has cool new features that IE Doesn’t, It makes sense to download it. It in no way in my view a replacement for IE, but a nice companion.

Here is what I like:

- It seems a little faster. Pipelining – improves browser performance on both dial-up and broadband connections.

- Tabbed browsing

- Pop-up blocking

- Cool printing features

What I don’t Like:

- Crashes

- Lack of Add-On’s

- Interface is clunky. “This may be just because I am use to IE”

- Potential Security Issues.

The bottom line is that I like both IE and Mozilla. So why Choose?

Here are some good links.

Mozzilla.org

Download.com

CNet’s Review of Mozilla

Note: I haven’t mentioned Opera because, I wont pay for a browser.

True Story….

I am currently designing a Warehouse and Data Marts for Iowa’s largest Healthcare insurance company. We using Sybase’s PowerDesigner to physically model tables for a Sybase ASIQ database. I like ER Studio better than PowerDesigner, but that is another story. We use PowerDesigner because it is the only modeling tool that will work consistently with Sybase ASIQ. It works well but I did not do a few thing that we need it to do. The customer has hundred of thousands of dollars of licensing with Sybase, so I decided to give them a call.

I called them up, reported the PowerDesigner issue, told them of the environment and of ASIQ, and waited for a call back. Very Promptly, I got a call back.

I will interrupt myself to ask a question, when you call tech support, do you know more than the technician?

Anyways the Technician on the phone was an ASIQ tech. That’s ok, It is the same company, they should be able to help, a little. I went through the issue again, and the tech astonished me with the depth of ineptitude. The conversation went something like this…

Tech – “Sybase can not help you with PowerDesigner…You should call the manufacture of the Product.

David – “Could You Type in http://www.sybase.com/products/enterprisemodeling/powerdesigner” I asked.

Tech – “Ohhhhhh, Well I still think that it is a third party product, and is not compatible with ASIQ. ”

David – “Hum, ” What do you say to that ” What do most of your customers use then?”

Tech – “VI” That is a Unix text editor.

That ended the conversion and I reentered my issue to tech support. I then got a great PowerDesigner Tech, and he knew that Sybase made PowerDesinger. J He did not know much about ASIQ but he got the job done.

Bottom Line:

Companies like Sybase work real hard to get customers, but not to keep them. Sybase is in no position to do this. Heck, Microsoft is not in any position to do this. The most expensive customer to get is the one you lost in the first place.

 bigBrains Links of the Day.

StephenKing.com - The master of Horror and Suspense.  The Dark Tower series is my favorite.  If you have not read them, do yourself a favor and start of with the Gun Slinger.

HotScripts.com - Great place to get code and sripts in ASP, C, Perl, Flash and other languages.

IESpell.com - I use this all the time.   ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).  

Jewish Calendar For Year 5763 - For us Jews out there.

It was to represent a ASCII version of a face with b squared to represent bigBrains. Now I think it is a bit basic, and doesn’t correctly capture the epic proportions of the bigBrains empire. I will be putting up a new logo soon. If anyone out there have any ideas, let me know.

Logo’s are not my thing, Lego’s are though.