Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles - for a technical only feed use the following URL - http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss - for a family only feed use the following URL - http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss

E and I headed out yesterday on a daddy daughter date.  We got tickets through the Cougar Club to a BYU baseball game and so we left Noel home to enjoy time alone and we headed down to Provo to watch some baseball.

Miller Park is a nice stadium - it is kind of unique as it has the softball field on one side of the stadium concourse and the baseball stadium on the other.  I taught E about first, second, and third base along with home "base".  We ate hot dogs and enjoyed the game for about an hour and a half or so.  We then headed over to the Marriott Center where our car was parked, put our blanket on the grass, read books, and ate Cheez-Its (sp?) and Twizzlers.  It was a lot of fun.  We did have to make a trip back to Miller Park for E to go to the bathroom.  As we went into the boys bathroom she said, "Dad, this is the boys bathroom."  I informed her that I couldn't go into the girls bathroom and so this was the best we could do.  She responded with, "But Dad it is going to stink!"  Turns out that all the stalls were occupied and rather than wait for them to open up and risk her clamoring loudly as we went in that it stunk we went hunting for another option.  They have a couple of family type bathrooms it turns out and we used one of those so it all turned out good!  It was pretty funny!

Here are a couple of pictures of us chilling on the grass at the Marriott Center.  We finished off our date by stopping by Mark and Stacey's to say hi to E's cousin E.  It was so much fun for E that with 5 minutes on our way home she feel asleep on me!  Seriously it was a great time - I can't wait for us to do it again!

For a year or two now I have been using a nice systray utility from dbmotive that has served me very well in managing the variety of Oracle Homes that I always seem to have on my machine.  It is called Oracle Locator Express - it looks like it used to be called Oracle Home Selector or something like that or perhaps is a replacement for it.

It runs in your systray and looks something like this

As you can see I have Oracle homes for Oracle 11g, 10g, XE, and Instant Client (not sure what the Instant Client thing is though?).  For my day to day development work I use the 10g client to connect to the various Oracle databases that I use.  Occasionally when I have something that I want to try out or test (like the Linq to Oracle prototype that is out there) I will switch over to the XE version.  This makes it very convenient and hassle free compared to what I have had to do in the past.  You just right click on the icon in the systray and up pops the menu above.  You select the Oracle Home you want to be active and away you go.  You have to restart any applications that you want to use this new Oracle Home.  For example I would need to restart Visual Studio so that it picks up the new path to the Oracle Home same goes for any SQL apps you might use like TOAD or PL/SQL Developer.

We got our keys yesterday and spent some time at the house yesterday.  The wood floor refinishing starts today followed by carpet, tile, and painting.  Here are some pictures that we shot while we were there.

Scoble just announced that he is switching from Hotmail to Gmail.  From time to time as I hear people making the switch I go back and revisit each site to assess capabilities and see what I am missing.  So far I have not seen a compelling reason to change from my 10 year old Hotmail account.  I have had a Gmail account for a year or two now.  So below I snapped some screen shots of the interfaces to talk to the advantages of each as well as to what I don't like about them.

The first two screen shots are of the message listing screen.  Windows Live looks better.  It looks more polished.  I like the message reading pane on the right (you can also put it on the bottom).  I couldn't find an option to do the same in Gmail which is a major disappointment because being able to arrow through my emails and scan them in the reading pane is how I work through my email. 

I like the conversation grouping that Google has.  That is a great feature to help reduce the size of email in your inbox by collapsing those ongoing conversations.

I am not sure what I think of the archiving of Google Talk conversations automatically.  I think it is cool that I can do that, but the fact that it does it automatically for all my conversations seems a little much.  I would imagine I could turn it off (just checked and yep I can).  Windows Live Messenger allows you to save conversations to a file or email them to yourself on a conversation by conversation basis which I like (although you can also configure it to automatically save conversations to a file).  Windows Live Messenger so dominates Google Talk in features though that it isn't much of a comparison and I am not meaning to compare them right now anyway so I digress.

Hotmail does folders and Google does tags - but both allow searching across your whole inbox on search terms which is way more important.  I have largely stopped filing my email anyway with the pervasiveness of search these days.  It is so much easier to just search and find what I need.  That perhaps gives Google the edge here in that I can annotate a message with a tag describing it more directly if I want and then archive it to just get it out of my inbox.

I like the ability to right click in the Hotmail interface and get a custom right click menu to interact with a message. 

Both services have way more email storage than I need (both Hotmail and Gmail have in the 5 to 6 GB range although with my Hotmail Plus subscription I get 10).

This view is where I look at it and can't believe all the love Gmail gets.  The ads down the side are just an annoyance.  I am assuming that most people must ignore them and learn not to see them.  Additionally they are reading the content of the email and providing ads based on the content.  While I imagine there are instances where this might be useful and interesting this feels very intrusive.  To test out the length that this goes to I sent an email to my wife with the message, "Hey sweetie - can't wait for the romantic evening tonight!"  Google's ads when I viewed the message in Gmail were nice enough to me provide links on how to get my ex-girlfriend back as well as where I can buy thongs and g-strings.  Nice.  Perhaps people don't pay enough attention to the ads to care or perhaps as some have suggested people don't care about their privacy as much such that having an email service read your email matters.  But for me reading my email to provide context sensitive ads crosses the line.

I had to add a picture in of the Windows Live Mail desktop application for Windows that is also available.  It is a lightweight desktop mail client which is more than enough for most consumers (your average home user doesn't need Outlook in my opinion).  Of course with Gmail's IMAP and other support I am sure you can plug into any number of mail apps out there (and of course you get Outlook support with both).

Conclusion

In addition to the good things above I noted about Google - Google Calendar is better today than the Windows Live equivalent.  Windows Live needs to get rid of having two different calendars - hopefully the next release of Windows Live Calendar will kill MSN Calendar and bring Windows Live Calendar up a notch.  I like the way I see Windows Live Calendar going if it simply added true iCal subscription support not just the ability to import it would likely have all that I need. 

Each service has it's strengths and weaknesses, but Gmail certainly doesn't yield a compelling reason for me to switch.  Plus when I look at the overall platform (Windows Live versus Google) I believe Microsoft has made great progress in establishing what Windows Live truly is and has begun to build out the platform effectively with things like Windows Live Events, Office Live Workspace, and Skydrive.  I am anxious to see what MIX brings in terms of Windows Live announcements.  Things have been a little quiet on that front lately and I am anxious for some new news. 

Google feels like they are stuck in the mud right now in this space.  I haven't seen any meaningful changes for what seems like a year.  I am sure that I am forgetting something they have done - if I have please note it in the comments as I would like to know.  Google's greatest strengths in my opinion lay in Google Calendar, Google Reader, and their main search page.  The main search page does little to tie me to a platform honestly - I can be Windows Live based - have a Google search bar in my browser to do web searches and I have the benefits of the web search I prefer with the productivity platform (Windows Live) I prefer.  I can see why people prefer Google Calendar, but once Live Calendar gets true iCal subscription support (they already publish in iCal effectively) than I think the advantage goes away there. 

Google Reader becomes for me the most compelling piece of Google's platform.  I will not switch from it until something can come close to what it does.  The starring and sharing (especially sharing) is a key part of my feed reading workflow (although for the casual reader of friends and family blogs they likely would matter very little).  I can't believe we haven't seen any integration between Gmail and Google Reader yet.  For my family members who aren't super techy, but want to read blogs enabling them to subscribe to RSS feeds and have them show up like emails in their email (which they religiously check) is huge.  That would be a huge boost to the adoption of RSS and Atom.  Today most of them use Windows Live Mail (that is the desktop client for Hotmail) to read their mail and it allows subscriptions to RSS feeds so I enable in there the subscriptions to blogs of friends and family and they are off and running.  Simple and seamless.  My grandma and grandpa read their grandkids blogs through RSS that way which is more RSS than most of my coworkers take advantage of!

We had a fun birthday party for E this weekend at Chuck E Cheese's!  The kids had fun and hopefully the adults did too.  It was fun to get together and eat some pizza.  I can't believe how much E is growing up.  Sometimes she seems so grown up - as for the other times - we'll just not talk about those right now!!! :)  Here are some pictures from her special day!

The Hinton family is having our annual reunion at the end of March this year up here in Utah.  Midway, UT to be exact!  We had a family party in Provo today and with the weather being outstanding today (we got into the 40s) we decided it would be a good day to check out the place our family is renting.  It took a few phone calls to pin down where it was because the cabin is down off the road and with all the snow almost not visible (and especially not when you aren't looking carefully).  We grabbed a few pics for our family to see what they are in for!  It will be interesting to see how much melts by the time the reunion rolls around.

In the picture below you can see me in past my knees which wasn't even the deepest part.  I was in my church clothes and so those suit pants are going to the cleaners tomorrow as a result of my little adventure.  My feet still haven't warmed all the way up yet! 

We bought a house this past week (or at least had our offer accepted - we still have inspections to do etc... before we close on it).  I thought I would throw a picture out there of what it looks like.  We are so excited!

cozicentral.cozi.com is yet another site doing lists, calendar, blog/journal, etc...  The interesting concept behind it is the ease of calendaring.  You can type in your appointment in natural english and it will determine when and who it needs to schedule the appointment for.

And when you hit return you see that Date Night has been scheduled for both Bryan and Noel (the colors represent different people).  If you click on Date Night you'll see the details down to the Movie Theater as the location for the event.

The natural language scheduling technology is really cool.  The site has the ability to sync with Outlook and send event details and list details to your phone.  All nice technology, but nothing beyond the natural language technology that really differentiates the site.  It is also hard to imagine me wanting to have my calendar info separate from my mail and contacts.  That is what gives the Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live platforms so much power is the integration between mail, contacts, calendar, and other features.  It will be interesting to see if any of the big companies look to match or purchase the natural language capabilities that Cozi shows.

Two good articles below that explore what an architect really means in the world of software development.  In particular the last one is excellent in analyzing the origins of the term architect and applying that to the world of software development.  My feelings on the role of architect mirror much of what is said in the second article.  I think an architect role is garnered by experience and that an architect is to be a leader.  A true leader needs to be able to get in the trenches and deliver working code as well as be in the room with the customer mapping customer requirements into actionable development tasks.

http://www.agilearchitect.org/agile/role.htm

http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2008/01/02/architects-back-to-the-future.aspx

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study - page 4

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.  Page 5

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? - Page 6

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945&page=1

Noel passed this along to me - she got it from a friend from Arizona that had sent it to us.

Noel, E, Carolyn, Noel's mom, and I went early this morning to President Hinckley's viewing.  It was held in the Conference Center which was a change from the initial plans because of the potential bad weather and the limited space in the Church Administration Building (known as the CAB here at work).  As an employee I got to bring my immediate family (those living in the same house as me) with me before things opened up for the general public.  E having been through the death of two great-grandparents and her grandpa in her short little life has a pretty good understanding of death, much better than I did.  I don't recall going to a viewing until my Grandpa's early in my 20s.

I love the Conference Center - it is such a gorgeous building - just walking through it and thinking of the vision that Pres. Hinckley had to build such a magnificent building was very special.  E was enthralled by all the beautiful art especially the huge painting of the Savior coming to America.  She was great the whole way there too - the ushers gave a gentle reminder to us as we entered to make sure that we were reverent and limited the talking I am sure because E was so young - she was fabulous. 

President Hinckley's casket was situated in the Hall of the Prophets up on the third floor of the Conference Center.  It was another testimony to me as we looked at our dear Prophet of the divinity of the soul!  It was definitely Pres. Hinckley, but it wasn't.  The power, humility, kindness, and vitality that were such a hallmark of him in my mind were missing from his face.  His spirit, possessor of those wonderful traits, had moved on to the Spirit World to continue his work.

As we walked away Sister Hinckley, one of his daughter-in-laws, saw E and came over and said hello and thanked us for coming and was so kind.  As we walked back into the seating area of the Conference Center to exit the area they had the flowers from the family along the way.  There were some tender moments as we read the expressions of love from kids, grandkids, and great grandkids.  There were references to "Standing a little taller and being a little better", to the 6 Be's, and one that referenced a statement Pres. Hinckley must have made after the passing of his wife - it was something to the effect of, "Christmas just isn't the same without your grandmother" with a follow on statement of "Christmas just won't be the same without the both of you Grandpa."

We also got two tickets to the funeral so Noel and I will be going on Saturday - we are so looking forward to going.  As we walked out of the Conference Center I was talking quietly to E about how we saw Pres. Hinckley's body and that his spirit had gone to Heaven.  She turned to me and said, "yep and that is the most important thing!" 

I received a couple of invites to try out NotchUp.com today so I decided to go over and try it out.  It is a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site).  Apparently the model it is using is to pair up interviewers with interviewees with the niche being that you can set a price that interviewers have to pay you to interview you.  Sounds good - It'll be interesting to see how it works or if it works.

Out of the gate though things were bad - performance is HORRIBLE!  So bad that the site is almost unusable.  I have no idea what employer would be willing to pay money to sit there and wait for the site to come back.  Major negative points there.  In fact the only reason I stuck around is I imported my information and wanted to correct it so that in the off chance someone was able to get the site to work long enough to find me that they would see the right information (it crashed on me many times).

If you are listening NotchUp - you should have never launched with those kinds of issues - just awful user experience - I will never go back to the site by choice that is for sure!

It is all over the Utah news (and many other news stations) - President Hinckley passed away Sunday evening at 7pm at his apartment from "causes incident to age".  It was interesting we were at a family gathering out in Saratoga Springs at all at once calls came into different family members from people reporting the passing of President Hinckley.  One of my cousins suggested we join in prayer for Pres. Hinckley's family and for the leaders who will carry on especially Pres. Monson.  I tried for a solid 30 minutes to call various family members, but the cell phone circuits were overwhelmed and no calls could get out.

That speaks to the magnitude of the news - many if not most of the 13 million members of the Church associate Pres. Hinckley with the Church's First Presidency (the Church's presiding body).  He has served there for 26 some odd years.  He has always been there during my lifetime - a stalwart, a rock, an example.  I was inspired by his biography and it affected me deeply and has throughout my life.  I often reflect on what he said and did and strive (albeit poorly) to follow his shining example.  He gave his life to his faith.  He was an optimistic man - impressively so. 

We are watching the tribute to him on KSL TV right now.  I work for the Church and work I am sure will be a somber and sober tomorrow and for days going forward. 

Mormons recognized Gordon B. Hinckley as God's prophet the same as we do Adam, Noah, Moses, and all the others from the Old and New Testaments.  He bore a powerful witness of the divinity of The Savior of the World, Jesus Christ.  I bear testimony that Gordon B. Hinckley was a Prophet of God.  He was God's mouthpiece to our troubled world.  He was an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ as were Peter, James, John, and others both in New Testament times and in modern times. 

As we mourn his passing there is no confusion or politicking for who will take his place.  The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles now leads the Church (the First Presidency being dissolved upon the death of the President) with President Monson as the presiding authority of the Quorum of the Twelve.  In time they will convene and by revelation set apart a new President/Prophet who will then reorganize the First Presidency.  If you look at how the Lord has worked over the preceding years Pres. Monson is the likely person to become the 16th President of the Church.  When that happens I will raise my hand in sustaining vote for him along with the millions of others knowing that God's work will go forward.

The Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done.

--Joseph Smith

We got a lot of snow today which only added to the tons that we already had and so we got out in it this afternoon.  We love playing with our new video camera these days and took quite a bit of video.  The highlight was Noel's sled ride.  I decided I would play with some video editing really quick to hack together something to highlight her fun ride!

I hate to just post links here - I want to put more original thoughts - but when someone says something that I don't feel like I could say better or don't need to add to why talk (or write) just because - Peter Provost has some great thoughts in regards to Teams that I shared off my link blog, but since many don't see that I thought I would repost it here.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/01/06/rangekeyed_1.html

In my new job I am spending a fair amount of time data modeling specifically around Data Warehousing Data modeling.  The team I work on are pretty committed Kimballists meaning we generally follow the dimensional modeling principles outlined by Ralph Kimball.  As with any programming methodology (and likely any methodology period) there is a fair amount of gray area.  That is where both experience and "gut feeling" come into play in making decisions on how to model certain things that don't fit the philosophy very well or perhaps fit multiple parts of the philosophy.

What has surprised is why there aren't more forums out there to discuss this!  I can go Google C# of Java or Oracle or perhaps better examples would be Agile Programming or Test Driven Development and find a host of forums to look at, but data modeling or dimensional modeling forums specifically seem to be very few and far between.  It surprises me after all these years of Kimball espousing the philosophy etc... that he hasn't made available forums for discussion to happen etc...  It would be fascinating to pose problems and see the community's opinions and to respond to other's questions as well.  Sounds like a project in the making!  Anyone interested or know if a good place already exists (not sense reinventing the wheel!)

Just having moved to Salt Lake and working downtown I have missed the nice 3D models that are available of Phoenix.  Well today the Virtual Earth team announced the addition of 3D imagery for Salt Lake and Provo so below are a couple of snapshots I clipped while navigating around. 

Here is a picture of downtown Salt Lake with a little note in the the bottom left pointing out the office building that I work it.

And here is my beloved BYU with a little annotation pointing out the season ticket location that my mother-in-law has that we got to enjoy this year!

You can also take the 3D Tour that I made that gives you a view of Provo and then moves to Temple Square - try it out - it is a pretty cool feature.  You can even record the tour and save that off.

In comparing features of mapping programs.  Virtual Earth is great in how 3D and 2D can just go back and forth in the browser.  With Google Maps you only get 2D to get 3D you have to go into Google Earth.  You do have Street View in Google Maps which is interesting - I prefer the Bird's Eye feature that Live Maps has over Street View though.  Google Maps has the ability for you to click and re-route your directions (Yahoo which doesn't have any of the other whizbang things we just talked about but did just add similar re-routing capability) which is very, very cool (Live Maps you really need to add that!).  In trying out the touring capabilities the Live Maps capability seemed easier to work with compared to Google Earth.

Since the iPhone release which generated I think iTunes 7.3 over the last couple of months we have had 7.3.1 and 7.3.2 and 7.4 and now 7.5.  Each required reinstalls (including a reinstall of Quicktime???) and the size continues to grow - last night when prompted to install 7.5 it downloaded and installed 69 MB or something like that - I remember 7 being in the range of high 40s.  Anybody ever heard of a patch?  I am a software developer so I understand a little about the distribution of software.  I just don't get why point releases aren't handled as patches - going from 6 to 7 or 7 to 8 I completely understand a reinstall, but not for point releases.