Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

We Now Rise to Prepare to Return the Torah to the Ark

analysis
Sep 14, 20071 min

I just finished two days of singing and choral conducting at Rosh Hashanah services. I feel uplifted, and also exhausted. As I expected, my physical mailbox was full when I dropped by my office to check on things, but only one book had been left outside the box because it didn't fit inside. What I was really worried about, though, was the backlog of email. I just spent three hours going through my accumulated em

I just finished two days of singing and choral conducting at Rosh Hashanah services. I feel uplifted, and also exhausted.

As I expected, my physical mailbox was full when I dropped by my office to check on things, but only one book had been left outside the box because it didn’t fit inside. What I was really worried about, though, was the backlog of email.

I just spent three hours going through my accumulated email from the two days I was out. About 1,200 emails were automatically filtered as spam by my client Bayesian filter and the mheller.com mail server, and another 5,000 by GMail. I had to manually remove about another 100 spams from my GMail inbox. Then I had about 300 real emails to read and answer.

Maybe I’ll be able to pay my bills and taxes over the weekend, and get back to real work on Monday.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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