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Healthcare

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:36:58 -0500

I have never written a political blog, and this isn’t a trend, but I need to say this. I haven’t heard Obama’s address to congress yet, so this has not been influenced by that.

I have posted this on both facebook and twitter, “I will be proud to pay more taxes if it means someone less fortunate than I receives health care.” I don’t care what administration is in office or what majority passes it. This is not political, it’s personal.

diskcached

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:24:58 -0500

I want memcached, but rather than allocating memory, it stores it on disk. This should be out there, I just haven’t seen it.

The use case would be for people with low-memory virtual machines who can benefit from caching, but do not have the memory to allocate to it. I guess technically it would work by simply using regular memcached and taking the disk page hit if it happens - perhaps I just solved my problem.

I know there is memcachedb, but that keeps things around forever without expiring. I think the housekeeping to expire keys is very difficult. I prefer to prepend a sequence number to items and allow the cache expiring to get rid of keys that no are no longer needed.

The idea with diskcached would be that you could allocate gigabytes of disk space and have a very low memory footprint. It would be orders of magnitude slower than real memcached, but if it’s faster than the time it takes to compute the data, then it’s worth it.

Example for Buckets

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:33:32 -0500

I am working on a database system called Buckets. The idea behind this are structured data records that are bound together through (optionally) classified associations. The goal of this is to have a structured and interlinked set of data records to organize information. Here’s an example of something I’m doing where I could use this system… I’m dealing with an external company to integrate their product with ours. Despite documented standards, there are always issues with integration. So I’ve started a Word document to keep track of issues that come up and how they are being resolved. Word isn’t the right tool. Excel isn’t either. And Access is a huge overkill as it will take more time to setup the database than will gain from having it. What I need is something in-between. Something that will allow me to capture pieces of data and have that data linked together in a meaningful way. Let’s look at what I’m doing now. The top of the document has a title and a short description of the purpose of this document. Really, this is an IntegrationDocumention record with two fields, Title and Description. Next I have a heading for each issue. I manually timestamp when this issue happened and have a description of what the issue is. In our database, this might be an Issue record with two fields, Title and Description. For each issue, there is an ongoing discussion of details and resolution options. Some of this is cut-and-paste from e-mails, some of it is snippets of documentation, some might just be off-the-cuff thoughts of what we can try or what we have talked about. There might be phone conversation notes (or audio) too. In this Word document, it’s just free-form text that sometimes uses sub-headings to help separate thoughts. In our database, all of these things might be stored in a variety of record types such as Comment, Note, Audio, Picture and so on. The problem with Word is I can collect all of this information, but there is no structure. There is nothing that separates one thought from another besides formatting. If you used Excel, you could create an issue spreadsheet with rows for each issue and columns for information collected, but it doesn’t allow for large, possibly interlinked, data to be put in there. A hack is the use columns titled (comment1, comment2, comment3), but that’s just lame and doesn’t really help. So going back to Buckets, we have defined the record types that we want to keep along with data in each record that we want to collect. The parent-child relationship is simple IntegrationDocumentation -> Issue. Issue -> Comment,Note,Audio,Picture. (where -> means has_many) We might want to have an additional level between IntegrationDocumentation and Issue for unresolved and resolved issues. Or an Issue might just have an association kind of “resolved” or “unresolved” that can be queried and displayed. In the former solution, you have a “bucket” of unresolved issues and a “bucket” of resolved issues. By virtue of an issue being in one of these buckets, it denotes both state and context.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSbssO2DR7A

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:27:24 -0500

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSbssO2DR7A

What is your guitar lick?

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:25:18 -0500

Disclaimer: This is not actually an article on guitars. Read on.

When you walk into a guitar store, unless you are Slash your guitar skills are unknown. Once you pick up a guitar, plug it into an amp for all to hear, and hit the strings for the first time, the first thing you play defines you as a player. If you start out with Smoke on the Water or Stairway to heaven, you will be banished and forever defined as one of those guys. But if you have a defining guitar lick that makes people stop and listen you can set the bar high from the beginning.

Same is true in business and social encounters. The first thing out of your mouth will set the bar for how other people view you. If your opening comment is obvious or immature, then it will take a lot of work to regain the respect and reputation that you want to have. But if the first thing you have to say makes people stop and listen and think, then you got something.

I recently joined a paper committee for a large technical conference. This conference is THE conference for my industry and being on the committee is a big deal. The committee meets 2 times a year before the actual conference to do paper abstract and paper reviews. Our committee has about 30 people and at the first meeting, almost nobody knew me. This was my defining moment. When we started the abstract review, I was prepared, had written notes, and was the first one to voice my opinion. Every abstract I had constructive information to present in spite of being a “freshman” member of the committee. Being outgoing is not my nature, but I had to establish my position as a valuable contributor.

At the dinner in the evening, I received several positive comments from people who didn’t know me. Some were also first time members who assumed I must have been a seasoned veteran.

When you are in a situation where you will define yourself, make sure what you have to say is what you want people to hear from you. Sometimes that means to be prepared, but often it may mean to stay quiet until you have the right thing to say.

What is your defining guitar lick?

Love this idea.

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:58:44 -0500

Love this idea.

Oh the irony

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:34:00 -0500

In our cafeteria there are table tents explaining the causes and dangers if diabetes. XX number of people have it, YY number of people die from it, and so on.

After breakfast, they often put out leftover food that was not sold. Surrounding the table tent explaining the causes and dangers of diabetes are 4 chocolate covered doughnuts.

Moths Outwit Bats By Jamming Sonar

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:18:47 -0500

Moths Outwit Bats By Jamming Sonar:

This is just so cool.

Gran Torino

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:08:30 -0500

I finished Gran Torino tonight. Very good movie. Clint Eastwood should be proud if he goes out with this one.

Beautiful Windmills

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:01:00 -0500

We are vacationing in Cape Vincent, NY right now. Right across the river is a Canadian island called Wolf Island. On this island are 50+ windmills that likely provide most of the power for the island.

From the shores of Cape Vincent you can see Wolf Island across the river. My first reaction was startling. There are a lot of windmills visible and I must say I can see how people might think of them as an eye sore. I think the look of windmills is the underlying complaint people have against them.

However, the existence of these windmills quickly turned from being startling to being beautiful. These devices are taking what naturally passes by them and turns that energy into a form we can use. I still see them, obviously, but they no longer are objectionable. In fact, they are beautiful.

Cost of startup

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:58:00 -0500

I’ve been talking with a co-worker who is trying to start his own Internet based business. His business will be typetribe.com when it grows up, but right now it is still in the idea/development stage. This got me to thinking about the cost of starting up a business like this.

I am a software engineer for a very large company that makes airplanes. I also do a lot of side work with web applications using Ruby on Rails and other technologies. I must say I am good at what I do and am very proficient.

If I were to startup a business like typetribe.com I could easily do almost all of the work without any external costs. I can do the development, design, engineering, scheduling, testing, security, and so on all myself. If I decide that I no longer want to continue, I can simply stop without any loss of investment except for my own time. If it succeeds and starts making income, the income is immediately profit. Any costs are negligible and can take advantage of cheap hosting like slicehost.com or scalable service such as Amazon Web Services.

However, for Jamey, he has no software engineering training and must rely on external people to get his business idea off the ground. To get started, he has to find investors (or put up his own capital), raise funds, find developers and designers, pay everyone, and if he’s lucky he may have found the right combination of people and have a working web business. Cash flow immediately goes to repay investors and employees. Changes to the web site and ongoing maintenance will continue to drain profit.

Does he have a chance? Sure. But he does have a definite disadvantage. His idea is great and I wish I had the time to work with him on the project. But it is interesting to see how much energy and momentum has to be built up to get an idea like this off the ground.

Echo, echo, echo, echo, echo

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:57:00 -0500

I used to use a service called iwantsandy. With this service I could send e-mail to a particular e-mail address and it would remind me about things. I could send an e-mail saying “remind 3 days change cat litter” and in 3 days I would get an e-mail reminding me to change the cat litter.

This was very useful for things that do not have specific calendar event times. I wouldn’t use it for a meeting reminder, I’d use the calendar for that. But if I needed to be reminded to do something sometime in the evening I would use iwantsandy.

Often I would get e-mail from people that I need to take care of later in the day or even days from now. I could leave the e-mail unread to mark it as something I need to do, but this gets annoying because I keep seeing unread messages and have to keep track of when and what has to be done. My solution was to forward e-mails to iwantsandy with a command “remind this evening” and the e-mail is out of my inbox and will be re-delivered when I actually need to handle it. Worked great.

But iwantsandy went away. I was very sad. I started to write my own replacement, but got side-tracked. I eventually found this service called Echo that did almost what I wanted. The e-mail address is echo@3mindme.com and if you simply send an e-mail message to that address it’ll reply with a help message telling you how it works. Try it out. It’s a great way to re-queue your things to do that will be delivered when you actually need to do them.

Peanut shelling machine

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:14:31 -0500

What does the machine look like that shells peanuts? It takes me a baseball game to go through a small bag of peanuts. I hope their processing rate is better.

"hush little baby go to sleep. I won’t sleep until tomorrow."

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:43:04 -0500

“hush little baby go to sleep. I won’t sleep until tomorrow.”

- Eleanor age 6 John

Getting stuff down

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:00:58 -0500

Getting my ideas out of my head and down in some external form is my latest productive improvement. This goes beyond the “getting things done” ideas where not just the things you need to do get written, but most every idea or concept get’s written or typed. This blog is just one of the forms.

I used to keep everything in my head. I didn’t carry a notebook at work. In meetings I never wrote stuff down. When doing work, I never kept notes. In class I would often simply absorb what was said.

I recently started carrying a spiral notebook at work where I take notes on what I’m doing. It’s amazing how often I refer back to that notebook. Simple things like IP address can be looked up in the configuration files, but if I write them in the notebook with context I can find the answers much more quickly. Ideas or things I should do get written down too. Perhaps it’s my old (cough, cough) age, but this really helps out.

I think what I like is, like the “getting things done” condept, it lets my brain let go of needing to remember that bit of information and allows it to focus on other things.

This blog is another. I thing of things I’d like to tell people and I often don’t blog about it. My ideas roll around over and over in my mind as I’m forming my thoughts. Here, I can put my thoughts down in a form that hopefully is useful to someone else.

I also have a new information database system I’m calling buckets. The idea of this database system is to have a flexible and permenant storage of structured data. Rather than being relational, records have a fixed structure and are associated with other records to create contextual relationships. These relations are informal, providing links between records that make sense in their context. Records can be put into “buckets” to group things together and everything can be tagged and searched.

Buckets will be my new information repository once it is created. I am hoping to work on this on my vacation, but we’ll see how that happens. I’ve created one version of this already and it worked quite well, but I have a new strategy this time. One that has been churning through my brain for quite some time and in the “getting stuff down” strategy, I need to get this written so my brain can think about other things.

"I don’t want to sleep on the air mattress on the floor! I want to sleep in my own bed in my..."

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:47:00 -0500

“I don’t want to sleep on the air mattress on the floor! I want to sleep in my own bed in my own house!”

- Abigail (4 years old) at the beginning of a 2 week vacation.

iPhone usage tip

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:45:00 -0500

I discovered this by accident when the iPhone 3.0 OS came out.

I put all the applications I use on the first page of the home screen. I have a LOT of applications installed, most of which I never use. All the applications I use on daily basis are on the home screen.

For some reason, it created a blank home page after the primary home page screen. In there it put the new applications. As new applications that use 3.0 features like push notification came out, they got installed right after the main page. This was incredibly useful because I didn’t have to hunt through pages of applications or lose a possibly useful application in the mess. I knew all the new applications were going to be on the sparsely populated 2nd page.

So my suggestion is to make a blank page after your home page to put newly installed applications that need to prove themselves before either being promoted to home page status or banished to the later pages.

Shampoo bottle

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:31:00 -0500

In PragPub (The Pragmatic Bookshelf) I found a quote saying…

“If the shampoo bottle in the shower is turned around half the time, why isn’t the logo on both sides? — @KentBeck”

This makes sense, but there is another analysis to consider.

Most people run their mornings on auto-pilot and in a specific order. The shampoo typically has a flip top. The bottle will be gripped by one hand and the flip top opened with either the thumb or the forefinger of the other. Now, most people will have a consistant way they open the bottle (left hand hold, right thumb flip, etc.). This means that when the bottle is placed back on the shelf, it will generally face the same way every single time.

So the argument by @KentBeck still holds, however, the analysis might be flawed. For some people, the bottle will always face front and for others the bottle will always face back. So for the people where the bottle faces back, they never see the logo while the others always see the logo.

If anything, this analysis makes the “logo on both sides” comment more accurate. It’s not that your users will see the logo half the time, it is half of your users will never see the logo. That’s really bad.

"Wow, that looks a lot better than I thought it would."

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:19:28 -0500

“Wow, that looks a lot better than I thought it would.”

- John Aughey after taking a picture of his Father-in-law and wife on the beach. It was evening and the viewfinder showed a washed out blah image. However, with the flash the people were lit up and the background was a beautiful evening sky. It didn’t quite come out the way I expected.

Technology is cool

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:06:56 -0500

So I’m on a road trip and taking advantage of technology. Mainly GPS and my iPhone. Here are some of the things I’ve done.

On the way out, we needed lunch in the middle of nowhere Ohio. Using the trusty GPS it found restaurants at the next exit that were not on the highway information signs. We found a town just a mile down the road with a lovely DQ so the kids had a great meal and dessert all in one.

On the way, I used the iPhone with BeeJive to keep the people we are traveling to abreast of our progress. I would periodically copy and paste Google Maps locations of where we were using the in-phone GPS into an AIM chat using the BeeJive program. BeeJive uses Push Notifications so I could get replies when my phone was “off” too.

Just today was the greatest use of the tech. I was out getting stuff at the store and stopped by Office Depot. They had a clearance camera for $89. I used Amazon lookup on my iPhone to find the specs and prices. The price was right, but the specs showed it used the Sony Memory Stick technology which I wasn’t excited about because of the cost. So I was able to make the decision to not buy the camera because of that.

We then went to Best Buy. I used the same lookup to check another camera selling for $79. Specs looked good. It used SD memory so that’s great. I checked cnet and the review showed no horrible problems. Same with Amazon. But Google said the price that Best Buy Online was selling it for was $66. So I showed that price to the sales person and they said they could match the price in the store. So I was able to walk out the door with a good quality pink camera for my daughter’s 8th birthday that has the right specs for $13 cheaper than the in-store price.

Way to go technology!