Information systems such as Hospital Information systems, Laboratory Information systems, Pharmacy Information systems, Radiology and other related imaging systems and other specialty medical information systems need a mandated federal standard for exchanging patient data which will allow the creation, exchange and management of a Virtual Electronic Medical Record for patients.

Without basic technological standards one could not call from one county to the next, but because there are properly implemented standards and exchange systems one can call almost anywhere in the world with ease. But those standards took a hundred years to evolve. By comparison, the internet, based on tcp and http protocols evolved in less than a decade, because every vendor had a standard from which to build. Meanwhile, I often can't get my data from one section of the hospital, much less between hospitals, because there is no accepted, agreed upon, and implemented protocol for the exchange of medical information.

Every vendor has a proprietary data exchange format and a business model that supports vendor 'lock in.' While that may be good from a business model, it is a disaster for modern medicine. And the additional time and expense of trying to maintain these disparate systems just continues to add to the cost of healthcare. Both hospitals and vendors need to embrace the reality of the need for implementation of good informatics practices in hospitals and clinics.

Medical practices and ethics should supersede business ethics in every situation where software and/or devices are used in medical care. You don't see incompatible medical hardware surviving long in the industry. A needle has to fit a syringe, an IV tube needs to fit a bag, and they do because of standardization. Yet medical software vendors continue to ignore the need for data interchange standards that will support a truly portable Virtual Electronic Medical Record.

As someone who's just moved to Java myself... I suggest starting here: http://grails.org the Grails framework will get you started in Java based web development and you can learn more diving deeper into Java as you get more and more proficient. Grails is built on Spring which is a Java Enterprise platform but Grails saves you from having to learn all those "enterprisey" bits. Instead Grails picks defaults that are the most sensible for web development.

As you get better you can graduate to adding your own features to the framework or even beginning to use the more advanced Java frameworks outside Grails tying everything back together using Spring's IoC and Java JNDI. Or you can keep things light weight and web2.0 by using various remoting technologies inside Grails. It's a quick way to learn that doesn't put training wheels on you.

Get going in an afternoon... scale out using Java as your project grows.

... looks like I'll be packing up my bags and leaving the Perl kingdom for the lands of Java. Forever this time. Not entirely from choice but from pragmatic concern over my career. All the cool vibe has rubbed off the Perl kingdom. Most of it dribbled onto the Rails zealots. I'm beginning to think the Django fans may have gotten some of it too. But, I'll be making money by day doing huge scale Java applications for medical, clinical, and biotech applications from now on.

My only hope is that the lands of Java will be invaded by the "cool vibe" again ... somehow ... I don't think there will be a Perl rebirth anymore. It seems more likely that there will be a turbulent season of integration efforts between a new incarnation of Java born from open source, some language redesign, and a smattering of Linux distributions. There is a very good shot at Groovy, JRuby, or Jython becoming the "new Java" on the Java platform. I also sense the inkling of a Red Hat, JBoss, Java, Jython integration story happening at Red Hat over the next few years.

For reasons that are just becoming apparent Groovy/Grails is not as popular in my region. There is no technical reason in fact if you are running in a Java environment you'd be myopic to not pickup Groovy... and you would be well served to at least build a demo app in Grails. This region however is a Python/Jython stronghold. I didn't know why, but, I just learned that a major Jython contributor is a member of my Jug. That explains a lot. I know RedHat is primarily a Python shop so Java to Jython in the region surrounding the Red Hat campus makes perfect sense. I suspect that Java running Jython code would be the main way Red Hatters will use Java going forward. They are big on Python. And so too are some parts of Google apparently...

I'm beginning to learn that political forces more than technical merit can shape the technological landscape. It's a sad thing to learn because we techies want to believe we're more like mathematicians and only proof and merit rule our decisions. It's not true. For example, Slashdot is among the last strongholds of the Perl kingdom. Outside these hallowed walls the PerlBe are under constant threat.

Each of the major technologies have their own little world they live in and very few technologists actually have a realistic view of the whole technical landscape. I've found that http://www.indeed.com/ is an invaluable tool for looking into the reality of what the tech landscape was. The fact is companies hire for the technologies that they were using three to five years ago. Most do not hire for what they will use or what they are going to use. The hiring managers simply don't know where tech is going tomorrow. If the job is on a job board it's probably a legacy application that's being supported and that means it's a few years old.

You start to bundle these technologies into sets. Perl and C go together better than Perl and Java for example. Python, Perl, C and C++ all roll together for example. So to me it looks like if you were after sheer job security you should learn C really well. In fact from this data C is the unassailable emperor of computing languages. And even though I'm packing my bags for Java land that's the truth of the tech landscape ... Java land is firmly in second place. It's shocking that the whole of the kingdoms of Pythonistas, Rubyists, and the PerlBe are all half of what the C++ers get.

Truth hurts. I'm going to have to go and play with some open source C again at some point. I figure if I can cross between Java and C I'll be a sight better off than someone trapped on either island. Both of these are pretty big islands now though.

I really do.

Each kind of karma point would be aligned along it's own axis in N-Dimensional space. The resulting total karma score would be expressible as an N-dimensional manifold. You could then filter the resultant N-ary manifolds using your own total karma manifold. The results would be utterly transparent to you... instead as you accumulate karma points it informs the shape of your own manifold that is being projected onto the comment moderation system results.

In short you would experience the Slashdot that best fits your perceptions of reality.

... it's gonna rock! Or at least orbit an asteroid.

The problem with always writing new software is that you never learn to maintain old software. Old software maintenance is harder, takes longer, and is far less glamorous... paying far less. Yet there's a species of "new software" guys out there that run around building new systems all the time leaving horrid messes. I wonder if the success of some companies isn't that "new software guy" invented something or that "old software guy" came and fixed things silently in the night.

I just said something stupid on the internet!

fabulous, crabulous day! Hurray!

I want a Futurama themed topic. Make it a bust of bender and call it "Futurism" I wonder if the copyrights would fly?

... at least to look at indeed.com things aren't so bad in the technology sector. I'm not looking for work but one of the things I do every six months is see how many jobs are open out there and how many of them I'm over qualified for. It looks like there are about 1,600 positions within 100 miles of me that I'm over qualified for.

I check for jobs I'm over qualified for because I figure that means I can easily land those jobs in a big hurry if I have to. Since the US dot-com bust I've always been paranoid of getting laid-off with no notice and for no cause.

In other news a young fella I drink beer with decided to take a job in Syria. Syria... I know... but he's excited about it and can't be dissuaded. So I guess he's got his big adventure... his quest if you will. I honestly think every young man needs his dragon to slay, his quest, his adventure. With out it they become bitter old men who swill beer in tacky sports-bars (aka pubs). Once a fella has lived his quest he becomes an old man who swills beer in tacky sports-bars that tells stories that make young men go on quests.

I wish him luck. I can't wait to hear his stories when he gets back from his contract... in two years.

Now I've always wanted to work and live in Australia. I won't do that until my kid is done with high school and college but I figure maybe old men need to go on quests too. And on the topic of questing...

I think my son will be one of those environmentalist nut-jobs I hate... just like my father. Well, at least he'll have a cause he believes is just and all that. I deeply respect that. So I've tried to get him to meet with and spend time with some environmentalists that are doing work with marine animals (an interest of his) we'll see how all this works out.

I have user id 5735... but only because I ditched an older account. I can't remember the name of that old account. Oh well. I think I've been on Slashdot since before comment moderation. It's been a weird ride. I have noticed more changes to Slashdot in the last year or two than the previous five. But, for the most part the /. system doesn't seem all that broken to me. The new features seem to make things slow and buggy ... but that's their job. We wouldn't want things to work too well otherwise we'd have to stop calling them "technology"

I am now an open source contributor to the grails plugins project! Yeehaw!

... I am no longer employable as a C/C++ programmer. My experience in C/C++ is now so old and so spoiled by Perl and Java those are the only languages I can actually day dream about getting employment in. I'm going to try to do a C/C++ project on the side but this will be a hobby project. Sadly, I don't pass mustard with the hard-core geeks anymore. I am a Perl/Java weenie.

So I was thinking... I've got some extra dough and I've never actually _bought_ an SDK. Why not buy the SDK for the Wii. I mean it's not like I'd *force* them to sell my game or to even put any kind of endorsement on it. I'd just like to play with some Wii hacking at night from my home office.

So how does one get a Wii SDK? Well, you buy one. It runs about $2,000 USD. Buy you have to apply for the privilege of buying one... check out these requirements...

Well, crud. That rules out the home office. I'd need to have a separate office ... and get this ... it would have to have some kind of "security" so that way I could keep Nintendo's secrets. Yipes! It looks like you don't just do game development on a whim like you do web development.

Unfortunately, It looks like the most open and free of the game platforms is currently the Microsoft XBox. No Really. Check this out OpenXDK an open source kit for XBox.

Still, I have my heart set on doing some Wii coding because I want to swing the Wiimote around like I did the CaveGL wand when I was doing VR work. Now I do have hope in WiiWare but I understand that this may in fact open you up to a potential $1,000,000 fine from the ESRB if you produce a game that accidentally has a tree that looks like a wanger or a pair of twin peaks in it. But, that could just be Microsoft FUD mongering. They want you to use XBox.

So I don't get it. What does Nintendo think is so secret in their Wii? Honestly, after the thing shipped we all figured out the IR and accelerometer tricks... (and though: wow why didn't I think of that?)

I was just wondering if anyone had tried using flash memory to provide page/swap file space. I'm guessing that with usb or pcmcia flash memory one could both improve performance and battery life and decrease hard drive access. Has anyone tried this? If so, what were the results?