Edward Tufte's Patient Status Summary

Figure 2. American Medical Association-designated basic metabolic panel (80048) graphic report. Values are given as Système International (SI) units for sodium, potassium, chloride, and carbon dioxide and as conventional units for blood urea nitrogen, creatinine, glucose, and calcium. To convert the values for sodium, potassium, chloride, and carbon dioxide to conventional (mEq/L), divide by 1.0; to convert the other values shown to SI units (mmol/L), multiply by the following conversion factors: blood urea nitrogen, 0.357; creatinine, 88.4; glucose, 0.05551; calcium, 0.25.

Figure 3. American Medical Association-designated hepatic function panel (80076) graphic report. Values given are conventional units. To convert to Système International units (g/L for total protein and albumin; µmol/L for total bilirubin; U/L for the other values), multiply by the following conversion factors: total protein and albumin, 10.0; total bilirubin, 17.1; other values, 1.0.

Designing for Civil Society: Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism

Designing for Civil Society: Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism: "Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford have put together a terrific list of Open Source tools that can be used by activists to spread the message and promote interaction by enewsletters, forums, blogs, wikis and epetitions. They wrote an article for Steven Clift's excellent Democracies Online Newswire.
1.ActionApps (On-line Magazine/Content Sharing) http://www.apc.org/actionapps/
2. PostNuke (Slash Forums/Portals) http://www.postnuke.com/
3. Drupal (Blogs) http://drupal.org/
4. Active (News Posting) http://www.active.org.au/doc/
5. phpList (eNewsletters) http://www.phplist.com/
6. phpBB (Forums) http://www.phpBB.com/
7. WebCards (eCards/email2friends) http://webcards.sourceforge.net/
8. TWiki (Wiki/Group Documentation) http://www.twiki.org/
9. Back-End (eActions/ePetitions) http://www.back-end.org/
10. FPDF (eLeaflets/ePosters) (Dynamic PDF/Graphic Generation) http://www.fpdf.org/
"

Hazards of Hiring; Hiring the best

Longhorn Developer Center Home: Columns: Hazards of Hiring: "It turns out that the usual advice works just fine, but we have to move from the vague to the specific. To summarize the various points I made in the sections above, here are ten questions to ask yourself when considering a candidate for a developer position:

1. Can this candidate bring something to the team that nobody else has?
2. Is this candidate constantly learning?
3. Is this candidate aware of his/her weaknesses and comfortable discussing them?
4. Is this candidate versatile and willing to do 'whatever it takes' to help make the product successful?
5. Is this candidate one of those '10X coders'?
6. Does this candidate have a bachelor's degree from a good computer science department?
7. If this candidate has a Ph.D., is there other evidence to suggest that s/he is one of those rare people who also has 'Shrinkwrap Qualities'?
8. Does this candidate have experience on a team building shrinkwrap software?
9. Does this candidate write good code?
10. Does this candidate love programming so much that s/he writes code in their spare time?

It's not necessary to answer 'yes' to all ten of these questions. I'm not even going to specify a minimum number of 'yes' answers needed for a positive hiring decision. Hiring is all about probabilities, and each of these questions can serve as an indicator to help you predict whether the candidate will be a success for you.

In the end, every hiring decision will be made with your own judgment, and there are no guarantees. However, giving consideration to these issues can help raise the probability of making a hiring decision that you will not later regret."

Software That Lasts 200 Years

Software That Lasts 200 Years: "A new style of development
What is needed is some hybrid combination of custom and prepackaged development that better meets the requirements of societal infrastructure software.

How should such development look? What is the 'ecosystem' of entities that are needed to support it? Here are some thoughts:

Funding for initial development should come from the users. Bridges and water systems are usually funded by governments, not by private entities that will run them for generations. The long-term needs of the funders must be more inline with the project requirements than the investment return needs of most private sources of capital.

The projects need to be viewed as for more than one customer. A system for tracking parking tickets is needed by many municipalities. There is little need to have a different one for each. As a result, the funding should also be able to come from a combination of multiple sources. Funding or cost-sharing 'cooperatives' need to exist.

The requirements for the project must be set by the users, not the developers. The long-term aspects of the life of the results must be very explicit. Best-practices must be established, tracked, and revisited.

There is the whole issue of data storage and interchange standards that is critical to the long-term success and ability to do migration. Impediments such as intellectual property restrictions and 'digital rights management' chokepoints must be avoided. (Lawmakers today must realize how important data interchange and migration is to the basic needs of society. They must be careful not to pollute the waters in an attempt to deal with perceived threats to a minor part of the economy.)

Another critical issue is platform (hardware and software) independence. All development of long-term software needs to be created with the possibility of new hardware, operating systems, and other 'computer infrastructure' in mind.

The actual development may be done by business entities which are built around implementing such projects, and not around long-term upgrade revenue. Other entities are needed for providing the ongoing services with a mentality of keeping existing systems running. (The two entities may or may not be related.) Many such companies already exist.

The attributes of open source software need to be exploited. This includes the transparency of the source code and the availability for modification and customization. Much has been written with regards to open source and its value for bug finding, security checking, etc., which is why this is needed. The added benefit here is that society as a whole may benefit in unforeseen ways as new applications are found for programs, be they in the private or public sector. The availability of the source code, as well as the multi-customer targeting and other aspects, enables a market for the various services needed for support, maintenance, and training as well as connected and adjunct products.

The development may be done in-house if that is appropriate, but in many cases there are legal advantages as well as structural for using independent entities. Some governmental agencies may be precluded from licensing their results under licenses that are most appropriate for the long-term health of the projects. For example, they may be required to release the program code into the public domain where it may then be improved by others (and re-released under restrictive licenses) without a return benefit to the original funders.

Unlike much of the discussion about open source, serendipitous volunteer labor must not be a major required element. A very purposeful ecosystem of workers, doing their normal scheduled work, needs to be established to ensure quality, compatibility, modifications, testing, security, etc. Educational and other institutions may be employed with the appearance of volunteer labor as students and other interested parties are used, much as courts and other governmental agencies have used interns and volunteers for other activities. The health of the applications being performed by the software must not be dependent upon the hope that someone will be interested in it; like garbage collecting, sewer cleaning, and probate court judging, people must be paid.

The ecosystem of software development this envisions is different than that most common today. The details must be worked out. Certain entities that do not now exist need to be bootstrapped and perhaps subsidized. There must be a complete ecosystem, and as many aspects of a market economy as possible must be present."

What we learn ...

Link: http://www.refdesk.com

 "We Learn ...
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss with others
80% of what we experience personally
95% of what we teach someone else." - William Glasser

 

Project Dashboard

 Link : http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&ObjectType=COL&ObjectId=7655&tth=DYN&tt=siteemail&iDyn=2

 Senior manager: “Where are we with the testing?” 
Test manager: “Oh, here’s the defect data and the test data and–” 
Senior manager: “No, tell me where we are with the testing!”  
Later on, the senior manager says to a colleague: “That test group is a black hole. The product goes in, but nothing comes out.” 

  

 You're in the Information Business 
Providing data is important. You'll need the data to create a one-page status report for your customers across the organization, but furnishing data alone is not enough. Consider what other people need to know about the product or the status of testing. Remember: You are in the information gathering and dissemination business.  

pediatric cardiology terms

Confused about the words used to describe your child's heart problem? Here is an explaination of pediatric cardiology terms.

http://www.childrensheartinstitute.org/educate/vocabula.htm

User-centric Distributed Social Software

User-centric Distributed Social Software:

"For many years email and usenet news constituted the majority of the Internet's use as a tool to facilitate communication among individuals. The last five years have given rise to a number of novel applications in this domain---which has come to be known as 'social software.' Notable among these are instant messaging systems, weblogs, and services like Friendster and Tribe which exploit the concept of 'six-degrees of separation.'

These services generally employ centralized client-server architectures. These architectures are failing to adequately scale with the growing user-base. These services do not rely on open protocols; the user-base is fragmented among competing service providers. Users use numerous service providers to get the features they want, but have no easy way to maintain the consistency of their information on each.

This paper summarizes the ever changing state-of-the-art in social software, and presents an alternative to this 'service-centric' view of social software. The novel user-centric distributed social software model outlined in this paper overcomes many of the limitations of the current model by drawing from ideas from the Semantic Web."

Russell Beattie Notebook - Moving to Linux

Russell Beattie Notebook - Moving to Linux: "I just lost this post because I was messing around with my browser and wacked the page. Dammit. Okay, here's a much shorter version of it.

I've moved to Linux on my desktop at work and it's great. I've been preparing for this move for quite a while, but now that it's happened, I'm still pretty amazed at how smoothly its gone. Mostly because I had already moved to mostly open tools for some time now. Everything from FireFox through Cygwin has made my Windows PC into a pseudo-Unix box, so it was just a little extra push to finally move. Here's the apps I'm using now and their Windows Equivalent (I had a nice table before, but I'll just text it out now.):

* FireFox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, Adobe, MySQL Control Center -> No change
* Trillian.cc -> Gaim
* WinAmp -> XMMS
* Word -> AbiWord
* Acrobat -> Gnome PDF Editor
* UltraEdit -> Still Looking (BlueFish for now)
* Macromedia Fireworks -> No Equivalent (Sodipodi in a pinch)

The app I miss the most - and I've written about this before - is UltraEdit. I've been using that app for *so* many years that it's like second nature to me. The column-edit mode (Alt-C) is worth the price of regular updates alone. There's just nothing like it that I can find. I hate Emacs, I don't like JEdit and none of the native text editors come close. Bluefish has a great GUI, so I'm using that for now, but I'd *love* to be able to use something better. UltraEdit is closely followed by Macromedia Fireworks, which is just untouchable when it comes to vector-graphics image editing for the web. Pics, and logos and things like that? Perfect. I've been using both apps for years and I'm really going to miss them.

I think what I'm going to try now is the CrossOver and see how that works to get these apps working on Linux. I'll report back.

Back to Gnome. I've always liked Gnome over KDE and the latest release just confirms that decision. Except for one thing. The decision to default to Spatial Views in the Nautilus file explorer. I'm not sure what crack-head geekoid thought this one up, but they SUCK SUCK SUCK SUCK SUCK. Vineet sent me a link to an article about how Spatial Views work, which was nice, and it explains how to TURN THEM OFF, which is even nicer. What happens is that instead of opening up windws in the same window, and giving you a navigation bar for forward, back and up, Spatial Views subscribe to the One Folder One Window religion. Every click into a folder, up pops a new window. In a different place. Within seconds your desktop is LITTERED with windows. This wouldn't be so bad (maybe) if you could easily create a shortcut to your final destination, but you can't. And what if you just want to drill in to a window without the clutter? 'Double-Middle Clicking' is the answer. Oh My God. Two steps forward, Four steps back. It doesn't even work well. You double middle click and a window appears randomly all over the screen (from the last time you moved that window, say back in November), then you go hunt it down and double click it again and then you go hunt the whumpus again. It's as dumb as you can get. But like I said, you can turn it off (thank goodness) and the rest of the GUI is amazing so it's okay.

I have to say, at least the OSS guys are thinking about it though, right? I'll give them credit for trying something new (or actually, since it's a copy of the Mac Finder circa 1988, we'll say old) but it just didn't work this time. Sorry.

Anyways, I'm very happy and will soon be dual booting my notebook into Debian as well. No sign yet of my eBayed Mac. I'm thinking I got scammed as the seller is uninformative and slow. We'll see."

Homeland Security planning possible delay of elections || kuro5hin.org

WOW

Homeland Security planning possible delay of elections || kuro5hin.org:

"'American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call 'alarming' intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack...

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week's terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge... Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.'"

the amp journal

the amp journal

This is quite a cool utility, u know

Welcome to my Website!

Welcome to my Website!: "Shebz.com"

WOW

"Has your mother been teaching you geography?"

Thanks Harish

 Here's a short story with a deep meaning by the renowned author Paulo Coelho A father was trying to read the newspaper, but his little son kept pestering him. Finally, the father grew tired of this and, tearing a page from the newspaper - one that bore a map of the world - he cut it into several pieces and handed them to his son. "Right, now you've got something to do. I've given you a map of the world and I want to see if you can put it back together correctly." He resumed his reading, knowing that the task would keep the child occupied for the rest of the day. However, a quarter of an hour later, the boy returned with the map. "Has your mother been teaching you geography?" asked his father in astonishment. "I don't even know what that is", replied the boy. "But there was a photo of a man on the other side of the page, so I put the man back together and found I had put the world together too."

The Open For Business Project - Home Page

The Open For Business Project - Home Page