Modeling

The RUP (rational unified process) is very nice, and so is UML. For smaller projects though, the following will do:



I would really like to know how much code is written according to diagrams. The mental image that programmers have of a problem's universe is a fascinating topic indeed - and far reaching, since how a software system works determines, ultimately, how a user has to work to accommodate the system.

HealthVault

Yes it does have an API, and some sample apps. The .NET samples include a web application to talk to the service - however, I give up on it for the time being as the utility to make certificates seems to crash all the time (nice unhandled error, by the way; the crash seems related to the fact that the app is installed in Program Files as opposed to Documents, and Visual Studio doesn't have full rights to PF). Will come back to it later, but so far it is remarkably similar to Google Health.

One additional thing, the SDK features some device drivers to enable medical devices to talk directly to HV. Nice - as long as they don't cause any crashes...

AIR and Google Health

Recently I've been tinkering with AIR and Google Health (GH). It's been surprisingly easy, if one can overlook the endless stream of XML returned by GH - but there is no other way, HL7 would be just as nasty looking. I don't know yet how it returns the file/image data that can be attached to the GH account.

AIR seems an ideal environment to build a desktop client to front a GH cloud-based application: it's lightweight, Javascript-compatible, and portable across platforms.



Speaking of, it seems that AIR will be ported to mobiles as well. I would argue that the paragraph above (and not just the stronger OO features found in Flash and available to AIR) is a strong reason to do this port, although I am not sure how easy is to develop and maintain AIR applications, and also I am not sure how well do these applications perform given the several layers of virtual environments they have to execute in.

Will write more thoughts as soon as I finish the small scale project I am working on right now, 4-5 forms of reduced complexity (but with a significant amount of functionality built in; the underpinnings of this relatively simple project are amazingly complex and would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago).

I haven't looked at Google Tables yet, but read some things about YQL and can see a scenario where medical (and other) personal information (e.g. reverse phone lookups, credit history, white and yellow pages) is queriable over the web via a SQL-type of language with the right security in place. In fact, the infrastructure already exists! So it would be just a mater of connecting the pipes.

And, I haven't even started to look at HealthVault's API (if it has one).

A map of where I've been

LinkedIn widget

My LinkedIn Profile.

Donkey Kong

I never really played this game in the 80's - it seemed to be available only on computers I did not own, such as the C64. I can, finally - will someone make a Sentinel widgety game available please?



Whatever one thinks of video games, I find it amazing that today you can run what was once a significant programming effort in a 'virtual' OS through several layers of interpreted code (widget > flash > browser > OS process > ...). I wonder how similar is the machine code ultimately generated on the OS to the machine code of the original program :)

Slideshare

Some of the academic presentations I have worked on can be found here.

LiveEarth

More tweets visualizations

For quite some time now I have been finding visualizations cool. There is a whole list of blogs and web sites dedicated to this rather obscure area of - computing? Web 2.0? It's an Edward Tufte-meets-open source type of thing... and even (SF) author Bruce Sterling is in on the game. And now, even IBM: they too are visualizing tweets (real-time Internet seems to be the in thing now). Still unsure about the usefulness of it all, but it makes for nice mind-map-like charting.

Visualizing tweets live

I'm not sure how useful it is, but it's certainly cool: Twittervision.

Virtual Worlds in Asia

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Virtual Worlds in Asia

View more presentations from Benjamin Joffe.

About me....

Or rather, about embedded Google presentations:

Flight Stats widget

Flight Status

By Flight or Route

examples: CX 709 or JFK to LHR
Don't Know the Code?

BBC World Music Widget

Who knew that the BBC was so cool?

Processing

Body Navigation by Recoil Performance Group from ole kristensen on Vimeo.

Semantic space

A semantic space explorer. Unfinished, but a great metaphor for exploring all kinds of databanks and databases.

Pricing of information

An interesting piece of research from one of my professors from INSEAD, Markus Christen: it seems that it is more profitable for information providers to offer lower quality information to their clients. This will force their clients to use multiple providers to arrive at a 'truth', and will also allow them to raise the prices of the (unreliable) information they offer. This works if there is a low correlation between the information offered by the providers, and if there is a relatively low number of providers.
Reminds me of IDG, Gartner, et al. Which incidentally are among the examples mentioned in the paper.

Reality?

Not sure what to think about this, other than having my vanity reach new levels as I look at my face in a Blade Runner-esque virtual environment... thanks to ExitReality. The navigation metaphor is ok-ish, I had a similar idea for exploring databases; but I'd guess that most of the information-rich web sites aren't amenable to this kind of visualization.

Super cool toy, though.

Eno & Byrne

Moolah

Nice, Wordpress. To redirect a WP-hosted blog, one must pay $10/year. To use a custom CSS (I hate the font used by the current one I have there), it's another $15. I understand they have to make a living. They should understand I can use Blogger instead.