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 :)