asiel’s scratchpad

For some reason I’m having trouble logging into the Oracle site today. This is frustrating. Luckily though Firefox gives me a hint of why there is a problem. I get a somewhat useful error message.

In IE though the request seems to just go forever with no error and no progress. I’d rather get an error than the illusion that something will eventually happen when it won’t.

Hopefully in the meantime Oracle can fix the login on their site so I can download Oracle XE. How does something as critical as login break on a site like Oracle.com? I thought they were supposed to be the example of high availability and reliability.

I loved the points that were made in the KDE 4.0 Launch Keynote. They apply to almost any software development in my opinion.

• Own your data
• Choose your vendor
• Explore, create and learn

Web based systems especially fall into this boat. Users should feel free to change. They shouldn’t feel locked in. Otherwise they will lose trust in storing their data on the web and using web based systems in general.

In my usage Google maps has been pretty stable. With all the people that use it there are bound to be bugs that are found. I found a blog link to a very intersting “bug” in google maps. Check it out. I am amazed that this was able to get through the QA team at google. Or maybe it is a hidden “feature”.

Sometimes it is sure nice to be able to find a stock photo for a graphic you are looking for. The downside is that they usually cost money. I found a pretty good stock photo site today that is free. Most of the photos require no credit (although some do) to use them. It is called stock.xchng and is located at: http://www.sxc.hu/

From my experience in dealing with online photos Smugmug is the best solution out there. They don’t have the limitations that many other sites have, they are consistently fast, and they have awesome support. Overall I think it is well worth the money. If you get a higher tier account they even let you embed smugmug within your own site and change the css to make it look however you want. This is pretty cool. They also have a neat web services API so that many common tasks can be scripted or done through an external app. For example, I upload my photos through a desktop app because I think it is much easier and more flexible.

Give it a try. Sign up with my coupon and you save $5. Put k3nzPigCBr5qk in the referral code box when you sign up.

I love my Blackberry phone. It has been one of the greatest things I have ever had. I’m currently having my first problem with it though where I’m just not getting my e-mail. It just decided to stop two days ago for some reason. I finally e-mailed verizon today so we’ll see how long it takes them to get it working again.

The funny thing is that I didn’t change anything at all. It was working one day, and then just stopped. I know that is always the description of problems, but this time its really true. How that occurs I don’t know. It is tough to troubleshoot though since blackberry hides almost all the complexity of the setup from the user and they don’t really provide any useful tools to troubleshoot when you are having problems. So I guess I’ll see how fast Verizon can fix a problem.

There needs to be a standard electronic communication protocol between doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. This would probably be a good canitate for some type of XML communication.

Some of the issues are authentication and verification of the data, also privacy is a big one. If this were put in place though it would make trips to the pharmacy much easier. Your doctor could ask you where your pharmacy was then send them the prescription. Or if you don’t want to do that or don’t know where you are going you could get a bar code that basically contained a link to where to go in a db to look up your prescription info. Overall this would save incredible amounts of time as well as cut down on mistakes, fraud, and other similar problems.

I thought of this after waiting for several hours to get a prescription for my daughter and seeing how tedious the process was of people bringing in their prescriptions and the pharmacist having to call the doctors office and then fill the prescription. This same type of system could also be useful for insurance, but that is a whole different problem that also needs to be addressed.

I got bit by testlink still having the short style php tags in its codebase today. It still has tags such as \<\? instead of \<\?php. I also had to tweak error reporting as this was making debugging the problem difficult. We really need to go through the code and remove all these old style php tags.