Dear Microsoft, My university, University College London, had an agreement with you to move our e-mail addresses to www.outlook.com. I usually work with up to 30, or more tabs in my browser. Regardless of the browser, as of 2010, I can in no way, bother to find a particular tab, and I simply open a new one, if I’m in a hurry. Your web page for e-mail management, does not let me open another tab, even in another browser instance of the same browser. It says: you already have this page open, go find it, and use that one. ...

Well, this last month has not been the best of all times for the Java community. Oracle, which has acquired Sun Microsystems a while ago finally began to work on its new and most important asset: Java. Oracle, in many ways is very similar to Apple. They have a working strategy for their products, and they hold on to it. Whether or not you like it, they are good at making it work, and they make lots of money. Without a doubt, their product is good. Both Apple and Oracle provide solutions which are leaders in their domain. You’ll always find others claiming to do better, but you’ll rarely see them defeated in their main line of business. ...

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The web is swallowing everything in the software world. Everything from accounting applications to clinical apps are turning into web applications. The trend is there, and it is so strong, that betting on emergence of a web based application for pretty much anything is possible now. You think that there are many things for which you can say “that’d never be a web app”? Think again. Sure, it is taking some time, but the trend is very strong. ...

When Google announced Chrome, I was excited, especially due to performance advantages. Those advantages still exist as of today, and Firefox is becoming more of a bloated software, or at least it feels that way. For a while, Chrome has been my primary browser, since its performance is really good. However, I realized that I can’t simply accept the usage of tabs in Chrome. It forces you to go through all tabs from left to right, and that is simply horrible for someone like me, who works with 30+ tabs regularly. There are no proper tab plugins to provide the kind of functionality that is provided by tabmix plus. Also there are minor but annoying problems in various web sites, some of which actually stopped me from buying stuff online. ...

Wow! I do not know how I should feel about this. Heather Leslie of Ocean Informatics wrote on Twitter that MS is leaving the HIS market, and as you can read here, it is true. Now I’ve written about Amalga more than 2 years ago, and I was excited about what it may become. I was hoping that with support and competition from Microsoft, the hospital information system business would go forward. Competition in this kind of very high cost markets is important, and only actors with lots of resources can push this kind of competition. ...

Wow! I can’t believe I have not written anything for two months.Well, time to catch up then. Ibelieve that EHR implementation is not taking off because of some fundamental problems, and I’ve written about them before. Check out my previous posts for anti-patterns in EHR implementation.One of the things I have not mentioned (or maybe I did) is the lack of commercial motivation for investment in EHR implementation. Pretty much any project has a commercial aspect, and it offers some profit to one or more stakeholders. Sometimes though the offer is not significant enough to attract big players into the project, and at the end, unexpected costs lead to financial constraints and less then desired level of implementation.The big players are governments, private insurance companies, trusts (for UK) and private practices, and large IT domain players like Accenture, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. However, if you have these names on the table, you have to be very careful to not to create a monster instead of a project. Unfortunately, what happens most of the time is that grand visions (with grand bills) emerge, and billions are spend while actual results turn into fairy tails.If you go for smaller projects like PHRs, the commercial driver, the motivation that comes from profits is hard to build and harder to keep alive. ...

Now that James Gosling has left Oracle, the trend has become even more obvious: key people who have made Java a success, are leaving Oracle. This is not news to me, but I had hopes of being wrong about my expectations. I’ve watched Oracle acquire some very capable technology firms, focusing on Java, and one by one, they disappeared from the Java world. Sure, they existed, but companies like BEA, which used to be the topic of daily discussion in the Java world, for one reason or another, slowly faded away. In an amazing way, when a company is acquired by Oracle, the pattern seems to be the opposite of what happens when other giants buy companies. When MS, or IBM or Adobe buys a smaller company, you see their products getting well known, having a larger user base. When it is Oracle, they seem to go to that magical place where all good technologies go… ...

Imagine looking at the sky in a summer night. All the stars in the air, and suddenly, they are all gone, as if somebody turned the lights of the universe. This is all the spoiler I’m going to give about Spin. As human beings we are capable of adopting to so many things. The hole in the ozone layer, hunger in Africa, wars, you name it. Spin is a good book since it depicts a realistic picture of humanity’s potential response to something as impossible and as shocking as described by Robert Wilson. Though I have to admit that it goes a little bit too much into details of a relationship between two people. In the grand setting of the events taking place,Wilson seems to spend too much time with the emotions of two key characters. At least that is what I felt. ...

One of the realities of the IT domain is that, unless you are the first vendor to offer a solution for a particular domain, you are quite likely to be replacing a legacy solution with your offering. The existence of a legacy system makes the process of EHR implementation much more complex compared to lack of it, and this complexity is usually not managed very well, leading a couple of repeating, hard to avoid problems. The definition of a legacy system is important in this context, since I am claiming that it is a part of an anti pattern. I’d like to describe the legacy system a little bit more, so that the upcoming problem definitions do not refer to a vaguely defined context. ...