Google has just released sidewiki, a toolbar that allows you to attach comments to web pages. This is a step that will allow a (supposedly) large number of users to attach information to a resource, and Google will try to rank the comments using their ratings, which will be provided by other users. To me, it is an advanced version of of del.icio.us, which provides a more granular access to other people’s interest in the things you are interested in. If it takes off due to large number of users Google has access to, it may become a very useful tool . It may even have the potential to change the way we do searches on Google, if it allows searching around the chosen page, using comments and commentors’ profiles. This is another case of Google providing a slightly better implementation of an existing idea, leveraging its size. Let’s see what’ll happen.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun is having minor bumps, and in the process is making what would happen anyway happen faster. Cryptic? Well, how about this: JRuby team has left Sun. Their work was important, quite important actually. I’ve done some Ruby work before, of course starting with Ruby on Rails projects and after that some db utilities. I found out that scalability was the most important issue, and these guys were doing a great job with JRuby, so that ROR could run on Java. Java means scalability (among many other good and bad things). ...

I’ve just written this bit in CHIME blog. I’ll copy it here too. We spend a fair amount of time talking about the things we can do if we had proper EHR. I just found out that sometimes you discover use cases not only by imagining what would be better, but also experiencing what has gone bad. It is bitter, but it is still useful. I have arrived Turkey less than a week ago, and I am here for family related things. When I was here two months ago, my mother was trying to get better after her meniscus surgery for her left knee. That was a surgery he failed to mention to me, just like my father failed to mention his eye surgery. My parents, being classical parents, still try to keep me away from anything that may worry me. Since I’m in London, they assume that I’ll worry too much for their problems, since I can’t help them from abroad. Well, it is true that I’ll worry, but it is not true that I can’t help. I could have helped if I had access to their medical data as their son, since one can do a lot today, armed with Internet access. Even knowing their exact problems recorded by their doctors would help, instead of trying to pull out the words from my parents’ mouth who barely say more than “it is no big deal actually”. ...

It used to happen to me in the past. After playing for about 4 or 5 hours, and slightly. After almost 10 years of not playing fps games, I bought myself a copy of Half Life 2, and it hit me like a truck! I can’t believe the strength of the nausea I experience after only 10 minutes of play. I wonder if it is specific to Half Life 2, or to my XPS’s monitor etc. The problem is trying to figure this out is expensive both in money and health terms. I guess I am really getting older. I have to lie down now, before I decorate the keyboard in a very unpleasant way!

Being the market leader is the dream of almost all companies, unless they have an unusual dislike for success, or that is what we mostly think.We dream of having products or services which dominate the market, but it appears it is possible to make a lot of profit without having a huge market share. There you go: Apple and RIM. How about selling just 3% of the phones and getting 35% of profits in the market? It gets even better according to estimations: they will sell 5% this year, and scoop 58% of market profits. Wall Street Journal says so.I’ve previously written about the absolute control of manufacturers on devices and applications, and these figures prove that it works quite well for them.

I’ve had my eyes on the mobile market for years. I’ve started with j2me apps on a motorola phone, and I’ve developed c# based applications for both that phone and ipaq. In general I loved it. I thought the devices and their future held enourmout potential, and today’s mobile application market is getting close to what I had in mind, especially with IPhone. The trouble is; developing mobile applications is expensive. Yes, you heard me. Capable devices which also has a market are expensive to buy, since you usually need a developer edition of the device. For Iphone, things are even harder, since you have to have a Mac to develop for it. Combine Mac mini (cheapest you can buy and use for the purpose) and a developer iPhone, and you’re looking at something above 1000$ already. For the slightly interested developer this a really high entry cost. Then there is the issue of distribution, where you have to go through a bunch of processes and get approval from someone (Appple, Google etc) to distribute your application. ...

I’ve been thinking about a particular future business and its infrastructure for almost 3 years now. Cloud technologies are quite relevant to what I have in mind, and recently I’ve started to think about working on a set of open source cloud implementaitons. However, there is a problem. It is not a technical problem, it is an economic one. Amazon, Google and probably MS will be in cloud business in a quite strong way in a couple of years. Amazon and Google do it already, and the cost efficiency of hiring their infrastructure vs creating mine is very, very relevant. Cloud loves hardware, in fact its advantage is at joining rather simpler models of storage and processing with very efficient scaling. So the advantage is about scalibility, and that is dependent on hardware. Now, knowing how to design and build a particular solution to a processing intentsive problem is a valuable asset, but what if your customers do not have the money to buy the hardware that can give the performance you’d like to provide? In these kind of situations hiring cloud capacity from these giants and putting your know how on top of if is more efficient in terms of cost, and many cases will make your services more affordable. ...

Once I used to love Intellij Idea. At the time it was the most insightful java development environment. It was clearly created by people who knew about Java development. Then I started working with Eclipse, and at first, the switch was hard. At the time, Idea had so many nice features that I was used to, and I was quite frustrated to see that many of them did not exist in Eclipse. ...

The competition amont different information models in healthcare will never end. Yes, I know that there are many out there who think that a particular piece of work is so much better than the rest, and it is the feature of healthcare informatics. Sorry, I don’t agree. There are many other reasons, which I’d like to outline in another post, but in general, I can’t see this competition going away in the future. ...

The competition amont different information models in healthcare will never end. Yes, I know that there are many out there who think that a particular piece of work is so much better than the rest, and it is the feature of healthcare informatics. Sorry, I don’t agree. There are many other reasons, which I’d like to outline in another post, but in general, I can’t see this competition going away in the future. ...