I am not sure if quality assurance is the right term for what I’m trying to describe. As soon as you start something a little bit larger than the proof of concept project, you realise that something is wrong. The way you (I) handle potential errors is problematic in a couple of ways: Code that ensures that certain conditions are satisfied in your classes is cluttering your class methods. These are secondary concerns in terms of what your class is supposed to do, and having to read code that ensures that constraints on method parameters are satisfied is not nice. ...

I’ve spent almost all day trying to write a small piece of code that would generate a form using an archetype as input. I had everything written, accept the code that would create the form. Would be a no brainer, right? Well if it is java swing that you are using, that is not the case. What I wanted was very simple, however the “powerful” layout engines in swing just would not let me do it. After spending hours cursing to gridbaglayout, I finally discovered tablelayout here.It works exactly it was meant to be. No catches, no smart tricks. It simply works. In case you want to save your own hours, just take a look at it. ...

I was in Birmingham yesterday, to join Healthcare Interoperability 2008. I can not say that is was as rich as I had expected, but still it hosted some interesting stands. EMIS and their partners were the star of the event, and I guess from a business perspective the message was obvious there: primary care is a very good market for healthcare informatics. I guess it allows you to build controllable products and services. Controllable in the sense that the medical domain requirements you have to handle are much smaller compared to ones in a secondary care institution, and also administrative and financial side of things is again tiny compared to hospital information systems. EMIS certainly knows how to tap into this domain, and their approach to business partners is encouraging. PAERS and EMIS together produce solutions which can take some burden off the shoulders of GP offices. I have to say EMIS people have been very helpful, and they made sure that any questions are answered. ...

I’ve spend two days of last week at HL7 UK conference, and it was worth it. It was nice to see what are the hot topics in the HL7 domain, and some topics seemed to be a real focus of interest from the community. A couple of thoughts about the feel of things: first of all, CDA is getting stronger. People are more focused on CDA than any other method for messaging, and this is supported by NHS’s choice to use CDA for messaging. However, HL7 community may like to consider thinking about why people are so focused on CDA, when they have a huge amount of work channeled into building models based on the RIM. I mean, CDA has a more controlled environment of (kinda) its own, and that seems to take a lot of attention. ...

When you see an empty dialog just after the splash screen, first check the .log file under workspace/.metadata/ if it is a xul error, which probably is, then do this: sudo apt-get install xulrunner append to eclipse.ini -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner/xulrunner (taken from : http://sandakith.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/eclipse-ganymede-startup-problem-in-ubuntu-orgeclipseswtswterror-xpcom-erro/) Remember: the -D… stuff goes last in eclipse.ini

Dear friend(s), I have no idea why you may hope that this little piece of blog will make you rich through the garbage you keep posting on, but I will not loose a minute of my time thinking about it. I’ve closed all comments thanks to your endless desire to fill my blog with meaningless crap, and now you can go somewhere else. Maybe I’ll take the time in the future to implement a decent spam filter to get rid of you, but for the moment, you’ve made me choose a blunt mehtod. Way to go!

Ok, this blog has been a place of ranting for the last couple of days, but I won’t keep this one inside: my 3 mobile connection is terrible. Others using Vodafone, T-Mobile etc has not mentioned about any positive experiences either. It appears the mobile operators are enjoying the huge amount of customers buying mobile broadband(!), but are not keen to invest for proper infrastructure to provide the advertised speeds. So far the best my connection has given me is about 30-40 kbs/sec, and that’s when everybody else goes to sleep. 90% of the time however my connection is around 6-10 kbs/sec. Yes, kilobytes! I have not been using such a slow connection since what, 1996? ...

I have just realized that the VE (Visual Editor) project does not support Eclipse versions above 3.2. Moreover, the project seems to be dead, and even if there are a few people who seems to be active in the project mail list, the overall look scene is not very promising. I am just starting a new project which will be open source, and it will use Java Swing for the UI. There is simply no free UI designer that I can use for Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4. ...

The title is simple, but means a lot for me at the moment. I’ve moved to London for starting a PhD in University College London, CHIME. It took a a lot of steps, it took quite a lot of time, and there is a lot that must be done here. This is a short entry, for I have no idea how to talk about this change in detail. So many things to say…

During the past 7 years, all .net developers somehow had to face the problems of users with no .net framework installed. We all faced it, we all dealt with it, and we all hate it! .Net framework itself is a COM component actually, and COM is a technology that has roots in OLE which goes back to 1995. Even though some parts of the .net framework require other software to be installed in the OS, not all parts have this requirement. So in theory, the whole framework can be redistributed as a native dll. In practice, MS wants us to install the runtime. ...