Ok, will write this and go back to coding a Facebook app. Facebook, why on earth do you claim that you are giving an API to developers? There are so many quirks that one has to deal when building Facebook app, that you feel like there is a camera hidden somewhere in th office, and Facebook staff is laughing at you while watching you suffer. The ajax infrastructure does something with the calls, so that your servers receive an ajax request three or four seconds later. If your server needs to get a piece of information (like friends of someone), than you can add another 3-4 seconds (at best). How can I claim that ajax improves user experience when a call takes 15 seconds? There is no surprise so many people are using iframe apps. ...

Ok, Back from London, to watch an amazing game in Euro 2008 just in time, to see Turkish national team creating sort of a miracle . I just have to mention this. I can remember screaming and jumping around, probably breaking some of Zeynep’s stuff, and the rest is still fuzzy… The main reason I was in London was to join the Snomed conference organized by Tim Benson from Abies .The event was quite dense, with some very interesting presentations. It was held at the same place with Smart Healthcare 2008 Expo which was a different beast on its own. Tim deserves a big “Well done”, for the content and the environment he provided. Too bad no one else from Turkey was there. ...

After switching back to Windows XP for a .NET project, I did not boot my Ubuntu partition much. It has been almost 8 months or so, since I did not take a look at Ubuntu front. Why go back then? Well, the Apache Axis problem I’ve written about, just made me crazy. I could not accept the fact that I can not “compile” a piece of software, that should not take more than 10 instructions to do. The problem appeared to be with the unit tests, which blew when a temp server was started. So I thought this might be another java on Windows problem, and decided to give Linux a try. I also wanted to take a look at latest Ubuntu release, which has been doing a wonderful work for me in the server side (that’s another story) ...

The requirement is simple: download Apache Axis sources, and compile them. According to web page that gives you the link to source files, all you have to do is to setup Maven, and use it to compile Axis from sources. In case you want to open the source with Eclipse, you need to use Maven again, and that’s also a single line comment in a web page. Looking at this, you first feel happy about it: this should be quite easy, right? Not if you are an idiot, which is what I am appearently! ...

The requirement is simple: download Apache Axis sources, and compile them. According to web page that gives you the link to source files, all you have to do is to setup Maven, and use it to compile Axis from sources. In case you want to open the source with Eclipse, you need to use Maven again, and that’s also a single line comment in a web page. Looking at this, you first feel happy about it: this should be quite easy, right? Not if you are an idiot, which is what I am appearently! ...

Yes I do. I am about to go crazy because of all the books and documents I have to carry around, and I can not read from the screen. I have to read from paper, otherwise I feel very uncomfortable with what I’m trying to read. I have to carry around a couple of books, a large number of papers etc, for I can not know when I’ll have that spare time to work on something. As I work on my main PhD subject, the amount of books and papers I keep getting back to, increases exponentially. The laptop is not a solution because of the battery life, screen display and more important than that, the ergonomics. ...

Ok, I’ve written before about Google getting into PHR domain, and now the service is publicly avalilable. Needless to say, I’ve taken a quick look at it, and it looks promising. There are a gazillion things being discussed all over the web, and almost everyone seems to be concerned about privacy and security. A large proportion of users in USA are discussing about the fact that HIPAA does not cover Google Health, and Microsoft HealthVault. ...

Ok, this is really an interesting one. In medical informatics, one challenge that never seems to be conquered is providing a user interface that will not make a doctor grumble. No matter how hard you try, you almost always here the comment: “this is not so easy to use…”. Medical professionals seem to be very picky when it comes to user interfaces and interaction with information systems. This link here mentions the same thing again. I’ve previously written about Microsoft CUI, and for all of our sakes, it would better be successful. This is a field that is sucking up a huge amount of effort and it is a large setback to adoption of many systems. Being terrible about user interfaces, I am not the one to take things further in this domain, but this is one field which should benefit enourmously from some form of standardization.

Ok, this is really an interesting one. In medical informatics, one challenge that never seems to be conquered is providing a user interface that will not make a doctor grumble. No matter how hard you try, you almost always here the comment: “this is not so easy to use…”. Medical professionals seem to be very picky when it comes to user interfaces and interaction with information systems. This link here mentions the same thing again. I’ve previously written about Microsoft CUI, and for all of our sakes, it would better be successful. This is a field that is sucking up a huge amount of effort and it is a large setback to adoption of many systems. Being terrible about user interfaces, I am not the one to take things further in this domain, but this is one field which should benefit enourmously from some form of standardization.

I am not sure that the answer to this question is yes. Sure you can find a lot of vendors who’d claim that they already have a product that can miraculously convert raw data into precious information, but is this really the case? I doubt it My own experience with real life data has shown me that generating information from data is a complex process. It almost always requires understanding of the domain, in which the data is generated, and moreover, the issues with data make the whole thing an ad-hoc process. I’ve asked the Weka mail list about commercial tools that can be considered as alternatives to Weka, and the responses so far confirm my feelings about the domain: you can’t simply throw in a product and expect people to get knowledge out of data. You’d need a substantial amount of knowledge about machine learning and data mining, how these tools and more important algorithms work. Most of the time, you’ll need to adjust many parameters, transform data, and iterate continously till you have a pipeline that connects raw data to some form of decision making process. Sure there are tons of ETL tools, Business intelligence tools etc. These are either infrastrucutre tools for transforming and/or moving data or glorified reporting tools. ...