I love my iPhone and it’s a great platform for delivering all kinds of applications. Just like the ad says, there is an app for everything (at least it seems like that). The bottleneck, however, is the AppStore and Apple’s stranglehold on the device. You can’t just re-purpose the device without jail-breaking. The iPhone is versatile, yet, constrained. If you look at the numbers published here on GigaOM, you can see the extent of iPhone’s market and its economy. Android or any other device has a lot of catching up to do.

However, I think there is opportunity here for Android to completely blindside Apple and make Android devices indispensable. Google can do that, not by courting consumers, but by collaborating with makers of complex software systems like HMSes (Hospital Management Systems).

A hospital is a complex system and a truly integrated solution is mind-boggling. It takes a lot of brain power to comprehend the enormity of implementing such a project at even a mid-size hospital. There are processes within processes and to top that everything is highly regulated. It’s a question of life or death. Literally.

The typical architecture of HISes (Hospital Information Systems) is client-server, mostly implemented in Java. Large established hospitals still run mainframes but the basic architecture is client-server. The textbook approach of modernizing such “legacy” systems is to go the web applications route with a heavy mix of web-services to make everything “service-oriented”. You would probably throw in lots of JSP (Java Server Pages) pages and expect them to run in a browser. So the browser becomes your client accessing the application functionality. Then, you sprinkle the campus with desktops running browsers and you have your setup.

My proposal is this. Instead of using $500 desktop based browser clients to access system functionality why not access the functionality from $200 Android devices? Heck, with bulk orders, these could even cost about $100. These devices will access the required functionality via Android apps. Just imagine what would happen if Google and McKesson were to collaborate. McKesson’s Paragon Community HIS can dole out app features via Android apps. Google could subsidize these devices and could reduce the overall implementation cost of the system. Granted not all application features can be appified. (I invented this word, if anyone patents it, you heard it first here). But I suspect most of the features can be. So instead of nurses or hospital staff needing to go back to their stations to access the system, they can whip out their Android devices, and perform their tasks right at the point of the service. No need to make entries on paper charts and then transfer them into the system back at the station. Just tap them into the device. Throw in a pico-projector into the device and you have the option of viewing the data on a large screen. Like, say, you want to view the blood glucose chart of a patient or the vital signs charts. The possibilities are endless.

So instead of trying to create web clients or thin desktop clients, makers of complex software systems should focus their effort on developing downloadable android apps of their applications’ functionality. And McKesson, if you are looking for someone to lead up such an effort, you know where to find me.

I am a huge fan of Scott Hanselman and religiously listen to Hanselminutes, one of the best technical podcasts. I also enjoyed the short lived science focused The Brainfood podcast. Podcasts were all the rage couple of years ago and everyday brought a new one. I wanted to join in on the fun and given that I am not as eloquent as Scott or Jeff Atwood of codinghorror and stackoverflow.com fame, I figured I could piggy back on the success of technology leaders and create a podcast. I first contacted Scott and he was gracious enough to respond to my email.

My idea was to render interesting blog posts and articles written by industry leaders like Scott, Jeff and, others as audio. My premise was, given the relentless march of technology we seldom find time to read articles. So I posited that I could convert hand picked (by me) blog posts and articles to audio and make them available as podcasts that you can listen to driving to work or fixing breakfast. Scott alerted me to odiogo a service that can convert written text to audio. It does a good job. Check it out. I brushed Scott’s hint aside and contacted some of my favorite bloggers and requested their permission to use their blog posts and articles in my podcast. Everyone granted me permission and I was thrilled.

I borrowed a studio quality from my colleague Greg Johnson and with music from The Podsafe Music Network (now musicAlley), Audacity and an account on libsyn, I put together the podcast. My co-workers listened and encouraged me. Finding great articles to render as audio was easy given the caliber of bloggers I had permission from. However, interest has, at best been, muted. Only 325 downloads. That’s for all 11 episodes. Hanselminutes logs that number is the first 5 minutes of being uploaded.

Of late, given extreme pressure at work and my interest in Healthcare IT and iPhone apps, it’s been hard to find time to research and put together an episode of pixels2soundBytes. It takes me a week to put together an episode, which includes time needed to find the articles, render them as audio, edit the recording, and compose an episode with music. I have become an expert in Audacity.

So, with no time to spare, I have decided to end the experiment and will close my podcast account with libsyn. If you are looking for a cheap podcast host, libsyn is a no-frills, affordable excellent host. The basic account costs $6/- per month and is more than enough for a budding podcast.

I would like to thank the following technology leaders for granting me permission to use their blog posts and articles in my experiment. I really appreciate all your help.

• Jeff Atwood
• Phil Haack
• Jay Fields
• Ryan Farley
• Jon Davis
• Doug McCune

I would also like to thank my colleague Greg Johnson for lending me a great studio quality microphone. Thanks are also due to Scott Hanselman for responding to ALL my emails.

Last but not least, a big thank you to all those who downloaded pixels2soundBytes and tolerated my accented rendering of great blog posts and articles. Thanks for your support.

I like the two-factor authentication feature of myOpenID powered by CallVerifID. The two-factor authentication works like so. You determine that a website offers compelling features and are ready to authenticate yourself (think stackoverflow.com). Provide your user id (userid.myopenid.com). You will be redirected to myOpenId.com. You enter your password. And wait. Within 15 seconds your phone rings and only after you verify over the phone, will the authentication proceed to the next step. I use this to logon to my HealthVault.

Great! Has always worked like a charm for me. But…

This month I am in Bangalore. Although CallVerifID is available in 30 countries, it’s not available in India, yet. So, for the entire month of July, I can’t authenticate on any website that offers openID authentication. For HealthVault, I can use my Windows Live ID as a backup but I suspect that I have two accounts on HealthVault, one tied to my myOpenId ID and the other tied to the Windows Live one. I can’t disable CallVerifID on myOpenId because myOpenId uses CallVerifID to logon to my myOpenID account. For now dead in the water. I am not ready to give up on the CallVerifID feature. I like it. Very much. Just need to figure out a way to make it globally portable even if CallVerifID is not available in the country I travel to. I guess the one piece of critical link in the chain is the ability to receive a phone call.

Here we go again. Hopefully, third time is a charm or it could turn out to be a third strike. And I am out. After failing not once, but twice, I am going to try again. This time, it’s yet another favorite community leader, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame. Jeff and Joel Spolsky, co-founded stackoverflow.com, a go-to site for anything and everything computer programming. They also record a weekly podcast which is nothing but conversations on IT and is hosted on IT Conversations by The Conversations Network.

On behalf of all the programmers who have benefited from stackoverflow.com, I am organizing a fundraiser to raise money to sponsor an episode of the stackoverflow podcast. I got in touch with the folks at The Conversations Network and gathered that it costs about $500 to host and produce one episode of the stackoverflow podcast.

Fellow developers, let’s come together and raise money to sponsor an episode. I suggest a donation of not more than $10. With 550 pledges, we will have enough to cover the cost of an episode after fundable.com has taken its cut.

Let’s do it. Click here to go to the fundraiser page.

TIA

A HUGE thank you to everyone involved in putting together the fifth Atlanta Code Camp (March 14 2009). I attended a few useful sessions. Although I could not stay for the entire day, I gathered enough information that can be put to immediate use. Like tomorrow.

Having been involved, along with The Blogus Maximus (aka Chris Williams) and, Lou Vega, in putting together the very first code camp hosted by Greater Charleston .net User Group (GCNUG), I know what it takes to host such an event.

A huge shout out to Matt Ranlett (@mranlett), Brendon Schwartz (@brendonschwartz), The King of Linq (aka Jim Wooley) and others , for working tirelessly to make the code camp yet another memorable event. Thanks are also due to Glen Gordon, Developer Evangelist (Microsoft) for his continued support of all .Net user groups and their activities. Microsoft in Atlanta has been very supportive and has been lending their facilities in Alpharetta for user group activities.

I attended 3 sessions. Restful-WCF presented by James Ashley, ASP.net and jQuery – A Match made in Heaven by Glen Gordon and Entity Framework by Sven Aelterman. Except for the Entity Framework session, I can put things I learnt at the other 2 sessions to immediate use. Beware, here I come with a set of new hammers.

The Georgia Gwinnett  College facility is great. And it is a new facility. The main auditorium where we had the welcome talk is well built. I don’t think every one was wearing a mic, but I could hear them all loud and clear. Good acoustics.

I do have a complaint, if you call that, regarding the code camp. 9 tracks, in my opinion, is too many. 6 would have been ideal. But with 9, a *LOT* of topics were covered. How about two code camps per year? Atlanta can handle that. Maybe my complaint should be about not being able to attend ALL the sessions. At  least the good ones. I had to give up one too many. Short of breaking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is NOT possible to attend all the sessions you want to. That is sad. Well, there are the user group meetings. Some of the code camp sessions will be presented again at these meetings.

Overall, it was a short but fun day. Let’s do it again. And hats off to all of you who worked hard toward making the fifth code camp a great event. Thanks guys.

For the past few days this Security Update for SQL Server 2005 with SP2 kept nagging me via Windows update on my windows XP SP2 machine at work. Couple of times, I did try installing it and the installation completed without any apparent errors. But a few minutes later the Windows update nag would show up again. I downloaded the KB from Microsoft and tried a manual installation. After 5 minutes the message “No qualifying product installed on this machine” popped up. 5 minutes later the nag message popped up. I had disabled couple of ununsed services like Analysis and reporting, enabled those. Still no luck.

I had resisted upgrading to Windows XP SP3. Finally I relented and installed SP3 and then the KB and that took care of the nag. The KB installed without any errors although it did take a while (more than 20 minutes) to complete.

Hope this helps someone.

A mandatory test post from a new toy

Ok, I now have a podcast. Although the content is repurposed from popular blogs, I believe it will help you save time by listening to interesting posts while you multi-task.

pixels2soundBytes is a podcast of audio renderings of blog posts and articles written by prominent software development community leaders. So far I have permissions from Jeff Atwood, Phil Haack and Gunnar Peipman to use their blog posts in my podcast. Typically each episode will have 2 blog post renderings with music from the Podsafe Music Network.

Check out the first show here and subscribe to the feed here.

I hope you will enjoy the show and continue your support. All feedback welcome.

If you would like me to use your blog posts in the show please let me know by emailing your permission to pixels2soundBytes_AT_gmail_DOT_com. Please replace AT with @ and DOT with .

Wednesday morning I was greeted by the familiar login screen on our Windows 2000 home computer because of a scheduled windows update the previous day. Unfortunately after security update KB951748 was installed my computer could no longer connect to the internet. Uninstalling KB951748 restored connectivity. If you know how to fix the issue without uninstalling KB951748 please let me know.

Update:

ZoneAlarm has been updated to address the issue. I haven’t tried it yet.

Check CNet’s story here and download ZoneAlarm fix from here

I have been mulling over this and would like to elicit feedback before I go about setting up a website. There are two classes of 5:01 Developers. The first is a set of people who do not care about the craft and just bide their time and bolt out the door at the stroke of 5:01. This is NOT about them. The second is a class of software developers who really care about the craft but need to bolt out the door due to other commitments. If they had time, they would spend all their waking hours in bettering themselves.

And here is the idea. Setup a website on the lines of dotnetkicks (use kigg because it is an open source digg clone in C# – something I can enhance easily if need be). This new website (501Developer.net) will contain user submitted articles on how one can move beyond 5:01. How to make the max use of available time and better oneself and stay relevant. How to balance personal commitments and technical improvements and advance one’s career.

Finding time to read articles is hard for us 501Devs. But I am sure, like I have, you can find atleast 30 minutes to listen to podcasts. 501Developer.net will have audio of the top articles read by me. You can put up with my Indian accent and have fun. You can submit a reading of any article that may be of interest to a 501Dev.

Do we need yet another website? Do we need one more podcast? Well, that’s where you come in. Shoot down the idea for what it’s worth. Save me from going off and blowing $$$s setting up this website which nobody care about.

Feedback please! and TIA.