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Today the Healthcare Information and
Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference wrapped up. In
previous blogs, I laid out the
href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/report-from-himms-health-it-co.html">
benefits of risk-taking in health care IT followed by my main
theme,
href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/report-from-himms-health-it-co-1.html">
interoperability and openness. This blog will cover a few topics
about a third important issue, infrastructure.

Why did I decide this topic was worth a...

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This week the U.S. Army announced the launch of Apps for Army. It is modeled on the Apps for Democracy contests in the District of Columbia and is being run by the same indefatigable Peter Corbett and his iStrategyLabs. It looks to uncork the Ar...

I wrote in 2008 about Review Board, a code review package I'd tried and liked. Unfortunately our developers didn't like it as much as I did, and having learned my lesson (thanks, FogBugz), I declined to impose a tool choice on them. They chose Gerrit, instead, which is more tightly bound to Git, and has some nice features related to that (such as pushing to master from a button in the UI when the review is complete). The rest of the UI is very unpolished, but has been getting progressively better.

Code rev...

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Where 2.0, our mapping and geolocation conference, is at the end of March in San Jose and early registration is ending tonight. We are also opening the selection process for Ignite Where.

Where has a full program. We've got a number of great thinkers returning. We are also welcoming first-timers like Chris Vein (San Francisco's CIO), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Bing Maps), Josh Williams (Gowalla), Walter Scott (DigitalGlobe) and Michael Arrington (Techcrunch). And returning for the fi...

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Global Ignite Week (GIW) is kicking off today in Germany! From March 1-5 there will be >65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. There are lots of Ignite videos online.

Mashable has a fun piece with 10 Reasons Why You Should Attend an Ig...

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Foursquare is an on-the-rise application that blends mobile, location awareness and a clever points system that's an evolutionary leap for loyalty programs. Think coupons, but with rich data and gaming thrown in. Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Fou...

1. Meet The Sims and Shoot Them -- America's Army has proven so popular globally that, with so many users signing on from Internet cafes in China, the Chinese government tried to ban it. Full of interesting factoids like this about US military-created first person shooter America's Army and other military uses of games. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. Most Overused Cloud Metaphors, Sorted by Weather Pattern -- headline writers beware: you are not being original with your "does the cloud have a silver lining?" folderol. (v...

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1. like python -- lets you write Python in Valleygirl, LOLCAT, fratboy, and rap. Still not a handle on writing Perl in Latin. (via Hacker News)
2. Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview (NPR) -- applicable beyond climate change. Whether you get what you want depends on how it's framed and how it's delivered. The paper cited is available for PDF download.
3. gheat -- add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre's blog.
4. TrueType VT220 Font -- turns out it...

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Most user manuals are worthless. They're chock full of poorly written text and confusing diagrams. Worse still, the gap between problem and solution is vast because we're forced to apply a linear format (a guide) to a specific question. Where's a ...

1. Off-the-shelf camera hacked to grab high-speed video (New Scientist) -- scientists used a chip from a home cinema projector to record 400fps on consumer video hardware. They put the chip, which has tiny moving mirrors, in front of the digital camera and it directs the incoming light sequentially over a grid of pixels in the digital camera, meaning that each of the digital camera's frames contains 16 samples (frames) of the picture. You lose resolution but gain frames/second. (via viksnewsclippings)
2. Histor...

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The public rift between Google and China may have elevated cyber security and cyber warfare into the public's consciousness, but truth is, network attacks and Internet-based espionage are nothing new. In the following interview, Jeffrey Carr, aut...

We have access to more health information now than any time in history, yet this deluge of medical data may sometimes make health decisions more difficult. The Internet has opened a Pandoras Box of data that can easily overwhelm us. We need a way to process all this information to assist us in making better healthcare decisions. Sifting through the barrage of health information writhing across the Internet can be a challenge and new sources are continually cropping up.

There are some great online resource...
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Last week marked the first time the U.S. iTunes store had over 150,000 apps available. Close to 31,000 different developers (or "sellers") were responsible for those apps, with many offering one to five apps, while a few offered over a hundred dif...

1. Mimo Monitors -- USB-powered external monitors for your laptop or desktop, and you can daisy-chain them for multiple external monitors. Opens the possibility of task-specific monitors (one for chat, one for email, one for shell, one for code, ...). Monitors are 7" (800x480) and there's even a touchscreen option. (via James Duncan)
2. The Secrets of Malcolm Gladwell -- how to give a talk like Malcolm Gladwell. A short read and interesting. (via thestrategist)
3. Plupload -- a nice widget to handle file uploads...

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Google Maps has added more user photos to its Street View (above). Now the Yahoo-owned Flickr is joining the Google-owned Panoramio and Picasa photo sites as a supplier of alternative street views. GeoBloggers reported it earlier today and also...

1. Kindle Development Kit APIs -- Amazon will release a Kindle SDK. These are the API docs. (via obra on Twitter)
2. rePublish -- all-Javascript ebook reader. (via kellan on Twitter)
3. Peer Review: What's it Good For? (Cameron Neylon) -- harsh and honest review of peer review with some important questions for the future of science. But there is perhaps an even more important procedural issue around peer review. Whatever value it might have we largely throw away. Few journals make referees reports available, virt...

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The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it.

As you may recall, the judge has only 2 choices: he can approve the settlement, or send it back to the parties for revision. He cannot modify it himself.

The US government statement advises th...

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I was talking recently with Bob Frankston, who has a
href="http://frankston.com/public/Bob_Frankston_Bio.asp">distinguished
history in computing that goes back to work on Multics, VisiCalc,
and Lotus Notes. We were discussing some of the dreams of the Internet
visionaries, such as total decentralization (no mobile-system walls,
no DNS) and bandwidth too cheap to meter. While these seem impossibly
far off, I realized that computing and networking have come a long way
already, making things normal that not...

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As a computing device, the iPad has some obvious limitations that have puzzled many tech-savvy Apple devotees, provoking a variety of critical articles explaining where Steve Jobs has gone wrong.

After reading one such blog post saying that the iPad was antisocial, because it didn't have SMS or the ability to run IM in the background, it struck me this was a restricted view of what it means to be social.

The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren't. You really can just hand ...

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I'm a sucker for audacious ideas. Big, huge things with a hint of insanity. And if you put those ideas in space I get really interested. That's why the Open Luna Foundation is right up my alley. This nonprofit project wants to use open source t...

1. Chartdroid -- an open source charting library for Android.
2. China Bugs and Burgles Britain -- The gifts cameras and memory sticks have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users computers. Beware geeks bearing gifts.
3. Bespin -- sexy HTML5 "code-in-the-cloud" IDE from Mozilla Labs. If the future is truly in locked-down hack-free devices whose only interface to the world is through the web browser, these sorts of IDEs are going to become critical for f...

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