This morning I noticed that they have released an update to Skitch, the incredible networked image tool, to 1.0b8.4 with a few improvements for Snow Leopard and extending the 'beta timeout' in the application. I'm guessing that someday they aren't going to extend the beta period, and that's when I'll need to cough up the money to purchase it. It's just that valuable to me.
This weekend has been a pretty stressful weekend. Liza hasn't been feeling well, she had to spend the night in the hospital for tests... it was really stressful. I heard someone say that being in a hospital is like entering a time warp, and I totally agree. There's nothing that happens quickly in a hospital - unless you're in real trouble, and that is a good sign, I suppose.
It started last Tuesday (11/10) when Liza told me she couldn't open her right eye all the way. It didn't sound good, but she's not one to run to medical help if there's not broken bones or bleeding. In this case, it wasn't warranted, and since there was no blurred vision, no outward signs of a stroke, no dizziness, she thought "I'm getting old". So she let it go.
Wednesday (11/11) it was getting better, she could open it more, still had a headache from the day before, and now things didn't taste right. The ice cream she had in the evening didn't taste right. I told her that tomorrow (Thurs) she was going to the doctor to get it checked out. And she did.
Thursday (11/12) her right eye could open up almost all the way. It was very hard for me to even tell there was a problem, but she could tell that the right eyelid wasn't opening up as quickly as the left. When she called the doctor and explained her symptoms, they wanted her in right away. She, of course, had a few things to do, and went in around 3:30-ish in the afternoon.
The doctor saw that the right pupil wasn't responding to light like the left one, and tried to get her into the opthamologist that afternoon. No luck there, but the next morning (Friday) was going to have to do. She tells me that he didn't look very lad back and happy after seeing the pupil dilatation difference. He even gave her a list of "bad things" to check on overnight. The worst of which was a ruptured carotid artery. Nice.
I knew I needed to go with her on Friday as it was going to mean pupil dilation, and that's no fun to drive home with. So we went. The doctor was very nice, and checked her out from top to bottom. He couldn't see any evidence of the differing pupil dilation, and in general, couldn't see anything wrong with here in the complete exam. So we left with no idea what was causing the problem.
When we got home, I started doing a little taste-testing with her. What was it in her taste that was really effected? Turns out, it was sweet and sour. They are connected, so that makes sense, but her sense of smell was totally unaffected. That was odd. We both remembered that your sense of smell is tightly coupled to your sense of taste, but I guess the reverse is not necessarily true. She could smell lemon juice, but it wasn't sour in her mouth. She could smell sweet cookies, but she couldn't even taste raw sugar on her tongue. Very odd.
The next morning, Saturday, we decided to go to the emergency room as waiting another two days for a chance to she her primary care physician didn't seem like a good idea any more.
Saturday morning we had a volleyball game to coach, and after the game we got a little lunch and then headed out to the emergency room at the local hospital. We had expected to spend the rest of the day there, but little did we know Liza wouldn't see the light of day for more than 30 hours.
We got into the emergency room, explained the story once to the nurse. She got the vitals and we started to wait. That afternoon, she got a CAT scan, and explained her story now fewer than four more times to doctors. I told her we needed to write it down before we came and then just hand out photocopies. In the end, by 4:00 pm we hadn't seen a doctor for more more than an hour, and we were convinced by their stunned silence that they had no idea what was happening.
Hey, that's OK. As long as they don't know, then it's not something like a stroke, tumor, etc. All those they'd recognize and we'd be in a lot worse shape than if we didn't know. So I took this as a good sign, and about the only thing they could do yet was an MRI. We figured, OK, that'll take an hour, let's get cookin' and get it done.
Silly me.
They had to 'admit' her, but they really didn't, we later found out. They had her as an Out Patient in-house. Very odd, but that's what they wanted to do. Still, we didn't learn this until long after, but it's interesting that they believe all these little details are "beyond" the typical patient. I say, tell me the facts, and let me decide.
Rather than get her up and going, it took several more hours of waiting, and then about 7:00 pm, she was in her room. When I returned from checking on the kids and making sure they had dinner, we found out that she wasn't going to have the MRI until the next morning. Now while some people might not mind this "mini-vacation", she and I wanted to be back at home and not sitting in some hospital room. It's not restful, no matter what you hear.
I left at 8:30 pm on Saturday to be with the kids for the night. Telling her I'd be back in the morning as early as I could.
On Sunday I arrived at about 6:45 am and she was awake and waiting on the MRI.
Finally, at 8:30, they took her to the MRI. Good. Maybe we can be out of here by noon. Sounds very reasonable. After all, this is a simple "covering the bases" test as they have no reason to believe it'll uncover anything, but OK... we go.
By 9:40 am, she's back in the room and we sit and wait for the neurologist to come in and tell us the results, and then we can leave. So we say "Noon. We'll give him to noon, and then we'll ask them to contact him."
Good plan.
So we wait.
At noon I get up and go talk to the nurses and ask if they have the ability to call the doctor and ask when he's going to come in and give us the results. Here's where my wonderful experiences with the nurses up to this point sours. They say that they can't get ahold of the doctor, and there's nothing they can do. In fact, they can't even be sure he's coming in today.
OK, I'm not an idiot, but what about some healthcare professionals thinks they can treat me like one. Do they think I'm dumb enough to think that if she goes into a seizure they will not be able to get ahold of him? Wrong. Simply silly. Of course, they can contact him... they just won't.
If it's honest, then I can deal with it. Tell me you won't, not that you can't. Then, I can say "Give me the number, and I'll call" - to which they can again say they won't (or not), and we can go from there. But the lies to save them from having to look bad or incompetent are really quite annoying when it's your health on the line.
Finally, I got a nurse that told me that if they called, the doctor would hang up on them. To which, I said "Give me the phone number", and I called him. Amazing how a little personal presence can get things moving.
He wasn't up to speed on the case, even at a different hospital (possibly), but he felt uncomfortable enough that I felt we'd gotten his attention and at 4:00 he walked in the door.
Of course, his answers were the same as we'd heard all weekend: "No idea". But the MRI was clear, and finally we got to leave. Liza finally got the prescriptions for something to kill the migraine, and that was good, but it was days late, and my poor wife had to sit in a horrible hospital bed for more than a day for an hour-long procedure and be told the same thing as the emergency room doc said.
I'm exhausted. I know she is. It's been one heck of a weekend.
When I started using the Google Visualization widgets, like the AnnotatedTimeLine, I didn't have any Java-based tools and had to make my own to fit into the Tomcat backend of the web app. Not too bad, Google had an API for the server component, and a pretty complete spec for the DataTable, I just had to build it. So I did.
In the meantime, they have built a Java back-end, and while it's possible to use theirs, it's no better than what I have in mine, so I'm sticking with that, and yet they have significantly expanded the spec for the DataTable. I needed to play "catch-up". So that's exactly what I did this afternoon.
Most of the things weren't too hard, but I'll admit I've postponed the filtering and sorting as I just didn't have time for it today, and I didn't think it was going to be something I needed this week. I'll get around to finishing it, I just didn't get to it today.
The rest is pretty well implemented. I've put in some unit tests (where appropriate), and they are working well. I also ended up making a lot of the objects Cloneable so that it was easy to copy these guys. Details, yeah, but that's where stuff like this lives - all in the details. We now have the ability to get limits on columns, distinct values, etc. It's much more full-featured.
But if Google keeps moving, I'll need to have another afternoon like this. I don't see them making a Java version of this, but if they did, I'd certainly look at it. I'd love to find something that's well-built and completely free of my involvement. But until they do, this is what I'm going to stay on top of.
This morning I knew that I needed to get Safari 4.0.4 with a few security fixes and a few nice improvements - like faster JavaScript execution, which always helps. Safari is still my favorite browser on any platform, and on the Mac, it's just beautiful. I just wish they allowed me to have the "tabs in the title bar" that was a feature of the beta several months ago. I really liked that, but can see that there were a bunch of folks that didn't. Hence the option. In any case, it's the thing to do this morning, and then the reboot... ugh... but a necessity.
I was reading the wires today and came across another article talking about the speed advantage of JSON over XML in the serialization/transfer/de-serialization. Certainly, that's no surprise to anyone that's used both of these formats. XML, as it's defined is just not meant to move large amounts of data, and while it's possible to use it for config files, I think it's still a miss there as plists or SQLite is a far better solution.
But what got my interest this morning is the existence of a Google Groups project called touchcode. In this one project, there is a sub-project called TouchJSON that implements the JSON format in Obj-C code. This is cool stuff.
I've done plenty of JSON stuff in Java for the Google Visualization API, but this means that I don't have to mess around with writing an API for all the work on the Mac I might like to use JSON. Again, I can't see it as a valid tool for config files, but for serving up JSON data, this, along with a nice embedded HTTP server in Obj-C would be a great pairing. That way, I could stay in Obj-C and provide JSON data to AJAX clients. Neat.
Not sure why WebObjects got the can, but it did. Sure would be nice to see what (if anything) Apple is looking at for a possible replacement.
This morning I saw that Hulu had updated it's Hulu Desktop client to 0.9.7.2. There are a few nice UI changes, and there's supposedly a nice Apple Remote integration with Mac OS X 10.6.2, but the nicest thing (of course) is that House, M.D. episodes are on Hulu. 🙂
It's just my favorite TV Show.
Thankfully, they have not started charging for viewing content. If they do, I'm not sure I'll be such a fan. Face it, I'm already watching commercials, what more do they need? It's going to get worse than network TV if they do commercials and charge for the views.
This morning I saw that The Gimp 2.6.7 was available for Snow Leopard with a 64-bit build. This is interesting - very interesting. I've always liked the Gimp, but I have to admit that since I've started using Acorn, I haven't used Gimp nearly as much. It's just a tool that's not as "Mac-like" as Acorn, and everything I needed to have done, was do-able within Acorn. But with the advent of a 64-bit build, that makes the Gimp a little more attractive as a tool. I'm not sure I'll use it more, but it's more attractive.
Still... with the bug fixes, it's a good thing to get. If you need logos and titles done, this is a great tool.
Today I needed to get a few interesting things done on my web app - primarily all GUI-related, but there were a few things I needed on the back-end for some new functionality I was adding to the administration page. It was very simple on the back-end and on the GUI, and it got me to thinking - Are there really limits to the Web 2.0 paradigm now? I'm not convinced there are that many.
Oh sure, if I was writing a Photoshop-clone, using a web browser is a mistake. But for the vast majority of the apps that I've written in my life, I'm not sure that they could not now be written in AJAX and be just as effective as the original apps.
This web app I'm working with is a great example. Lots of graph/graphics that needs lots of data, but it's working just fine. Sure, I might wish the Google Visualization widgets were a little more full-featured, but that's an implementation issue - not a limitation of the technology.
I have been talking to an old friend about some problems they are having with their patient management system - a successor to one I wrote for them many years ago. That could certainly be re-written in the AJAX framework and probably have a significantly better user-experience. At the time, it was forms-based, and while that was fine for patient management, it's not anything like what we're doing now.
I'm getting to like this idea more and more. In the past, applications like Paradox and Filemaker were the tools that I used to make these applications, but now I could use a Mac Mini Server with Tomcat, H2, and AJAX, and be done with it for next to nothing. This is really pretty impressive. I just need to keep thinking about things a little differently. Interesting what assumptions you challenge, and how your answers change as time passes. Neat.
Fantastic news! This morning I noticed that Apple had released Mac OS X 10.6.2 to Software Updates and with this, I could get quite a few updates, including the Magic Mouse, the "Guest Account" kill switch, and many more. It seems to have done a pretty decent job of fixing the problems I've been having with Comcast's SMTP server, as I'm not getting the disconnects that were so bloody frustrating in the past few weeks.
Gotta love Apple!
Today started off very nicely. I fixed up a few more things on my web app and was able to get rid of the fixed calendar on two pages and replace it with a pop-up version of the same calendar. It allowed me to free up a nice 200x200 px area that I really needed to free up for some other GUI elements. It was really nice to get something done and make progress on something.
I was then able to keep moving and add a new feature to the web app and allow a few interesting aggregations on the client. It was interestingly easy - I took the data, had the mappings from the existing columns to the aggregating columns and then simply run through all the rows collecting the data into the aggregate columns. Simple. One nice little function in the code and a few GUI widgets and we're good to go.
It's been very nice to get real progress made today. No problems with legacy apps... no never-ending performance problems... it's nice to make progress.