Category Archives: Computing

An Asciidoctor IDE wish list

Posted on 28/10/2015 by wolandscat

A while ago I blogged on why we replaced FrameMaker with Asciidoctor for the technical publishing function of openEHR.org. At around that time I posted on an Asciidoctor mailing list my wishlist for Asciidoctor. I reproduce that list here. As … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, openehr | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Goodbye to Adobe FrameMaker, Hello AsciiDoctor

Posted on 11/09/2015 by wolandscat

I am probably one of the longest time users of Adobe FrameMaker in the world. I started using it at version 2, sometime around 1990, and finished with it a few months ago. For most of this period it was … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

The folly of the obsession with source code

Posted on 20/02/2015 by wolandscat

My favourite topic these days is the phenomenon of fundamentalist thinking. You don’t need to go to Iraq to find it, it’s all around us…. Recently I chanced upon a post entitled ‘Coding is not the new literacy’ by Chris … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Windows 8 Metro, high DPI screen chaos, and other epic fails of modern life

Posted on 28/12/2014 by wolandscat

Windows 8 – a Lesson in Corporate Schizophrenia Recently I moved up to a Dell XPS 15 (fast i7 machine) with Windows 8.1, from an old Dell with Windows 7. I am now, along with the rest of us, suffering … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | 7 Comments

No SQL databases, documents and data – some misunderstandings

Posted on 06/11/2014 by wolandscat

A good friend pointed me to this post: why you should never use MongoDB. It’s a very interesting post, about how bad MogoDB turned out to be for dealing with social network data. It’s not that MongoDB is bad per se, just … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

What is a ‘standard’: legislation or utilisation?

Posted on 25/10/2014 by wolandscat

Bert Verhees, a colleague from the openEHR community made this post recently to the openehr-technical mailing list: OpenEHR is not a standard, it is a formal specification. http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm ISO, What is a standard: “A standard is a document that provides requirements, … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Health interoperability standards are a pre-platform concept. Discuss.

Posted on 02/10/2014 by wolandscat

There is a growing recognition that we need an open platform concept to solve e-health interoperability and reuse problems. Some evidence of this I noted in my recent post ‘What is an open platform’, including various US-based cross vendor platform … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What is an ‘open platform’?

Posted on 07/05/2014 by wolandscat

The word ‘platform’ is starting to reach the same status as the word ‘internet’ – part of the bedrock, but many have no idea what it really is. In e-health particularly, ‘platform’ is often mixed up with ‘open source’, ‘APIs’ and ‘standards’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Archetype unification proposal – node identifiers

Posted on 01/01/2014 by wolandscat

    happy new year and best wishes for 2014. I hope your new year’s day is a bright one (unless you live in the UK, in which case it’s a lost cause here today 😉 I have been working … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The real reason most software fails

Posted on 29/09/2013 by wolandscat

To my mind there is a problem in academia to do with where disciplines like ‘computer science’ (CS) and applications of computing sit.  Pure computer science is the study of computational theory and applications. It develops things like data structures, … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Culture, Health Informatics, Philosophy | 8 Comments