Industry Zero: One man’s thought on software, business and life

I ran into this website called: LimeExchange which allows company or individual to post projects and other companies or individual to bid to work on them. The idea is not new. It just add some web2.0 and social networking community features on top of it. The only thing bother me so far is that there are way more workers than employers. I only see a few projects under software development and there are over hundreds of developers registered with the sites. Another funny thing is that most of the developers are from India and the projects are also from India too.

Most of the time, the latest software or practice are usually improvement of the previous existing ones. However, sometimes they are not. For example, wiki is great for a community to edit and share information but it may not be good for as a central repository for all documentation even though there are a lot of people are using it that way. There is always a cost to move to the latest. Sometimes the cost to bring enough benefit that it is worth it. However, a lot of time it won’t. It will only help to build up people’s resume. Software industry is constantly trying to replace the current with the latest even some of those ideas are just repackage of old ideas.

The process of deploying rails app for a single domain is pretty simple and is documented in the following link. I ran into problem when I tried to deploy another rails app for an alias domain running on the same share host account. So here is the general steps:

1. create a rails directory for your new app. Let’s call it mysecondapp. Upload your rails app in mysecondapp directory.
2. create a symbolic link to mysecondapp (let’s call the new symbolic link mysecondlink)
3. create your alias domain and have the root path point to the symbolic link: mysecondlink. Let’s say your alias domain is myseconddomain.com. It’s content root will be mysecondlink.
4. This is very important step: change your dispatch.cgi for dispatch.fcgi to include the following line: “RewriteBase /” to set the base to the root directory so that it won’t try to find the dispatcher based on the related directory to the current content directory.

That is it. Godaddy’s support is no help. Asked them and they just give you the run around.

I just tried to upgrade to rails 2.0. Got some error when starting the server. Google it and then find out I might need to upgrade to a new version of rubygems. No problem, do an “sudo gem update –system”. Then run gem command. Shit! Got this error: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner. Now, I can’t even do gem install or uninstall. Now what? How can I go back to previous version of rubygems? More Googing. After another hour, find a post can fix the problem by adding this line require 'rubygems/gem_runner' to /usr/bin/gem. After that, gem is finally working. Run script/server again. Another problem: can load openssl. Google more. Find out need to install the libopenssl-ruby. Did that and finally everything worked. Time well spent? No!!! I am getting too old to waste time on doing upgrade.

Just downloaded JavaFX and played with the demo.  I am sorry to say that by looking at the codes of the demo, it seems too complicated to do some simple thing.   How come Sun doesn’t learn from some of the mistakes in Java? First, why create  a new scripting language, why not just use Ruby, Python or any existing scripting language.  If you are going to create something new, make it simple and take advantage of scripting language feature like dynamic typing. Why still does static typing?   Crazy!!!

NPR has a radio segment on Personal Health Record. Revolution Health’s PHR and trackers were mentioned in the radio segment. Since I am the Engineering/Dev Manager for the both of the products. I am very happy about it.

Let’s face it. We all want our code to be solid and be able to last long.  We code it such a way that it can  be extended in the future and we thought of all the scenarios that the requirements can change.  But then it always happened like this:  Business has changed, technologies has changed, it is better to rewrite the code from scratch then to maintain it.  Your old code is gone.  So why spend all the time thinking about the future.   Code it now.  Change is going to happen.  Change is going to be a pain. But that is the nature of the game.

There are a few open PHR systems that will allow third party to integrate with them. One is Google Health PHR which will open up their API soon. The other is an open source project called Indivo which anyone can use and allow import and export from any third party systems that will create an interface to it. The third one is Microsoft Health Vault which also allow third party to connect to it. I am trying to figure out which system is better to integrate with. So far the only system that I can take a look under the hood is Indivo. I wish Google and Microsoft will open up their API soon. Whoever can get the most doctors integrated with their system will win. There are a lot of other opportunities to provide add on services on the top the PHR system. For players who doesn’t want to fight a battle with Google or Microsoft. They should concentrate on the add-ons instead.

Personal Health Record battle is heating up. From Microsoft to Google
, and also RevolutionHealth (disclosure: I am the engineering manager for the PHR in RevolutionHealth), all trying to figure out a way to create a electronic health record system that can be managed and used by consumer, physicians and hospitals. After working on this product for awhile, I am not sure if we get to the point that we can change consumer behaviors yet. No matter how easy we can make PHR for users to use, it is still extra time that consumers needs to spend on managing it. Consumers need to see  great benefits before they are willing to manage their health records online. In fact, consumers probably don’t want to spend time to manage it. They just want to have access to it online. They will not want to import or export data between service providers. Service providers should do that for them.

I recently found this website CrimeReports.com. This website contains crime data overlaying on top of a Google map. So you can see what crimes happened at where in your neighborhood. What a great site! The best part is that their business model is not ad driven. Police department pay them to publish the data. What a cool concept!