We don’t need a healthcare platform

4. august 2020

Hello world

This text was triggered by discussions on Twitter in the wake of a Norwegian blog post I published about health platforms.
I stated that we need neither Epic, nor OpenEHR, nor any other platform to solve our healthcare needs in the Norwegian public sector. Epic people have not responded, but the OpenEHR crowd have been actively contesting my statements ever since. And many of them don’t read Norwegian, so I’m writing this to them and any other English speakers out there who might be interested. I will try to explain what I believe would be a better approach to solve our needs within the Norwegian public healthcare system.

The Norwegian health department is planning several gigantic software platform projects to solve our health IT problems. And while I know very little about the healthcare domain, I do know a bit about software. I know for instance that the larger…

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Norgeshistoriens dårligste idé

29. juli 2020

Hello world

Aftenposten tok kontakt i forrige uke for å få noen innspill om Akson-prosjektet.  Resultatet ble publisert her.
Men artikkelen gjengir selvsagt ikke alt jeg sa, så jeg har fått lov til å publisere det fulle intervjuet her.

Aftenposten:
På bloggen din skriver du om «hvordan både konsulenter og fast ansatte har valgt en prosjektgjennomføring som går imot alt vi har lært om softwareutvikling og hvordan man unngår katastrofer.» Hva legger du i dette?

Svar:
Først og fremst mener jeg dette med at de har valgt å løse så mange problemer i ett stort prosjekt som skal gå over 10 år og koste flerfoldige milliarder kroner.  Vi har veldig mye erfaring nå, både i Norge og internasjonalt, både i privat og offentlig sektor, som tilsier at størrelse på prosjekt, både i omfang, kostnad, tid og antall deltakere korrelerer negativt med suksess.  Jo større prosjektet er, jo større sjanse er det…

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Fixing font rendering in WebStorm on Ubuntu

9. mai 2017

The font rendering experience I got out of the box on Ubuntu was terrible, but I think it was just due to using the Oracle JDK, which I had to use since WebStorm crashed when using the OpenJDK that was installed by default in Ubuntu 17.04. After wasting half a day trying to fix it – seeing countless dubious JDK downloads and unhelpful tips – this is what I ended up doing that seemed the most solid and actually worked.
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Avoid Fundancer and Theater 21

5. mars 2017

A Youtube ad for a site called Theater 21, that promised a variety of full length movies for a monthly fee, led me to a site sign up for a trial membership. The membership signup did not lead to any Theater21 site, but to Fundancer.net. After signing up I tried searching for the movie on fundancer, found nothing, and then promptly returned to Theater 21, which seemed to have the movie. Every attempt at logging in only landed me back at Fundancer. So I sent a customer inquiry to the support, asking for how to get access. The response came within seconds: my subscription was cancelled!

The reason was obvious. They did not actually have any of the content they advertised, only clinging to income by people not cancelling the fake subscription before 5 days had passed, leading to 89$ being deducted monthly. That’s 3 times what Netflix and HBO cost each month. The site Spam 404 also warns aganst the site. Should have googled them …

My advise is clear: stay clear of Theater 21 and Fundancer! And so should Google!


Svineinfluensa (H1N1), vaksinasjon og narkolepsi – et overblikk

22. februar 2017

Belle Tully

Lenge siden sist.

Jeg har blitt stadig mer oppmerksom på en faktor rundt svineinfluensavaksinasjonen og narkolepsi, og hvordan jeg aldri noen sinne har sett at det er blitt nevnt i media. Innen akademia er det et særlig kjent fenomen, men av en eller annen grunn ser det ut til å forbli en slags internkunnskap. Dét synes ikke jeg noe om.

Vi har nok alle fått med oss den store tragedien der barn utviklet narkolepsi etter at de ble injisert med svineinfluensavaksinen. Det som derimot mange kanskje ikke er klar over, er at det er ikke hvem som helst som utvikler dette.

Relativt nylig har man begynt å få en bedre forståelse for hva som faktisk forårsaker autoimmun narkolepsi hos enkelte, og jeg skal etter beste evne forsøke å forklare dette så enkelt det lar seg gjøre. Dere får tilgi de litt slurvete MSPaint-tegningene mine og oversimplifiseringene (oversimplifiseringer blir sjeldent 100%…

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AWS Java documentation is fucked

14. februar 2016

This is why I don’t work with Java anymore

A Really Good Rant

The problem

We recently had a use case that was a perfect for the Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF).

In the end it was quite simple to implement. I simply read the C# SWF Hello World example and implemented that in Java.

The actual Java example is a nightmare. The following is not a rant about Java, Design Patterns or Aspect Oriented programming. I actually don’t mind any of those. It’s a rant about a Hello World example that requires hours to even setup and comprehend and in the end abstracts the whole point of the exercise away.

The fucking ridiculous HelloWorld example

Let me show you why i do not like to use the Java examples and why in general the AWS documentation is complete shit.

Let me introduce you to the SWF Hello World Java example. It has a few prerequisites.

Step 1

Setting up the Framework with the Toolkit for Eclipse

I’m in…

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Mounting VMDK images on OS X

29. juli 2015

Just some quicknotes on how you can extract files from a vmdk image when on OS X. The tips should also be applicable for other operating systems. Les resten av dette innlegget »


My experiences with the HubiC backup service

1. juli 2015

This review sums up my two first months of using the cloud service HubiC, which is a very reasonable priced backup and file sharing service backed by the French company OVH. I started using this instead of the Norwegian JottaCloud backup service as they never managed to create a linux client, and I was tired of waiting.

TL;DR for those who cannot wait, here are my main points:

  • Great pricing
  • Data is hosted in France.
  • A nice web page in many languages, along with a nice localized web app for your account.
  • Good Linux client, if you manage to set it up
  • Poor documentation
  • Poor support.
  • Payment is problematic.
  • All info by email is in French.
  • Not so great uptime/stability of the web servers

Pricing

5€/month for 10TB. This is great, and compares favorably with most other services.

Technical quality

The web site is nice, although I had a really hard time getting my phone number to validate and ended up having to examine the javascript code to find out what was wrong … Still unsure whether they actually did anything about this … But once you have managed to sign up everything is good. The client programs for Mac and Linux are also good, but you will struggle to set up the linux client as there is NO documentation (per May 2015).

Hosting

Data is hosted in France, not the US. So goodbye NSA, and hello BRGE. This is great. The uptime has not been so great. My logs from May and June contains lots of server errors. At one time nothing was uploaded for a couple of days. But this is for the private market, so this is tolerable. Especially at that price 😀

Poor documentation

Customers have implicitly documented stuff on the forums, but that does not count. You need to read the man page after installing the linux client, google for tips on setup (possibly using my init script), and basically wander around in the dark until you get it working. And it’s very hard to debug the init scripts on Ubuntu as it is, so some help pages would have been sorely needed, as hubic does not report to the system logs.

Poor support

No phone, no email, no case tracking. You need to post messages in the forum page, and request personal help by sending private messages to the team there. Support takes forever to answer you.

HubiC is French, so of course they have some problems communicating with the outside world due to severe problems understanding Anglo-Saxon humor, and this really shows in the forums and in the support replies 🙂 But they are generally nice people it seems. Due to the slow response and awkward communication, I have a feeling that the programmers themselves are involved in the support requests … At least that could explain some things, as I am sure they have tons of bugs and features to implement and these annoying customers are keeping them from doing so 😉

No feature request or open issue tracker

I have so far found several bugs, documented and reported them. What happens later on I don’t know. An issue tracker would be nice.

Lots of unlocalized bits

Most emails are in French, which is especially problematic if you have payment problems, as you will only find out once stuff stops working.

Conclusion

I really like hubiC, actually. They seem to build a very solid platform at a very competitive price, and although there are some kinks here and there, it generally works very well. They do have problems communicating this to the outside world, but the French have never been known to take a lot of room on the global entrepreneurial field, so I guess this just comes down to lack of experience. Still, human communication is where they need to improve the most! At the moment, hubiC reminds me of communicating with a government bureau by mail. No personality is shown anywhere. What about having a little blog, like labs.hubic.com? Just a sneak peek into the everyday life, and what is going on? This is great for building a community. Hoping for the best, hubiC!


Using Bittorrent Sync behind a firewall

24. november 2014

Getting Bittorrent Sync to work in the workplace seems frustratingly hard to do, at least if you are as unsuccesful at googling solutions for bypassing the corporate firewalls as I was. Turns out it is really easy to get it working! Les resten av dette innlegget »


1Password in Linux

5. oktober 2014

I was amazed to find out that, although there is no Linux client for 1Password, you can actualy achieve full browser integration in Chrome under Linux! This is all possible using Wine, and worked surprisingly well. Using this, I can fill in passwords in the browser using the 1Password plugin, as well as add new ones.

This worked far better than I had hoped, and there are decent instructions from AgileBits on how to get this set up in the forums