Drupal

I've been playing with Drupal for a few months, playing meaning trying to figure it out. If you've never heard of it, Drupal is a piece of open source software for setting up websites, something like what's underneath Blogger, in the category of a "content management platform."

What it amounts to is an infrastructure so that you can use PHP, HTML, CSS, and a database such as MySQL, to set up a website that you add content to. It comes with several included "themes" or what we might call looks for your site. I really didn't especially like any of them, and in fact didn't like any of the dozens I looked at that one could have downloaded, so the challenge was to understand what was where to make this or that feature or tweak this or that appearance. I might have had a leg up if I understood a lot about PHP, but maybe not, since a lot of the challenge was figuring out what piece of code does what piece of the job.

Finally I bought a book as I often do, and also as I often do, bought one a little over my head, which meant that I had to read several parts several times to finally begin to understand what the hell they were talking about. Eventually I cookbooked my way through a theme of my own device, and played with it enough to figure out how to rearrange various spaces on the pages, how to add images, how/where to upload things. So here's the site. It's a site I've had for a year or so, but hadn't done much with, since I was hand-writing HTML for it, a very laborious process indeed. Now I'm trying to learn more about CSS.

My first project to help me have even more incentive to learn Drupal was to begin an online book, this one about how to understand EMG reports, rather esoteric I admit, yet perhaps of some interest to those who order them and might occasionally want to understand something more about the test than the electromyographer's thumbs up or thumbs down about carpal tunnel syndrome. I'm not aware of any book ever written from this perspective – there are plenty on how to do EMGs but none on how to understand the report.

It's a work in progress, but let me know if what I have there makes sense.

TV

I'm not a big fan of TV. Don't watch it much, anywhere. But it's more ubiquitous than ever. It's hard to find a seat at the airport without some talking head blaring out some blah, blah, blah.

But recently it seems we have to keep the patients entertained at all times. When I was in medical school was when TVs first were available at all for hospitalized patients, for a fee. Then we went to TVs in every room, then TVs for each patient. Now it's TVs in the waiting areas.

When we get to a TV in the exam room where I'm going to do an EMG, I'm really irritated. First thing I have to do is find the remote -- there isn't any off button on the TV itself you can get to. Real irritating.

Out

I went to try to see a patient in the hospital the other day. They have a large board on the wall, with patient names on it for various kinds of information. It used to be that if the patient was gone for an X-ray or some other test, the board would say, "X-ray 0930" to tell where they are and when they left.

Now, due to regulations, it just says, "OUT." So you have to go to the nurse to find out where the patient is, presuming she knows. It is said to have something to do with "patient privacy" concerns, but I have a hard time understanding how interfering with some basic information about where a patient is has anything to do with privacy. We have the occasional VIP who doesn't want their name posted, rarely maybe even a bogus name on the chart. This does nothing to improve care.

So I guess maybe I should just go in the room, say, "I may be a doctor, but I really don't want to give my name or say for sure. Privacy concerns."

LGM 2008

This sounds like it might be some revolutionary committee, but this year marks the 3rd year for this meeting, which brings together graphic designers, other users of graphics, along with the developers of many famous and not-so-famous open source software programs.

So, not only is my favorite, Scribus, going to be represented, but also people from Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, Blender, and others.

Here is the site: LGM 2008. The meeting is to be held in Wroclaw, Poland this year.

I also would like to invite you to consider contributing to the meeting, since donations are being accepted, and are needed, since by its nature, these projects are made possible by volunteers, who contribute their free time so these great pieces of software can be available for download for free.

And donating is easy: the Gnome Foundation has set up a page here for your tax-deductible contribution.

Prehistoric Poop

The last issue of Science has a news item about some recent research on some coprolites - fossilized feces. It was found in a cave in Oregon, and archaeologists want to know its origin.

It turns out you can do this now by studying the DNA of the coprolite, and researchers say this is the smoking, err, gun to show that this was of human origin. Why this is of special interest is that this poop by carbon-dating is 14,000 years old.

Many archaeologists have suspected and look for evidence of humans in the Americas before Clovis man - 13,000 years ago - and this seems to be the first, shall we say, solid evidence, and you can rest assured that coprolites are quite solid after 14,000 years.

Even so, like more recent DNA evidence, contamination can be a problem. The specimen also has DNA from canids (dogs of some sort), so some have questioned whether this might actually be dog poop. Well, say the researchers, this hardly matters, since it means that either the poop came from a dog who ate a human or a human who ate a dog, and either way means there were humans 14,000 years ago in that area.

Scribus Manual

We're nearing the end of the manual I've been working on, with others, for the last several months. It's been an interesting experience, collaborating with others, others I've mostly never met, who live in various parts of the world. Our main connectivity is the wiki for the manual and IRC, where we chat about all sorts of things in addition to the manual.

So we ask others for critiques, we edit, re-ask, they edit my stuff at bit, I edit theirs. As a whole, it's all gone surprisingly fast. Right now we are in the final stages of some feedback from others to finalize the content, after which the layout will take place, then on to the publisher.

These days you don't need to go to some book publisher and get a certain number of copies printed. There is something called POD (publish on demand), where you list on a site (could be with Amazon, for example), and when a book gets ordered, it's very quickly printed and shipped out. So that's what we'll do.


Some other things learned

One of the other main collaborators is German, and among the many discussions that has come up is his problem with wasps. He's been bothered with them all last year, and even this winter, creeping into his apartment, to the point that finally he moved out so the source can be found. The first thing I learned was that what he is calling wasps I would call yellowjackets. The second thing I learned is that what I call yellowjackets are a type of wasp, also called German wasps.

We had a problem with yellowjackets a couple of summers ago, which I finally decided to take care of when I was trying to paint gutters and such and there were numerous nests all over the place. So I told him that it was obvious he had a large nest or nests somewhere, and he really needed to find them and get rid of the nests, since with yellowjackets they just keep getting bigger and keep multiplying year after year.

That's when I also learned that in Germany, this ridding of wasp nests is something done by the firefighters - they have "specialists" who will come in and rid your house/apartment of such pests. Interesting. I told him if I called our firehouse and told them I had a problem with yellowjackets, they would probably just laugh.

Self-cleaning clothes

The latest issue of Science has a small news item about some research just published by some workers in Hong Kong, who have been able to, they say, develop fabrics that clean themselves.

They do this by embedding he fabric with nanocrystals of titanium dioxide, and when the fabric is exposed to light, the chemical catalyzes dirt so that it decomposes. In addition, it's supposed to deactivate odor-causing bacteria. While it works best in sunlight, it will actually happen with any light source.