VirtualBox Shared Folders with Ubuntu

Basically:

mkdir MOUNTED_FOLDER
id
sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=USER_ID SHARED_FOLDER_NAME MOUNTED_FOLDER

from: valibuk.net Accessing Mac OS X harddrive from Ubuntu in VirtualBox via shared folders

Home Network Topology, March 2010

Home Network Topology, March 2010
Originally uploaded by matveyp

I came across a number of questions about home network topology, and decided to diagram mine and share. I am by no means an expert in networking, so if you have a suggestion or two on optimizing this layout, I would be most grateful.

Internet connectivity is provided by Verion FiOS and they installed Actiontec MI424WR in my basement. I have no objections to it as a router (able to control the firewall, no problems with outbound VPN, etc.), but its wireless is limited to 802.11g and didn't cover the entire house. So I looked for a wireless Access Point and settled on TRENDnet TEW-637AP (that was a over a year ago; I am sure there are other worthy products available now). I turned off Actiontech's wireless and TRENDnet took over - it's been exceptionally stable and I am very happy with it. It is set to 802.11n only.

TRENDnet was wired directly into Actiontech. A bit later it dawned on me that my network was limited to 100GB and I bought an unmanaged Gigabit switch (D-Link DGS 2208) and inserted it between my Actiontech and TRENDnet. I then wired the rest of the network to this switch.

The rest should be fairly self-expanatory. Upper left part of the picture shows my office setup. Note that I use Airport Express in wired mode to stream iTunes to my Logitech speakers (love sound quality!). I have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box - Hammer Storage myshare. It's a fine NAS box, the only thing that bothers me is that the vendor promised a software upgrade with additional features, including iTunes server, and never delivered. On the plus side, it includes a decent print server and turns my super-cheap HP LaserWriter 1020 into a network printer (1020 is not Mac-compatible according to HP, and they are correct - I make it work but it takes a lot of weird contortions).

Did you notice my Newton Message Pad 2100? Very much alive and well!

Lower right is my AV setup - especially proud of my Mac mini - it is running Boxee and works great. Sound system (Bose LifeStyle 35) is not shown here because it is not on the network.

Not to forget my Slingbox - this amazing little gadget lets me watch my own cabe TV on my computer whenever and wherever I want, and I find myself using it frequently. Two thumbs up!

Also not shown are a bunch of assorted computers that are either not hooked up at all or are rarely used.

Lastly, my iPhone 3G is out of luck because I disabled 802.11g. 3G signal is good around here and I am not finding WiFi connectivity for iPhone all that necessary at home.

What's your home network like?

iPad thoughts

Before reading any media reactions, wanted to jot down some of my thoughts after watching Steve's announcement

• A Mac for couch potato. Hinges on new MacBook Pros do not keep the screen up when trying to use the laptop in the most ergonomic position anyway, so the tablet should be a perfect substitute
• I see it as a "stay home device" - save for using it as a portable video player or a game platform
• Appears perfect for consuming information (text-based, video); likely has similar limitations as iPhone re: data entry
• Communication - without a user-facing camera falls short. Various chats require typing; video-conferencing is far better
• Cons to applications in healthcare - bulky, fragile, limited data entry, though 30-pin connector allows for peripherals
• Mobility factor - seems good to carry around the house, up-to-date WiFi built-in. Larger version of iPod Touch, but at home there's no need for it to fit into a jeans pocket.
• Furthers cloud-based computing - would make sense to keep most if not all data (calendar, address book, bookmarks, RSS subscriptions, video content) in the cloud and sync
• Con - iPhone OS instead of Mac "desktop" OS - introduces limits; encourages more spending at the App Store
• Con - needs a user-facing camera
• If something like Boxee can be built for iPad, I wonder if it could be a contender to a big-screen TV

There is only one 192.168.1.1

My parents' laptop was marooned in one room of their house, chained by a wired connection to the DSL modem. I decided that adding a wireless router (Linksys WRT160N in this case) would be great to untether the machine. I expected the installation to be limited to daisy-chaining the new router between the DSL modem and the laptop, setting up a few things (admin password, SSID, wireless security and band options) and enjoying wireless connection in 5 minutes. And to do it all from 400 miles away. Piece of cake!

This could be a long blog post because my projected 5 minutes rapidly expanded into 5 hours, but I'll keep it short. Trouble manifested itself when after several failed attempts we reverted to old wired setup (new router not connected) and I noticed the laptop reporting being connected to a gateway at 192.168.1.1 - weird! Did I mention that the laptop runs Vista and I wanted to mock around with it as little as possible? So why would a DSL modem be at 192.168.1.1??? As usual, an extended Googling session brought clarity to this murky issue. Verizon's DSL modem - Westell 6100F in our case - turns out to be a router/modem combo! This box was acting as a router and the modem, and when new Linksys entered the picture, we had two devices - both routers! - competing for 192.168.1.1 address. No wonder things weren't working right.

I found excellent instructions on how to turn Westell's router functionality off, placing it in "bridged" mode, and effectively making it into dumb modem. Scary thoughts crossed my mind; "bridging" sounded eerily similar to "bricking," and being 400 miles away, last thing I wanted was a bricked Verizon's box! Nonetheless, after some deep breathing, we carried out the instructions. A few tense moments ensued when Westell in its new bridged mode was not connecting to the Internet. Turns out my parents particular flavor of Verizon's DSL uses PPPoE and newly dumbed-down Westell was no longer providing the necessary authentication information. Luckily, at this point configuration of Linksys proceeded smoothly and it was all too happy to take over the necessary PPPoE duties and we were online in no time.

Moral of the story? There can be only one 192.168.1.1! One for each private network, that is.

Raw Burgers and Future of Clinical Decision Making: A Ramble

The inspiration for this post was the final episode of "The Next Iron Chef". I was definitely psyched to see Jose Garces win. There was a moment in the show when the other finalist, Chef Mehta, served the judges a dish featuring a pork burger, and they commented that the pork was undercooked or even raw. This got me thinking - here are highly trained professionals, experienced practitioners of the art of cooking, and they are making such basic mistakes? In this day and age of advanced technologies, can't we come up with some gizmo to stick inside that burger patty, take its temperature and figure out - definitively - its state of doneness? Why rely on these rules of thumb (or rather the thenar eminence) - pun intended - by touching the meat to gauge whether it will still moo when I cut into it? Why am I talking about this? Well, think intravenous lines placement by highly trained professionals, experienced practitioners of the art of medicine. How are these lines placed? Essentially, by blindly poking around until you find the right blood vessel! Why not use the fancy technology? There are portable ultrasound thingies that help to visualize the needle and the vessel. Yes, they are far from perfect, but nothing new will be developed unless there is a demand for it, and there will be no demand until we stop thinking that relying on technology somehow makes doctors less cool.

Of course, same goes for information technologies. In his blog entry "Health IT: What’s the Future?" Steve Downs of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recaps themes from a recent "Discovery and Innovation in Health IT" workshop. One presenter focused "on the need for cognitive support, showing a hockey stick graph of the number of facts that will be relevant to a given clinical decision over time (this theme reappeared several times over the two days). The number is expected to reach 1000 by 2020, while the number of facts that a human can contemplate while making a decision remains stuck at um, five." Healthcare practitioners need clinical decision support (CDS). I am surprised that such a statement could still be considered controversial...

Just like those ultrasound vein visualizing gizmos, CDS technologies are far from perfect. Thus far the CDS efforts are targeted at individual systems. The challenges are to figure out how to get/represent/manage/update/share clinical care guidelines logic that drives CDS recommendations, how to surface these recommendations to clinicians at the right place and time in a workflow-aware fashion so that they do not dismiss them outright, how to make these recommendations "actionable" to facilitate carrying out an order should a clinician decide to follow a recommendation. Necessarily, these efforts are hard - if not impossible - to generalize. These systems tend to be tightly bound to their initial implementation environments and are therefore non-interoperable in any meaningful way.

Ken Mandl and Zak Kohane proposed an idea of a plugin-friendly platform instead of a typical monolithic EHR. For this to work, the underlying clinical data must be handled in a way that abstracts it from individual applications. Alternatively, leave your monolithic applications alone and pool your data into a near-real-time repository that is application-agnostic. Ether way, if data can be separated from applications (how's that for a radical idea?), there is hope for the kind of interoperability that would result in scalable CDS. Automated processes are needed to abstract and represent domain knowledge encoded in clinical guidelines so that it can be machine-processable (consider baby-steps like HQMF); and it will probably take a miracle to figure out how to deliver CDS recommendations to practicing clinicians in such a way that they are useful. But despite these challenges, if the right incentives are in place to ensure a healthy demand for CDS technologies, we will see progress. The end-goal is the realization of the potential of healthcare IT - safe, appropriate, timely, high-quality care.

Newton MessagePad 2100 is back

Apple Newton MessagePad 2100
Originally uploaded by matveyp

No, Apple is not resurrecting the Newton, but my very own Newton MessagePad 2100 is making a comeback. It is running an NPDS webserver software and is available online! Come visit and leave a note on my Whiteboard if you'd like.

I owned this Newton since 1997 and early in its life it served as my primary computer - I did my wordprocessing, printing, e-mail, Telnet, etc. on this machine and it was fantastic. Since about 2002 I tried on and off to keep it up and running as a webserver. You can learn more about its setup when you visit. In short, the Newton is connected to my home network via Ethernet by way of a PCMCIA card.

What is different this time around? First, I did not want to rely on pre-MacOS X operating system (namely System 9) to connect to the Newton for synchronization, software uploads and backups. But I ran into a catch-22: Newton connection tools (NCX) available for MacOS X require a piece of software to be installed on the Newton. My solution was to fire up Classic mode on my old and trusty PowerBook G4, download and install original Apple's Newton Connection Utility, and use that to install the required package on the Newton. That worked flawlessly. And now I can connect to my Newton right from my MacBook Pro!

I also needed to take care of what is known as the Y2010 bug - read more about it here.

Lastly, I wanted to make sure that Newton's clock is accurate. For that I ended up using NewtSync.

There is a community of Newton enthusiasts who continue to use this incredible machine to do wonderful things. For example, this tracker shows which Newtons are online at any given moment. I am grateful to folks who continue to work on maintaining existing capabilities and developing new ones. I hope that by keeping my Newton online I am participating in some small measure in ensuring that innovations represented by this platform are recognized and appreciated.

Image files to PowerPoint slides Automatically

Imagine that you (a Mac user, of course) have a bunch of image files (say, screenshots) that you need to get into a PowerPoint presentation. How do you do it? Well, in PowerPoint you would create a new slide, go under Insert menu, pick "Picture…", in the subsequent dialog box navigate to where your image files are, pick one, hit "Insert" and then repeat the process as many times are there images to include. The question is - aren't computers supposed to make your life easier??? I encounter this scenario quite frequently, and so I figured that investing a bit of time into trying to figure out how to do this right was worth it. The solution is based on Apple Automator and uses Snow Leopard revamped Services (if you are not using Snow Leopard, this is still imminently doable with Automator). Here we go.

Launch Automator and choose "Service" on initial prompt

Set the selectors in the upper right gray bar as shown on below

Find the poorly named but highly useful "Create PowerPoint Picture Slide Shows" action and drag it in:

File > Save

I named my service "Add to PowerPoint Presentation"

You're done!

To test, select some image files in Finder, then go Finder > Services > Add to PowerPoint Presentation. Viola!

Next time you find yourself with a heap of images that need to go into PowerPoint (or any other repetitive kind of task), right when your mind starts to get numb just imagining what you are about to start doing, ask yourself - won't it be better to have my computer do this for me? Then take a little time, figure out a cool solution, and write about it so I can find it!