Log
2003
This is in the DailyMidge page in the wiki now
February
4
A good BMJ editorial here on government misperception of where the work gets done in the NHS. Schools and hospitals is the meme being propogated about eductaion and healthcare. It doesn't work as well as accurate thinking would.
January
30
Cory Doctorow's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Worth reading.
20
I thought of an idea about demonstrating the high trust environment that is supposed to be coming in the NHS. We'll see.
2
Spam is irritating me. My killfile and some filters keep it down but the news of the confernece at MIT on teh 15th is welcome. One of the papers for it is at Spam: Problems with RBL I picked it up from Chris Gulker's weblog.
I wrote a BMJ rapid response on reading paper compared to reading electronic sources. The BMJ isn't indexed on Google and the like, so the only way the general run of people will get to see that will be through links like this. But how best to describe it - the full text?
2002
December
26
The old Unix tools diction and style are recreated for GNU/Linux, discussed on the O'Reilly site, and available from FSF. As with many such things, they work simply, cost nothing, and have been touted as features in later versions of complex software. I think running NHS documents through them would proudce a lot of output, and if the suggestions were listened to this would be good. Meanwhile, a glance at Strunk's advice on style is worthwhile.
The pronominal possessives hers, its, theirs, yours, and oneself have no apostrophe.
November
20
The Web Standards Project is a good thing. It is possible to achieve good design of web pages using stanrds, without tying it to one browser. So do so.
October
12
Security stuff - credit cards and digital signatures.
2
Sabbatical day. LDAP and some Open Source in Healthcare.
September
30
Paris was very smoky and I have a cough. I'll write about the PICNIC work somewhere. Brian Bray will probably present some of it at OSHCA 3 in November at UCLA
25
At the PICNIC meeting in Paris.
23
How do errors cause problems and disasters? The Swiss Cheese model describes a lot of them - when the holes in the system line up, problems pass through. We need everyone to try not to make more holes.
21
BMJ obituary of Sir Douglas Black He was a good and effective doctor in several ways.
15
Microsoft are sharing some source code. This is not bad, but falls far short of freedom of source code. GNU have it right
14
A series of essays on defenestration - not the one-time way of killing surplus kings, but developing satisfactory desktops not on Microsoft platforms. The amount of work I do for myself on a Windows desktop has steadily gone down to almost none, but I still find myself needing to use VNC to access a legacy Windows machine for some things, and have one major application still to go.
A Beginning
Weekly Midgley started as the old idea of a newspaper personalised to me, but drawing all its content from elsewhere - saving clicks. So now I'll add some editorial content from time to time.