I'm Flattr'ed!

Support my writing on Samat Says via Flattr, PayPal, or Amazon

I conducted an experiment back when I wrote my HP N36L review: I added affiliate links to both Amazon and Newegg, hopefully to recoup some revenue—without adding advertisements—from writing a high-quality, comprehensive hardware review.

It was successful: I earned enough back to pay for a few cups of coffee.

Getting paid to do what you'd do anyway is a good motivator

An aside: you're not going to see widgets on any my sites. That includes Facebook Like buttons or share buttons for Twitter and Google Buzz/Plus/their latest failure. It's amazing these corporations have convinced webmasters into adding things that both slow the performance of their websites and compromise visitors' privacy, for little/no tangible benefit the webmasters themselves—you'll not see any of that here.

However, in a minor bout of hypocrisy, I have added Flattr widgets. They use performance-oriented, "progressively enchanced" HTML and Javascript, so their widget doesn't slow sites down. Also, since they're not a "free" social or advertising network, I don't believe them to have any motive in tracking visitors across the Web.

Flattr is the brainchild of Peter Sunde, of The Pirate Bay fame.

Michael Madsen's Into Eternity

With Chernobyl's 25th anniversary a few weeks past (ignored, for the most part, by Western media), and the Fukushima nuclear disaster fresh in everyone's minds, now is as good a time as any think about nuclear energy's role in our civilization. Into Eternity, a Finnish documentary released in 2010, takes a very unique look at the nuclear power industry, one not typically thought about. Rather than nuclear proliferation or the plants themselves, it focuses on the geologic storage of spent nuclear fuel (aka SNF), in particular, Finland's Onkalo repository.

Spent nuclear fuel

Low-level nuclear wastes include things such as clothing, plant construction materials (e.g. concrete) and machinery

At the moment, the US does not have a storage plan for spent nuclear fuel. There is one geologic storage site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico, but the site is relatively small and destined for storing the generation I nuclear wastes of America's nuclear weapons programs, not that of commercial reactors. A larger site, Yucca Mountain, well isolated in the Nevada Test Range (where nuclear weapons were tested for decades, and much contamination remains), was shelved in 2010 by the Obama administration, leaving America's nuclear energy industry without secure storage for its spent nuclear fuel.

Much of the topics Into Eternity touches, such as communicating the dangers of nuclear wastes stored at sites via markers and monuments, has similarly been discussed for the US' Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Android 3 Honeycomb, free as in…?

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/No-Honeycomb-open-source-till-after-Ice-Cream-Sandwich-1241414.html

Drupal 7 upgrade post-mortem

This weekend, I upgraded Samat Says (this blog, in case you missed the memo) to Drupal 7.

For my Drupal 4.6/4.7-based site, I had created my own theme, Sands. Lack of time prevented me from porting Sands to Drupal 5 or 6, and it's unlikely it will be ported forward. I'm probably going to recreate it with one Drupal 7's many starter themes, however.

Why I use Firefox 4 Mobile

A couple weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 4 Mobile (née Fennec) for both Android and Maemo.

I've had an Android phone since 2008 and honestly, I've never browsed the web on my phone as much as I have in the past few months when I started using Firefox 4 Mobile. It really is that much better! Here are my thoughts (focused on the Android version) on why.

Sync

Firefox 4 Mobile's number 1 killer feature is Sync, which syncs tabs, logins, browser history, and bookmarks across multiple devices. The most useful of these are logins and browser history.

It's a complete pain to type user names and passwords on mobile keyboards, exacerbated personally since I practice good security and use a different password for each site on the web. Because Firefox Sync makes available on my phone all the passwords I've saved on my desktop, I never need fumble entering or remember anything anymore.

I use the web quite a bit (who doesn't?), proof of which is my 15 MiB history file. Sync makes available that same browsing history, everywhere. Having your browser history available to do simple things like coloring visited links purple really makes a difference (e.g., think about looking through apartment listings on Craigslist).

Having history available also powers Firefox 4 Mobile's Awesome Bar. I don't need to remember exact URLs anymore, or rely on a search engine—I can just start typing a keyword and Firefox's Awesome Bar automatically searches URLs and page titles of pages I've visited, just like it does on the desktop.

As a freedom-loving, free and libre open source software advocate, another bit about Sync I love is that it is an autonomous web service. That is, you can download the server-side component of Sync and run it yourself, should you not trust Mozilla.

Google has a Sync-like feature in Android 3.0 for its built-in web browser and Chrome for your desktop, but so far nothing is available for anyone stuck on older versions of Android. It also isn't autonomous—you're locked into trusting Google.

HTML5

Firefox 4 Mobile has much better HTML5 support, in the sense it supports more New & Exciting Web Technologies (NEWT), such as CSS3, SVG, and new Javascript APIs.

Firefox has dropped vendor-specific prefixes for many CSS3 properties, including border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow, etc. All in all, it makes your CSS that much more clean.

There's support for SVG, only recently supported in Android 3.0.

There's support for notifications via a proprietary API. Recently landed in Chrome 10, it's still missing (AFAIK?) in Android 3.0, even with 3.0's rich notifications support.

The iPhone has had multi-touch Javascript events (think pinch-to-zoom, essential for mapping widgets) since its debut, but multi-touch support and support for such events is missing from Android, even though Android was introduced much later. Firefox 4 Mobile has had multi-touch support since last year, though it does not support gestures, like the pinch-to-zoom event (patent concerns?). Even without gestures, nothing stops you from implementing gestures yourself. Firefox Mobile also is leading the way in supporting the (draft) W3C TouchEvents specification.

A good overview of the other HTML5 features Firefox 4 Mobile supports is Mozilla's HTML5 & Friends demo

Other stuff

Firefox 4 Mobile also supports add-ons. While I haven't found the need for any, there are some neat ports, like Adblock Plus Mobile. Expect the list of add-ons to grow quickly.

When Firefox 4 Mobile was in beta, Mozilla didn't do a very good job alerting people to its high system requirements. However, on release, a supported platforms and systems requirements page is first and foremost. A summary: you need a phone with at least 512 MiB RAM. The official builds require an ARMv7-generation processor (or more specifically, one that supports ARM's Thumb instruction set), but there are unsupported builds for older ARMv6 devices that have enough RAM (e.g. T-Mobile's MyTouch Slide, aka the HTC Espresso). Not to gloat, but Firefox 4 Mobile for Android works great on my T-Mobile G2.

Firefox 4 Mobile's previous name was Fennec 2.0, a name I much prefer. But somewhere along the way, Mozilla decided to take a page from Microsoft's marketing playbook—home of atrocities like Microsoft Windows Live Mesh and Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. What makes it worse is disambiguating Firefox 4 Mobile for Android and Firefox 4 Mobile for Maemo means you're using 5 words for a product title. For web developers, fortunately, Firefox 4 Mobile still keeps the keyword "fennec" in its user agent screen for easy detection.

In my opinion, the best software keyboard for Android is Swiftkey (proprietary software, unfortunately). SwiftKey crashes when used with Firefox 4 Mobile… SwiftKey hasn't been very helpful diagnosing the problem (it is SwiftKey doing the crashing!) but Mozilla has fixed the SwiftKey crash on their own, available by Firefox 5 Mobile, if not 4.02.

So, go download Firefox 4 Mobile now from Mozilla's landing page if you've not done so already. You can also get it from the Android Market, or, if you don't or can't use the Android Market, get the latest Firefox 4 Mobile release from Mozilla's FTP site instead. If release versions are not bleeding edge enough for you, consider the Nightly or Aurora build channels instead.

Also, if you're playing Mozilla's Spark, please tag me!

Patient care in the ICU in terms of vectors and topological spaces

Biomedical Informatics, Medicine

A few weeks ago, Timothy G. Buchman gave a talk at the Columbia DBMI weekly research seminar. During the QA session, someone asked why patients in intensive care units (ICUs) were given such “extreme” treatments, often causing them to develop new health problems and complications, keeping them in the hospital. He replied with this wonderful mathematical metaphor about patient care.

You are a point in an n-dimensional space. Each dimension is some vital sign or homeostatic attribute, e.g. blood pressure, blood glucose, temperature, etc. Homeostasis is defined a polytope in that space. As you do the various things of life, your point moves within the space defined by that polytope. For example, when you eat, your blood sugar goes up, and the point moves along in the blood sugar dimension; when you take a cold shower, your body temperature is reduced, and you move along in that dimension. Young people have a large space inside their homeostatic polytope

When you leave this homeostatic polytope, you're considered “sick.” If you travel to far from it, you die.

People who enter the ICU have points that are moving away from their homeostatic polytope. Their movement away can be represented as a vector, representing how quickly their condition is deteriorating.

Treatments in the ICU represent vectors that try to point you back towards your homeostatic polytope.