Bollywood Dialogues
by chintan patel on April 24th, 2008
Check out this site Bollydialogues.com. The site is meant to collect famous quotes/dialogues from bollywood movies from India. It was a 2 night experiment on hacking Ruby on Rails So far I m very impressed with the Model-View-Controller architecture of Rails. Makes a clean separation of the model (each of which is tied to a table in database), view (the display stuff) and the controller (what-to-do logic).
The tagging of actors and movies is all generated using plugins. I think Rails hits a sweet spot of flexibility and extensibility. There is a rating plugin that can be used to filter out the top or the best bollywood dialogues. Indians are quite fanatic about bollywood movies (annually there are about 250-300 main stream movies produced). So if you are into bollywood movies, submit your favorite dialogue to bollydialogues.com.
“Unbreakable” Microsoft HealthVault
by chintan patel on October 7th, 2007
So today I decided to try out the new Microsoft’s HealthVault service. I hit sign-up and it asked me to login with my old @hotmail address which I had dumped 3 years ago after I switched to Gmail. Then it tells me my password is not strong enough ???? (It already has seven characters with 2 numbers!!!). Anyways, they do mention this on their login page.
“Windows Live™ ID
Microsoft HealthVault uses Windows Live ID to authenticate your identity. If you have a Live ID with a “weak” password, you will be asked to create a “strong” password.”
Okay fine.. I m asked to change the old password and confirm a new password. I entered a new one. Then it asks me for a reminder question etc.. it says you can use your new password in all of MSN sites.. then I m thrown out.. so I tried this new password and again I m shown the stupid “your password is not strong enough page”.
I guess Microsoft is trying to make a point here.. Their “vault” is sooo SAFE that NOBODY can get in !!!!
Good Luck!
HL7 Common Terminology Services for MED
by chintan patel on October 2nd, 2007
Recently I had to work with HL7 Common Terminology Services and it was surprising how fast I was able to integrate the MED (Medical Entities Dictionary - the local terminology in use at NYPH) with it. In a nutshell, the Common Terminology Services (CTS) interface specifies a set of API calls to vocabulary/terminology to fetch relevant information, e.g. what is the ‘descriptive name’ for a given code or what are subclasses for a given code and so on.
The informatics group at Mayo provides an excellent reference implementation for the CTS API in Java - they have 2 implementations: one that works with their LexGrid local information model (with Lucene, LDAP etc) and other basic implementation for HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) schema. They also provide sample databases to test the implementation out-of-the-box! Although, I use Mac OSX and HL7 RIM implementation would only work with MS Access database, so I had to transform MDB to MYSQL using this utility.
The next step was to import MED into HL7 RIM schema. So from the CTS implementation of Mayo, I tracked down the SQL queries and hence the terminology-relevant tables in the RIM
VCS_code_system: contains the metadata about the terminologyVCS_concept_code_xref: stores the actual codes but it also uses integer based internal ids for better indexing
VCS_concept_designation: contains the descriptive information for a code.
Then I had to make a Web Service/SOAP wrapper for it. I looked into available tools after a gap of about 4-5 years and I was amazed at the easiness of starting up a Web service.
- The Apache Axis folks have completely re-designed and re-written the older version Axis toolkit. The new version, Axis2, is more efficient and speedier with low memory-footprint. They rewrote the entire XML API (StAX) to achieve greater speed.
- The Eclipse Europa release with Web Tools Platform provides a one click creation/testing of Web services with Axis2. They also have an inbuilt Web services Explorer to test your service
- Mayo folks provide all of the CTS implementation and its dependencies in a SINGLE JAR file!! so all I had to do was dump the file into WEB-INF folder.
In all, I was able to get HL7 CTS API to MED up and running in matter of few hours!!
I m now looking for an internal server to host this and put the HL7 terminology tables in some in-memory database — and do some performance comparison with QRYMED - the tool currently used to interface MED for the information systems at NYPH.