[h3ll0 w0r!d]

Recent Revelations

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:25:07 +0000

I've had two very curious 'revelations' recently:
(I'm using this term because I'm actually quite taken aback by this new knowledge. Not quite in the biblical sense, but whatever.)

Fireflies

I visited the always affable and accomodating Aaron B in the Garden State this last week, and while crusing along in his sporty, rented, Korean-piece-of-shit, a smallish insect wafted into my open window at a stop sign. At first, I figured it was a strange sort of a fly, or perhaps a little, shrunken Rick Moranis, but all of a sudden, it started to glow.

And here I was -- 23 years of age with a degree and a car payment -- captivated by the sight of this little insect shining it's light in search of its own personal Kristen Bell. I was completely mesmerized by how this little guy did his little thing, that I started to almost think that his insect booty was somehow infused with magic fairy dust comprised of unicorn tears and butterfly kisses. Shortly after, my higher level reasoning kicked in (it takes a little bit to warm up), and all I could say is "biology is cool" between giggling uncontrollably and snorting like the uber-nerd that I am.

Ambling up Aaron's gravel alleyway in Highland Park in our 4-banger, the narrow corridor opened up to a field of these little buggers, all pulsing their glowsticks like some kind of miniature lightswitch rave. Unfortunately, by the time I realized I should take a photo, they had already packed up their DJ booth, and they never returned during my trip.

Smoothies

For those of you out there that don't know, I'm hooked on smoothies. -- specifically, California-style smoothies where real fruit is used instead of gobs and gobs of ice cream. And I've become especially dependent on them since I started the auspiciously named Abs Diet. So to save a bit of green, I've been making smoothies myself and using them for my 6th meal after Dinner and for weekend snacks.

Using the Scientific Method, I've perfected my smoothie recipe so that it includes loads of Whey Protein, dairy, fruit and berry goodness.

Blueberry Dream

1 - 1 ½ cup ice
1 cup Milk (I prefer 1%)
2 tbsp Whey Powder
½ cup Yogurt
1 banana
½ cup Frozen Blueberries

Really freaking simple, but very tasty. And 3 power foods too!

Anyway, the actual revelation wasn't the smoothie, but the fact that instead of using the pitcher that came with your blender (and having to wash it, and the glass that you drink it out of, constantly), the same base, blade and seal will screw right into a mason jar!

Now, you have one (or several, they're cheap!) container that you can blend in, drink out of and store in. How awesome is that. And they're dishwasher safe.

N.B.: I know this is such a non-event, but it's cool to me, so get over it

Medsphere.Widgets still rockin!

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:31:06 +0000

OpenVista CIS

The team at Medsphere has been busy making huge strides in open source healthcare with the OpenVista CIS Beta ramping up at Century City Doctors Hospital, preparing for CIS's GA release, and beginning a few exciting projects for the future.

We also pushed out the 1.0 Beta release of CIS to the open source world with a new license -- the Affero GPL v3.0. We think this is pretty cool, as it drops the Medsphere Systems Public License (MSPL) in favor of a better GPL-compatible license that is more usable by the community, and also closes the Application Service Provider (ASP) loophole.

Medsphere.Widgets 0.2.1

But, that's not all we've been up to. Today, we're putting out a new release of the still-rocking-your-socks-off Medsphere.Widgets. The 0.2.1 release brings a few bug fixes that were discovered during our beta process.

For those who don't remember Medsphere.Widgets -- our LGPL v2.0 or greater licensed, cross-platform Gtk# widgets, here are the widgets:

CPaned

FBox

GridView

Graph

IconLayout

Run, don't walk, to download the latest release today!

Announcing OpenVista CIS v0.9

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:59:35 +0000

This weekend, the development team at Medsphere (Pete, Anthony, Cesar, Cody, Jon, Bailey, Thomas and Ben) have the distinct pleasure of releasing OpenVista Clinical Information System (CIS) to the public under a modified version of the MPL called the MSPL.

This release represents about 100k lines of C# code developed over the last 3 years that is fully internationalized (partial translations are available in pt_BR and es_AR), and fully cross-platform, utilizing the Mono runtime on Linux and the .NET Runtime on Windows.

I've personally spent the last 2 years working on this project and it's wonderful to finally fulfill Steve and Scott Shreeve's dream of having a fully open-source Electronic Health Record for hospitals available to the public. Many of you may be familiar with the court case involving the Shreeves, and while I don't find it necessary to throw my personal opinion into the fray, I hope that this release will help put all this behind us.

While many of my compatriots may opt to discuss the technology behind OpenVista CIS, I'll instead highlight the parts that truly interest me -- the eye candy!

Over the past year, I have worked very closely with acclaimed Swedish icon designer Andreas Nilsson, to create a consistent set of icons to represent the various functions in the GUI. We chose the Tango/gnome-icon-theme style because the Tango look and feel was designed to blend in well on Windows, KDE , Mac OS X and of course, GNOME desktops. From jimmac's Tango post:

As for the style itself, we wanted something that's not a strong and unique look. We incorporated elements of Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME style into the mix. The Firefox themes were a great influence. The goal was not to create an average theme, but something that wouldn't look completely out of place on the mentioned desktop systems.

Here is a taste of what he was able to come up with:

And an added bonus, all these icons are licensed under the GPL.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll spend some time (in theory) highlighting other parts of the OpenVista CIS interface, and the difficulties we faced in developing it.

True Beauty.

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:08:06 +0000

Forget mirrors -- we need this installed in bathrooms across America.

And Cowbells All Over the World Rang with Joy...

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:47:51 +0000

In a post-finals productivity surge, I finally got a Wiki for Cowbell up and running. It sports a shiny template, lots of useful and handy content, and, just to catch up with the Jones', a new Cowbell Tango icon. And, to think, just a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Aaron had me totally and completely beat in the buzzword game. Now, all I have left to catch with him is add NetworkManager bindings, DAP support, iPod transfer, MusicBrainz search, Helix playback, Encoding and CD Burning. Oh yeah, that and 35 hour days.

Oddly enough, Cowbell 0.2.5.1 was released exactly 1 month ago. It wasn't a particularly eventful release -- just the addition of additional translations. Cowbell is now internationalized in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish. If you are fluent in another language and would like to translate Cowbell, please contact me.

In other news, Monday will be my girlfriend and my 4 month anniversiary. It has been quite a fun time so far, and heres to the next 4 being even better!

DELETED!!!

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 06:56:02 +0000

So I was working from home today on my desktop (since I was too lazy to grab my laptop) and I noticed how Rhythmbox kept coming up with the WORST possible songs that it could possibly pick... It seemed especially interested in songs that had automatic ratings of 0 and 1 (meaning that I've hit the Next button like a cracked out gerbil that needs its fix every single time the track plays, enough so to lower a 3 star rating to a 0). So, until I decide to replace Hoary with Breezy to run Banshee, I opted to delete the following horrible, horrible, horrible artists:

Pretty much anything from The Living End
Blink 182 (I don't even know why I had them on my computer to start with)
Jimmy Eat World (waaaay too poppy)
Two Inch Winky (what the hell was I thinking?)
No Use for a Name (I downloaded this a LONG time ago and never listened to it)
Hidden in Plain View
Yellowcard - Where we stand (I hate them now with their new lead singer)
Simple Plan

Work

In other news, the Kickstand team (Anthony, Todd and I) just finished up v1.0 of Medsphere's new OpenVista client. It's sure been a crazy ride from when I was first hired and it was just Todd and I developing it! Finally, we can just about leave CPRS behind and begin developing cool new interfaces and more advanced and specialized modules. I can't wait to see what we can come up with. Also, we just hired Peter Johansen (latexer on #monodev) -- I'm pretty confident that the C#/gtk# skills that he brings to the table will make him an excellent developer and coworker.

Cowbell

I finally got my ass around to releasing Cowbell -- an elegant music organizer written in C# and gtk# -- to the public. Since I released it about a month ago, I've gotten lots of publicity, thanks mostly to Todd. Now, Cowbell has been translated in to German, and is availble on 5 Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu Breezy, Crux, LPT, Fedora)! Its truly exciting to see a project that I've worked on for more than year finally get appreciated for the gem that it is.

Recently, I've been working on Batch tagging support via the console and its truly rocking! Once I get some last kinks out, I plan to run it on my entire music collection (over 20 GB) so that I can finally have a clean music collection.

Now, I'm off to hang out with Yuliya and Chris -- more later!

I'm an unsigned long int and you're an 8-bit char.

Tue, 17 May 2005 07:42:17 +0000

So Much Drama in the PhD

by Monzy
Download MP3 (2.2 MB)

Yo, MC Plus Plus, my rhymes are so phat,
I'm PSPACE-complete but I'll reduce you to 3-SAT.
My crew is so hard that we roll in NP,
And bitches dereference my pointer for free.
When I'm linear probing they're like, "Damn that's gigantic,"
I showed it to your mom and she used Hoare semantics.
She jumped like JNE up onto my erection
And I picked up that ho like straight garbage collection.
("That's right, mark-and-sweep on these nuts, bitch.")

My lyrics get stolen by sucker MCs,
I gotta sign my rhymes with PGP;
But I keep on generatin' like a CFG
'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.

What's wrong MC Plus Plus, am I making you nervous?
Even skanky fat hoes give you denial of service.
You'll probably go to jail before you write your dissertation
So prepare your asshole for some internal fragmentation;
[Uhhh] Penetration, as they fill it up with jism,
It's too bad you aren't closed under homomorphism.
Your problem, Plus Plus, is that your typing isn't strict:
In ML my type is real and your type is 'a dict.

I control my flow better than TCP,
I rep the west coast like Eazy-E,
You best not front if you can't pass the GRE,
'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.

My flow is so intense that I will overflow your buffer,
Corrupt your stack pointer makin' all your data suffer.
I've got saturated edges but your flow is sparser,
Real gangstas sip on Yacc; instead you generate a parser.
While you're busy poppin' stacks I'll pop a cap in your skull,
While you smoke your crack pipe I'm gonna pipe you to /dev/null.
I may not have a label but I rap like a star;
I'm an unsigned long int and you're an 8-bit char.

Your mom circulates like a public key,
Servicing more requests than HTTP.
She keeps all her ports open like Windows ME,
Oh, there's so much drama in the PhD.

DWORD to your moms, I came to drop bombs;
I've got more rhymes that San Jose's got dotcoms.
I rep the Farm like 50 reps Queens,
With more power than multitape Turing Machines.
Blowin' up the rap scene faster than factorial functions,
I'm dope like PNP transistors and I'll saturate your junctions.
By the time you've rhymed one line, I've already busted ten;
You rap in exponential time and I'm big-O of log(n).

I run gmake and gcc,
And I ain't never called malloc without calling free.
I'll beat your ass until it's colored like a red-black tree
'Cause there's so much drama in the PhD.

midday droll

Tue, 03 May 2005 23:05:33 +0000

Me, in South Park form. What would you look like as a South Park Character?

Life has been quite hectic recently. Midterms are rolling around and my procrastination of late has finally caught up with me. I have two exams within the next two days and I've barely even cracked the book for one class, and, in the case of my drama class, I haven't even bought the book for the first 5 weeks. Lovely. I did, however, buy the sparknotes versions of Hamlet and Macbeth -- two of the three plays that we're required to read for this stupid class -- and I watched the film version of the third (Titus).

Work has been going quite well. The software we're writing is really coming along and I'm getting to learn a bunch of cool gtk+ stuff, namely writing my own widgets.

Last week, I got to see a very cool demonstration of Ruby on Rails, this web development framework that Steve fanboys, by Tobias Luetke of Typo and Rails fame. Tobias demonstrated how to whip up a quick blog client with Ruby and even showed off some of the work being put into the framework to include full Ajax support.

I just yesterday finished reading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the book was exactly what everyone said it was -- a helluva book. I originally had plans to go to see the new movie with Amanda, but I bailed out on seeing it on the opening night because I was just needed some time for myself. Jon ended up talking me into rewriting buzzword for version 0.9 to utilize the php class generator he wrote for another project and I ended up spending a good part of the night designing a new default template. Its going to end up rocking famously if we can actually get the time to work on it. It will probably feature a lot of Ajax just like Typo -- maybe even live entry preview when you add or edit a blog entry. Its really awesome to see websites pushing the envelope with such an old technology like Javascript.

drunken musings...

Sun, 01 May 2005 02:51:36 +0000

Amanda Sanchez: i said that i harte Amanda Sanchez: appletinis Amanda Sanchez: hehe Amanda Sanchez: weeee brad: haha brad: harte? Amanda Sanchez: dinner should make me less drunk brad: omg, you're already drunk, arent you? Amanda Sanchez: whoops... heart Amanda Sanchez: i'm so not drunk Amanda Sanchez: =P Amanda Sanchez: hehehehe brad: you *so* are brad: wow... you're really, really bad Amanda Sanchez: i cnsa barelt see my plate of ffood Amanda Sanchez: but i'm so bot drunk Amanda Sanchez: *not brad: ahahahah Amanda Sanchez: shhhh Amanda Sanchez: my family has no ideas Amanda Sanchez: 'cuz i'm very qutie Amanda Sanchez: evne though i reallyjust wannt to giggle at everyghing brad: okay, this is going on my blog.

and then later...
Amanda Sanchez: i totally justspikled my dinner on my lap Amanda Sanchez: hottness

even later...
Amanda Sanchez: my tonfye is noyb Amanda Sanchez: numb' Amanda Sanchez: uhm, that shoudlbe tongue brad: how many appletinis have you had already? Amanda Sanchez: one with loads ofg alchomls Amanda Sanchez: well brad: holy shit Amanda Sanchez: and another thant i messed up a but brad: that must have been pure vodka Amanda Sanchez: so i just frand k it kidan quskci Amanda Sanchez: it's sjyy covdaka

Arent the drunk fun?

A slice of strife.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 06:46:34 +0000

Strange. While I was cleaning out my car today, I stumbled upon a set of keys to an older (say 90s?) BMW, complete with CVS discount card, house keys, etc. Attached was a ticket with the last name Todd and room number 49. I'm assuming that since Mr. Todd had a CVS card (which happens to be a pharmacy located everywhere but Southern California) that one of you people didn't leave it in my car and instead it was left by the wonderful hotel staff at The Commodore, the hotel that Amanda, Aaron and I stayed over winter break. I find it quite odd that in the 6 months since the trip, I didn't once happen upon them.

Speaking of San Francisco, I have a few photos of the trip available on my gallery, but even more are available on Amanda's gallery. Aaron, Amanda and I trekked up north for a week full of fun adventures including, but not limited to, Fisherman's Warf, Ghiradelli Square, shindigs in Golden Gate Park, hiking in Muir Woods and playing in the snow in the Grapevine. It was way way fun.

Shortly afterwards, Amanda had her 21st birthday which, of course, was chock full of absolutely horrible photos, most of which could be blamed on me. Okay, who am I kidding -- all the shitty ones were my fault.

Fig 1.1. Shitty photo of Chris

Fig 1.2. My reaction after seeing some of the shitty photos I took

Fig 1.wWHAT THE FUCK??!!!!!1111oneoneone

Shortly after that, I happened upon a wonderful entry in Planet Gnome (while in class) written by a one Todd Berman. Quoth Todd:

And speaking of work. We are looking to hire an experienced gtk application developer. You would be working fulltime on creating a gtk# application. While knowledge of C# would be a plus, knowledge of gtk+ is what we are really hiring. C# shouldn't take anyone more than a week (tops) to learn. We are looking to hire something who is willing to learn new things (C#, Ruby, HL7, to name a few), is legally able to work in the US, and will be willing to relocate to Southern California (This last one is somewhat flexible).

When I read these few lines, I threw myself out of my chair (in the middle of class, mind you) and sent him an email. By the next day, he had called me in for an interview and I was meeting with Steve, the co-founder and CTO of Medsphere, and Todd Berman himself. The interview went famously and after an almost two hour interview, I was having lunch with the Bermanator and his roommate Jackson. Now, I've been working with them for over 4 weeks on ubercool gtk# magic and I must say, I'm loving it. The pay is great, the work is on the bleeding edge, and the future outlook is famazing. I feel like I'm finally in career, no longer just working at a "job".