Another near-death Apple upgrade experience

So I decided to upgrade my Macbook Air 11, late 2013 to Yosemite. After all, I’ve been holding off for a couple of weeks to make sure no major problems would surface and be reported on the net. Since everything seemed clear, I did it. Or, rather, I tried it.

First, I updated Audio Hijack Pro to eliminate a known problem with that. All other updates were done. I made a full image using SuperDuper (am I glad I did…). Then clicked the upgrade button in the AppStore. 

An hour for the download, fifteen minutes for the upgrade, which gets stuck at the “4 minutes remaining” mark for two hours, and then I do a hard reset. Boots, but crashes at login, back to login, becomes entirely unresponsive. No mouse movement, no nothing.

Now I’m in the process of restoring from the SuperDuper backup, which booted fine, albeit very slowly (running on an external USB disk, that’s to be expected). Let’s hope this works. It usually does, but you never know.

Really, Apple, what’s up with the quality control…?

Horrible Apple update quality

There are two updates waiting to be done on a Mac Mini Mavericks server here. Both cause problems.

Security update 2014-005 1.0

This one causes the App Store app to become corrupt. There’s no way to do more updates once this happens. Also, there’s no way I know of to download it and reinstall it. If this isn’t a FUBAR, I don’t know what is. Yes, I restored an image and tried again, same thing. The restore didn’t recover the app, though. Don’t know why. Had to take it from another Mavericks machine and copy it over (you have to use sudo to get past OSX’s reluctance to replace that app). Now I’m wondering if applying the update, then replacing the App Store app would work, but I’m sick and tired of this nonsense, so it will have to wait until I gather enough energy to try yet again.

OSX Server 3.2.2

This is the second update in the queue right now. According to the description, it brings all kinds of improvements, but in actuality, the only thing that it clearly brings is a total failure of the wiki system. There’s no connection to the database. Had to restore from backups every time I tried this update.

This is not good. Let’s just hope that some later update is better.

One more thing…

It would be good if I could tell software update I don’t want these two updates, but I don’t see how. So the machine continuously keeps bugging me about restarting to do them. Very, very aggravating.

TEDx Uppsala tickets open

I’m copying over the promotional email I got. Note that the last day to apply for a ticket is October 24, 2014.

 

A Day of Mind-Blowing Talks and Personal Stories

 TEDxUppsalaUniversity will run their second event ever at Uppsala Stadsteater on Saturday, November 15. 

 Eight local and international speakers, ranging from scientists to authors to activists to musicians, will give unique, surprising and personal talks around the theme ‘Who Cares?’. Join us for a day of brilliant talks and workshops that will blow your mind and make you wonder: what do I really care about?

 TEDx is designed and organised entirely by local volunteers in Uppsala. The independently organised event will be held in the globally recognised TED style.

 And our guests are…..

 Speakers are being added to the event throughout the whole of October, and the list is still growing. Preliminary speakers include: 
  • Sofia Falk, a former undercover agent for the military who has since devoted her life to making organisations better for women
  • Ida Lod, Stockholm-based violinist and performer will give us a musical piece with a surprising twist
  • Otto Cars will talk about the dangers of infectious diseases in today’s world.
  • Alan AtKisson will tell us “how to create a long-term global art project that can involve thousands of people and change the world”
  • Malin Forsgren, who shelved her career to build the Swedish branch of worldwide organisation Operation Smile, which now provides half a million free health checks and 20 000 cost free operations every year to children with facial deformities, will talk about how “reason leads to conclusion, but emotion leads to action”.
  • Martin Wehlou will show us how he aims to revolutionise the way doctors make their everyday decisions.
  • Jan Chilar will give a short, practical talk “what does ‘clean’ mean?” will challenge our conception of how we should use chemicals in our lives. From bathing rituals of ancient Romans to sophisticated cleaning products of contemporary society, improvements in hygiene have always gone hand in hand with increased public health… but do we need all those cleaning products? What if our grandma was right when she told us to spray vinegar all around the house?
  • More to come!

Watch TEDxUppsalaUniversity live!

If you want tickets to the live event at Uppsala Stadsteater on Saturday, November 15 can apply on the TEDx Uppsala University website www.tedxuppsalauniversity.com from Monday, September 29.

The event will also be live streamed on our website during the event for those who want to be a part of TEDx live. Get a few friends together and watch a day of brilliant ideas and personal stories. Edited videos of each talk will be posted the week after the event. Check our websites, Facebook or twitter for this release.

Lakin Anderson, Film, Marketing & Media Coordinator, TEDxUppsalaUniversity 2014, Uppsala, Sweden  lakin@tedxuppsalauniversity.com +46 (0) 760 90 58 52

EU home affairs chief secretly worked with US to undermine new privacy laws

EU home affairs chief secretly worked with US to undermine new privacy laws, campaigners claim — Tech News and Analysis: “The digital rights group Access has revealed an email that suggests outgoing EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström collaborated with the Americans in a successful attempt to water down Europe’s new privacy laws.”

Rethinking the Electronic Healthcare Record – The Book

My book “Rethinking the Electronic Healthcare Record” is now out. You can get it almost anywhere, but the best description is on the Amazon.com page.

The blurb:

9789198170603-Case-2 epub

Current electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems utterly fail to assist doctors and nurses in their work; designed without recognizing the actual needs of those users, but rather solving mostly administrative problems instead. This failure results in an ongoing lack of safety and efficiency in care delivery. We need to do much better. This book lays out how an effective EHR system should be built to deliver effective support for a doctor throughout the phases of her profession, from how a doctor learns her profession, to how she examines a patient, analyzes clinical findings, reaches conclusions, and finally applies therapy. The result is accurate, economic, safe, and consistent healthcare.

Scrivener, BibDesk, LaTeX, and symlinks

Situation:

  • Writing in Scrivener on OSX
  • Using BibDesk for bibliography
  • Writing several different articles or books using the same BibDesk database
  • Getting the database into the local folder tree so that it is included in version control

Assume the database is at:

~/Documents/BibDesk/Database/References.bib

In Scrivener, use the following in the meta-data page, which is the first page in the manuscript:

Base Header Level: 1
Title: Rethinking the EHR
Author: Martin Wehlou, MD, CISSP
BibTeX: ../BibRef
mycopyright: 2014 Man in The Middle AB, Sweden.

Then, in the base folder of your book or article, create a symbolic link to the real BibDesk database file:

ln -s ~/Documents/BibDesk/Database/References.bib BibRef.bib

The “base folder” is the folder where your .scriv file is. Scrivener creates the .tex files in a subfolder, so that’s why you need the “..” before “BibRef” above. By the way, I called the link “BibRef” just to make it clearly different from the actual database name, but you can use anything you like. As long as it doesn’t contain blanks or strange symbols.

Now everything works and life is good.

Rethinking the Electronic Healthcare Record

As mentioned before, I’m writing a book about how the EHR should be built and why. The latest, and possibly last, draft is available at:

http://wehlou.com/ehrbook/draft.pdf

This draft is significantly shorter and more focused than earlier drafts. I’ve also incorporated the “combinatorial matching” idea from L.L. Weed, and modified it to be more scalable. With that, I have a knowledge-based support and documentation system, with a complete flow from first patient contact to treatment. It goes way beyond what any current EHR systems do, and would be the help we need as doctors, instead of the drag of the current generation.

Any comments are welcome. My email can be found under the section “Draft Versions” in the manuscript. You can also comment on the blog itself, of course. At least during the first two weeks, then they’re closed (due to spam).

Swift, missing idea #1?

Going through “properties”, I’m not finding anything about private and public properties, or protected. I’m also not seeing anything about header files and class files, so at first blush it seems we can’t hide properties from other classes. How do we stop people from using the wrong properties?

That can’t be good. I must be missing something.

Swift, good idea #1

There’s a lot of good stuff in Swift, of course, but adopting Ruby’s block syntax seems a really nice idea. It’s called “trailing closures” in Swift, but it’s the same thing, as far as I can see. An example from the text:

let strings = numbers.map {
    (var number) -> String in
    var output = ""
    while number > 0 {
        output = digitNames[number % 10]! + output
        number /= 10
    }
    return output
}

Everything between braces is the block, um.., trailing closure.

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.” iBooks.