Art?

Very soon it will all be about Branding. At some point we need a proper artist to create the images and colours that best convey our message. This does remind me a bit of Google's initial logos which were obviously done in MS Word Art. The current logo on www.mediblog.co.uk was done with Visio and Paint. Which is why it's so awful.

dev url

try mediblog.co.uk

Server Time (Again)

Momentous day: today I ordered a Virtual Private Server from Rimu Hosting for Mediblog/Medys. How cool is that? well not very - all you need is a few dollars - the rest of the project is the hard work, eh?

Server Time

We had another short meeting last week and agreed to procure the server within the next week or so; the plan is to install the Liferay portal so we can start to get something up & running on the net and understand a little more about the issues of change control and portal integration (as well as the small matter of creating some Medys applications & Portlets. Watch this space!

Want to know about cancer?

..well if you do, I can recommend this special edition of Scientific American. It is slightly more "technical" than many would like to see but I'd say its the best introduction to what is known about cancer at the moment, and what is going on the research world to find cures. This will save a lot of hours searching for stuff in the internet. It's nice to see mention of Ralph Steinman in the piece on dendritic cells, Ralph is on the scientific review board of the Histiocytosis Research Trust, I met him once at the Nikolas Symposium, a really nice guy as well as a great scientist.

MS HealthVault

Just discovered the stuff the Microsoft are working on called healthvault. This appears to be a site and toolkit and a developer community and a whole bunch of other stuff around the idea of putting personal health data on the internet. They seem to be encouraging, in a kind of open-source-ish way, a whole new ecosystem. I expect this is some kind of response to google health and all the other things and ultimately aimed at generating money from advertising (tut, tut!) I think this is, like Google Health, a potentially good development as it is one more system that might encourage people to think it's a good idea to put health data on the internet. One guy in the blogosphere, Jon Udell (here), has done more research on healthvault than I can be bothered to do so have look at that link for more info on it. Incidentally, you can't get into it from outside the USA so that rules me out anyway!

PS - still doing more thinking than doing but all is not forgotten. :)

Update

..Not much to update yet, things are slowly happening on the corporate side (shareholder changes, new directors, bank account...) so will soon have a hosted server to play on. The WHO centile application is being specified which will be the first thing on the site. We have the latest versions of MyEclipseIDE for the development and will be finding some branding for the MediBlog site. Interesting that MyEclipse now includes some features for Portlets, about time I reckon! It's nice to see that portlet development is being recognised as serious requirement, I'm not sure how useful the specific functionality will be for us but we'll be checking it out.

Finally, Liferay are now on release 5.1 which has some very interesting new features - this does make things a bit tricky as we'll have to choose the initial platform version soon and they keep adding nice new things so fast its always tempting to wait for the next one..!