More UCLA Med Center employees peeked at celebrities’ record
The convenience of online medical record access can also mean the convenient dissemination of information as well. Despite notifications from UCLA Medical Center warning employees that it was auditing and taking a firm stance on unauthorized access to medical records, the privacy of a “well-known individual” was breached by two nurses and an ER technician who called up the patient’s EMR in mid-April, according to a critical state report released Monday.
Open Source Business Models
SugarCRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) application with the tag line “commercial open source”. This seems like a contradiction of terms but one of the founders and current CEO , John Roberts, is an open source advocate and former engineer so he understands the value in opening up the application and providing a free and supported version of the app.
Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte from FLOSS weekly actually interviewed John Roberts on July 14th and is worth a listen. It is SugarCRM’s intent to use this as the basis by which they can gain momentum in the market and propel the use of the for-profit side of the business. I’ve used SugarCRM on and off for a couple of years but only recently re-introduced this to our CEO for use in tracking sales opportunities and it has proven to be a very useful tool since we are a rather dispersed team of consultants.
Two areas where third-party developers can introduce plug-in modules are
SugarForge (OpenSource Only)
SugarExchange (OpenSource and For Fee)
The latest release of SugarCRM is 5.1 and introduces a lot of object oriented features that make this an even more modular application. I like the fact that, unlike many open source projects, they did not base or fork the development from an existing project but created a ground up application and corresponding framework.
Since working an ASP based EMR running ~90% open source software I’ve been intrigued how this business model would evolve. I think back to the early days of home computing and how readily available software was exchanged, albeit illegally, but how this helped propel the industry as a whole.
I think if EMR developers offered a cost effective or even open sourced version of their product to gain market share they could charge for truly value added features, as well as product and integration services on the back end. meanwhile gaining valuable information from community users.
I don’t mean cripple-ware but a truly useful application that you could gather feedback on use and feature sets that drive future development efforts. If a clinic likes the interface and the work flows fit well with their clinic or are configurable to conform to different work flows then this would be truly valuable information from the perspective of the developers building the application. I’ve mentioned one such open source based company but another is Fonality, the pervaders of Trixbox the open source VoIP PBX which is an amazing application and coincidentally integrates very well with SugarCRM. As a matter of fact many of the early Astrisk application distributions included SugarCRM by default.
Tags: crm, emr, Open Source, strategy, VoIP
Installing OS X on an HP nw8240 laptop
So I was doing a little research on how Apple has differentiated itself with its hardware compared to that of the commodity hardware in the PC Markets. I’ve heard of several stories when Apple converted to Intel processors of hackers trying to run OS X on non-Apple hardware. The biggest setback is the legacy BIOS that many PC’s still use today. Given that Apple controls the entire user experience by designing best-of-breed hardware with an operating system developed around this hardware they can pretty much choose whatever works best and fits their designs. One of these design requirements has been the use of Intel’s EFI which is an entire generation of technologies ahead of other PC makers.
This of course makes it next to impossible to install OS X which utilizes this EFI firmware to boot. Through Intel’s own spec they have developed a software specification for emulating this which is how some clever hackers have gotten past this requirement on PC’s with legacy BIOS’.
As you may have read through other posts I’ve been very happy running the latest 8.04 version of Ubuntu on my old HP nw8240 complete with the Compiz effects. However after reading this I had to see if I could get OS X to run on my laptop to see how it compared with Ubuntu on the same hardware. After doing a little searching I came across several articles on how to do this but none on how to do this on my specific hardware.
There are not many updates that can be made to the nw8240 bios however the one change that I made that eventually allowed me to boot the install disc was to enable multi-boot and set the timeout to 10 seconds. After that I was able to accept the defaults on the patched install disc and proceed with the install.
A couple of minutes later I was greeted with the following screen that gave me some glimmer of hope this would work.
A couple of more minutes later I got the initial install screen for Leopard.
After the typical registration screens I was greeted with a paltry sized 1024×768 resolution OS X desktop; a far cry from the 1920×1200 this LCD is capable of. Audio worked beautifully, Performance was moderately zippy. Since I didn’t have any wireless access I connected to an Ethernet cable and was quickly online with Safari. I downloaded Quicksilver and Firefox and was good to go. I changed the default background image and started looking at the core animation features built into the OS and quickly found out that their are several functions that rely on the OpenGL capabilities of the graphics card to work. While the FireGL 5000 adapter in the nw8240 is certainly capable of handling this the driver on the patched DVD I used did not support this by default so I was out of luck. Also updating this hackintosh caused a panic on reboot so I had to reinstall to get back to where I was before the updates.
Overall Impressions…
While this was just an exercise to see if I could get this to work I had no intention of keeping this on my laptop. I have become much too attached to Linux and compiz on this PC to move away so quickly not to mention I have a fully functional MacBook Pro that functions as my daily PC anyway and runs Windows and Ubuntu VM’s perfectly well. If you want to use OS X buy an Apple and take advantage of the integrated HW support. Yes, their hardware is more expensive but IMHO it is worth it if you really want to run OS X and support isn’t too far away for most people within a drive to an Apple store. The resolution and inability to change the underlying video drivers (and yes I tried) as well as the lack of updates were a big killer for me. This attempt while successful will quickly be rolled back to the latest version of Ubuntu which runs way better on this legacy hardware anyway.
Do you need OS X? Well that’s a topic for another post but I don’t think I can recommend anyone switch given the breadth of applications available on the Windows platform and the developer base is far greater for .Net applications than for Coco. For me I love the underlying *nix framework OS X is based on (BSD) which allows me some flexibility in mounting different drives, shell access to web servers, etc… Sure you can accomplish these things on a Windows server but running native Linux apps via X11 server on OS X is a killer feature baked right into the OS. Cygwin, while very useful, never really cut it for me on XP.
Microsoft and Apple strategies
I’ve started to take notice at the different business model approaches behind both Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft has a long history of providing backward compatibility with it’s software which, I believe, is one of the primary reasons why it has developed such a huge market share. Apple on the other extreme has complete control over the OS as well as the integrated hardware that it runs on top of. This, for many reasons, provides a fabulous method for managing the entire user experience. Having a limited and hand-picked chip set allows Apple to tweak and pull as much performance out of their hardware as they can. Microsoft has done a pretty good job at maintaining backward compatibility across many decades of releases, but they remain constrained by the breadth of commodity hardware that exists in the market and have been burned, unfairly, on many occasions due to “driver” issues that cause stability issues in the underlying OS. Apple is able to quickly resolve and address any issues that may come up rather quickly without having to go through so much regression and QA testing.
Many years ago Bill Gates was quoted as saying that software will never catchup to take full advantage of the software. What this translates to is the concept of efficiency in software design is moot as the hardware will be so powerful that software applications will find it difficult to keep up with the speed changes. While this concept was visionary it leads to the eventual outcome we see Microsoft in today with Vista which, in my own option has become a bloated piece of software that can’t possibly scale to the needs of multiple platforms like *inux or even OS X can. I can appreciate Microsoft’s efforts with their Windows 7 initiatives and think this is the right approach they need to take. Apple meanwhile is enjoying the rapid adoption of its OS and the stability they can provide by offering both HW and SW. Microsoft isn’t alone in this as Linux has this same approach but the open source community and early adopters don’t have the history or legacy application issues that Microsoft does so changes on this platform are accepted as norm. Looking from the perspective of an IT Director you want a stable platform that is supported and application that run atop of these systems that are also supported through multiple iterations of security updates, and OS enhancements. Many times in my career I’ve seen this lone server running in the back of the data center running some version of OS2/Warp that hasn’t been supported in years but runs this one small but important application… This is an IT managers worse nightmare and the motive for many enterprise development projects.
Apple, in many respects, has to function as sheep herders, but as their flock grows it will be much more difficult to wrangle their heard of consumers which is probably why Apple has stayed out of the Enterprise application market which is where Microsoft and even *nix variants to some extent have excelled.
Tags: Apple, linux, Microsoft, proprietary, strategy
Hamachi Personal VPN for OS X
Hamachi is the original name for the VPN client application for Linux, Windows, and Macs that allows for a virutual network to be created by simply joining with a Network name and a secure shared key. A virutal network adapter is installed and operates in the background tranfering traffic through a private (publically non-routable) IP address space. I’ve used this successfully on Windows and Linux and more recently Mac OS X. Windows installation is pretty straight forward. In this post I’ll review how to install the Hamachi client on the Mac. First, go to www.logmein.com and click to download the Hamachi client for Mac OS X. This is a command line installation so download the latest .tar.gz file to your Mac’s HD. Double-click on it to extract the Hamachi installation and configuraiton files.
Open up terminal, or my favorite iTerm, and navigate to the hamachi-x.x.x.x-x-osx folder you just downloaded. You will need to run the following commands as root so you will need to prepend sudo to your commands as follows.
Install hamachi:
sudo ./install
You will also need to install the tunneling adapter by issuing the tuncfg command.
sudo ./tuncfg/tuncfg
Now you can continue to utilize the command line interface or the easiest way to impelement this is to download the GUI interface HamachiX. This provides a visual interface much like the windows version that comes directly from the LogMeIn Hamachi Windows executable. Installing this in OS X will allow you to complete the remaining configuration.
You can click on the + Add button at the top of the HamachiX window
to add a network or create a new one.
Just don’t forget the Network name and password as you will need this for other Hamachi installation to access your virutalized network.
By the way for Linux users there is a similar but less feature rich Gnome GUI front end called ghamachi and can be downloaded here.
Tags: hamachi, howto, linux, Mac, osx, virtual, vpn, windows
Virtualization on the Mac with VMware Beta 2
I am a big proponent of virtualization in the enterprise and it has come in quite handy on my primary PC for virtualizing development environments for some of my .Net development as well as hosting several LAMP stacks running atop of Linux. VMware is my application of choice on the desktop and on the server. I’ve run VMWare for well over 6 years now on XP, Windows Servers, Linux, and now OS X and have had solid performance with consistent updates from what is now a property of EMC.
The first release of VMware fusion left a bit to be desired but I jumped on it none-the-less because of the portability of existing VMware appliances and machines. Within a few months another point release was issued that made it an almost daily utility for me. Now with the upcoming release of 2.0 VMware has added several features I think feature-for-feature will give other competitors, even the open source Zen, a run for it’s money.
Here is a snapshot of what is anticipated in the 2.0 release:
- Multiple Snapshots
- Save your virtual machine in any number of states, and return to those states at any time
- Automatically take snapshots at regular intervals with AutoProtect
- File and URL Sharing
- Share applications between your Mac and your virtual machines
- Finder can now open your Mac’s files directly in Windows applications like Microsoft Word and Windows Media Player
- VMware Fusion can configure virtual machines to open their files in Mac applications like Preview and iTunes
- Click on a URL in a virtual machine and open it in your favorite Mac browser, or configure your Mac to open its links in a virtual machine
- Map key folders in Windows Vista and Windows XP (Desktop, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures) to their corresponding Mac folders (Desktop, Documents, Music, and Pictures)
- Greatly improved reliability of shared folders—now compatible with Microsoft Office and Visual Studio
- Experimental Support for Mac OS X Server Virtual Machines
- You can create Mac OS X Server 10.5 virtual machines (experimental support). Due to Apple licensing restrictions, the standard edition of Mac OS X 10.5 is not supported in a virtual machine
- Display Improvement
- Improved 3D support
- Use 1080p full high definition video in Windows XP or Windows Vista
- Freely resize your virtual machine’s window and enter and exit Full Screen view while playing games
- Run Linux applications directly on your Mac’s desktop under Unity view
- UI Improvements
- The New Virtual Machine Assistant has Linux Easy Install in addition to Windows Easy Install
- Cut and paste files up to 4 MB, including graphics and styled text
- Status icons glow when there is activity
- A screen shot of the last suspended state of a virtual machine is displayed in Quick Look and Cover Flow
- You can remap keyboard and mouse input
- Keyboard compatibility between the Mac and the virtual machine is improved
- The vmrun command line interface is available for scripting
- Broader Hardware and Software Support
- VMware Fusion supports Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
- VMware Fusion supports 64-bit Vista Boot Camp; handles activation for Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007
- Experimental support for 4-way SMP (note: Windows Vista and Windows XP limit themselves to two CPUs)
- Support for Virtual Hard Disks
- You can mount the virtual disk of a powered-off Windows virtual machine using VMDKMounter (Mac OS X 10.5 or higher)
- You now have the ability to re-size virtual disks
All of these features are worthy of an upgrade in and of itself but VMware is offering this as a free upgrade to current Fusion customers - even better.
Source: VMware
Tags: beta, fusion, linux, Mac, osx, Upgrade, Virtualization, vmware, windows
Installing a 500 GB HD in a 17″ Macbook Pro
Here is how I replace my 160 GB hard drive with a Hitachi 500GB 2.5″ HD in my 17″ Macbook Pro. There are several sites and even video’s on the web that outline how to do this but to complement my post on how I moved both my HFS (OS X) and NTFS (Vista) partitions to a new hard drive I thought I would also post pictures of my install. My Macbook is less than a month away from being out of warrantee so I decided to go ahead and save the $80 or so that Apple charges to install a 320G drive and do it on my own with a 500G drive. This was actually a really easy project so don’t be put off by the steps as I’ve just detailed the steps and included pictures. Total time was about :30 minutes from start to finish.
Important: Installing this new hard drive was an intermediary step between my initial backup and restore of my data. Look a the “Restoring OS X and Boot Camp Partitions to a new hard drive” post for backing up your data to prepare this hard drive for installation and also for restoring. If you follow these steps when you install this HD you will have a bootable OS X partition just as you had before and will be ready for restoring your boot camp partition if you had one. Also last but not least this process will void your Apple warranty so keep this in mind. Apple will do a hard drive upgrade for you for $80, so if you are inclined to take this route there are other options for you to pursue.
Tools Required:
1 #00 Phillips Head Screwdriver
1 T6 size Torx Screwdriver (Star shaped head)
1 non-metalic driver to assist with lifting tape and connectors
1 multi-compartment case to hold several of the lilliputian screws used to piece this notebook together.
Note: A grounding pad would be a wise idea. I don’t have one in these pictures but what you don’t see is the grounding strap I used to be on the safe side since I didn’t want to risk doing any damage to the internal components.
Step One:
Remove the battery from the bottom of your Macbook Pro. I’m assuming you know how to do this. Just pull back on the two battery release tabs on the underside of your Macbook Pro.
Step Two:
Remove four Philip head screws that hold the cover for the memory in place.
Step Three:
Turn the Macbook Pro 180 degrees around to access three Phillips head screws. These are at an angle so keep this in mind when you put them back in so as not to strip the screw holes.
Step Four:
Remove the two Torx Screws just above the memory. You can see I removed my memory during this install just to play it safe.
Step Five:
Remove four Phillips head screws across the bottom near the hinge that attaches the LCD screen.
Step Six:
Remove four screws on both sides of the notebook
There is also two screws on the back of the hinge that need to be removed as well.
Step Seven:
Turn your notebook over and open the lid. You can start to remove the top portion of the keyboard by starting at the hinge and gently lifting and moving your way down the sides toward the front of the notebook. I included pictures to show how this will look as you remove it.
Gently lift the bottom of the keyboard assembly up. You must remove the ribbon cable connecting the keyboard assembly to the motherboard as indicated here. Just gently pull up on the connector and it should pop off. Don’t worry it pops back in.
Step Eight:
Remove the hard drive ribbon cable that connects to the motherboard
If there is a ribbon cable over your current HD just lift up on the tape to free it from the drive you will be replacing. Also, to the right of the drive is a bracket holding the drive in place. You must remove this assembly by unscrewing the two Torx screws holding it down.
The tape at the top portion of the drive wraps to the back of the drive and across the drive ribbon cable. You need to lift this tape up and out of the way in order for you to remove the ribbon cable that connects the motherboard to the hard drive. Gently lift up on the right side of the drive to remove it from its housing.
Step Nine:
Once you remove the drive from the laptop you will need to remove the rubber grommets and screws that allows the hard drive to sit snugly and quietly in the notebook and move these to the new hard drive.
Step Ten:
The silver colored screws that you put on your new hard drive fit into the holes in the hard drive assembly portion of your notebook. Just slide the hard drive into these holes, reconnect the ribbon cable and lower the hard drive into it’s new home. Put the hard drive bracket back in place to secure the unit.
Note: There is a size difference between the 160 G and the 12.5mm 500G HD but it does fit perfectly in the 17″ Macbook Pro case.
Just place the ribbon connectors back over your new hard drive and reconnect the hard drive ribbon cable back to the motherboard.
Step Eleven:
Reconnect the Keyboard assembly back onto the Motherboard.
Lower the top assembly back down and put your screws back in reverse order to patch things up.
Tags: Apple, Hard Drive, Upgrade
Moving OS X and Boot Camp partitions to a new higher capacity hard drive
The original HD that came with my Macbook Pro was a 160G 7200RPM Segate and suited my needs well. I had two partitions split about 50/50 between OSX and Vista via Boot Camp (~74GB-Vista) and 75GB-OS X). The solution was great as I was able to access my Vista partition through VMWare Fusion when running OS X and was able to boot straight into Vista when I needed to. I’ve had my Macbook Pro for about a year and have purchased and configured a variety of software for both Vista and OS X and was quickly running out of space to the point I couldn’t boot my boot camp partition via VMWare Fusion because I didn’t have more than 2G of available hard drive space. This quickly became a problem and moving files to and from my HD became too much of a chore so I decided to upgrade my hard drive rather than repartition OS X and take additional space from the Windows partition. There were several examples of how to backup and restore OS X HFS formatted partitions but only some untested suggestions on how to accomplish moving a boot camp NTFS formatted partition, so I thought I would share with you what I did to successfully upgrade the HD in my Macbook Pro and migrate the partitions to the new drive.
I’ll be making a separate post of what I did to upgrade the Hardware but below are the steps I took to backup and restore my system to the new hard drive:
What you need:
- Carbon Copy or SuperDuper for Backing up and restoring OS X volumes. Both work great!
- Winclone for backing up and restoring your Windows NTFS partition.
- Boot Camp Assistant for partitioning your new hard drive.
- A new higher capacity SATA hard drive and enclosure that you can put it in. I bought the Thermaltake BlacX hard drive dock which allows me to slip in any 3.5″ or 2.5″ Serial ATA Hard Drive for approx. $34. My drive of choice for my 17″ Macbook Pro was the 500GB Hatachi 5K500 which I got for about $230.
First Step:
Connect your new hard drive to your existing Mac. We will be erasing all data on this drive so be sure you don’t have anything you want to keep on this drive. I had already formatted it in Mac OS Extended (journaled) using Disk Utility but this may be an unnecessary step but for consistency sake this is what I did.
Open SuperDuper! and in the first drop down list next to Copy choose your source volume or your existing Macintosh HD. In the next drop down choose your backup hard drive.
Make sure that the “Backup - all files” option is selected next to using. This will erase your external drive and begin to backup your current OS X volume and make the external drive bootable. Note that the entire drive or partition is used for this step. So at this point I had a single 465GB OS X partition after everything was said and done.
After this is complete I would ensure that you can boot to your newly cloned OS X drive by rebooting and holding down the “option” key on your keyboard during the boot process. When you are presented with the available boot device options choose the external drive you just cloned. Make sure the drive boots up successfully before moving forward otherwise you may have trouble getting your system working when you physically install this new drive into your Mac.
Second Step:
Open Winclone and choose your current boot camp partition from the drop down list. My boot camp drive was titled “UNTITLED” (Note the image below shows new HD not my old 75GB partition…I upgraded my windows partition for more storage but we’ll get to that in a bit).
Click on the “Image…” Button to start the backup process. You will be prompted for a location. I chose to store this file on the external drive formatted as HFS (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from earlier. What Winclone does is creates a single file consisting of all the data in your NTFS partition. (Note: Winclone now backups NTFS and FAT according to their site so backing up either should work for you). So, you need to make sure that the drive you are backing up to supports file sizes greater than 4GB which HFS+ does so we are in good shape. Once you have chosen the name and location for your backup file let this application work through your partition and create the single image of your Windows parition. The larger your partition the longer it will take. For my 75G (60 Used) it took about 2 hours over a USB 2 connection.
Third Step:
With a copy of both your OS X partitions and Windows partitions you can shutdown and replace your current HD with your cloned HD. There are several sources that describe how to do this, like ifixit.com, but I’ll post my own efforts in another post.
With your new replacement hard drive installed and your Macbook all buttoned up your system should boot as it did before the upgrade. If your Windows backup image from Winclone is on the same drive you just replaced then you are free to move to the next step. Otherwise just connect a different drive with your Winclone image we performed in the previous step to prepare the next step of restoring your boot camp partition.
Fourth Step:
With your new drive installed and working properly with OS X you now need to re-partition your new drive using boot camp as you did initially when you first installed boot camp on your Mac.
Launch the Boot Camp Assistant and proceed to create your new boot camp partition.
I decided that I would give my Windows volume a little more space so I expanded it from the original ~74G to 101G. I simply moved the slider in the middle of these two drives to the left until I felt I had a big enough partion for both OS X and Vista. My original boot camp share was ~74G with 15G available. I work a lot in Windows sometimes for work so I wanted to ensure I gave myself enough room to install other software and keep files in this partition if I needed to so I increased the portion from my original 74GB to 101GB. When you are ready just click on the “Partition” button. The partitioning is fairly quick. When you are done you will see the dialog box below…
Since we are restoring and not re-installing Windows choose the Quit & Install Later button. You now have a complete boot camp ready partition to restore your old boot camp partition to.
Fifth Step:
Now we are ready to restore your Windows partition you backed-up earlier using Winclone.
Open Winclone and choose Restore at the top of the application screen.
Select where your Restore Image is located by clicking on the “Select Image” button. Remember this can be local on your newly installed HD or come from a different external HD you put your backup image on.
The Destination location will be the newly created BOOTCAMP partion we just created. Click on the Restore Button and be patient as the data gets restored back to your new Boot Camp partition.
After this is finished you are almost done… If you are like me an use VMWare to run your Windows partition as a virtual machine in OS X you need to make another step to get things working properly. If you try to boot your newly restored windows partition VMWare fusion will give you an error stating it can’t find the boot camp volume; least this is what happed to me. After checking that everything worked by booting into Windows directly by holding down the option key during a reboot and choosing Windows I looked for another solution. I found that if I removed the directory “Boot Camp” in Documents/Virtual Machines/ within OS X I was then able to boot into the new partition.
Overall the entire process took 4 hours to do the backups of OS X and boot camp partitions, about :30 minutes to do the hard drive replacement, and another four hours for the repartitioning and restore to complete but given the additional hard drive space 160GB -> 500GB it was well worth the effort considering I didn’t have to reinstall any operating systems or software and I let most of the backups and restores run while I was off playing with the kids or sleeping. The best part was not having to go through the long process of re-authorizing my Vista OS or Office software on my windows partition. I picked up right where I left off on both systems.
I’ve finally got the space I need to keep my media and applications flowing smoothly and will probably move my Linux virtual machines back to my laptop instead of keeping them on a separate hard drive. Good luck with your installation!
Update: I was experiencing a considerable slowdown when running the virtualized boot camp partition after this was finished however after a little digging I discovered that my virtual session was only allocating 512MB of RAM not the typical 2GB I had originally assigned before the transfer. This occured when I deleted and re-added the boot camp profile. VMWare uses this as a default value for new virtual machines. So just be sure that you assign the proper amount of RAM back to your Virtual Machine when everything is said and done.
Tags: Apple, Boot Camp, Hard Drive, Macbook Pro, Microsoft, OS X, Upgrade, Vista
Wordpress for iPhone now available
For all you mobile WordPress bloggers with iPhones. A new WordPress app is now available in the iTunes App Directory.
Not available yet for mobile download but I would imagine that will get refereshed soon as well.
Works great and users are finally able to post pictures while blogging on the run.
Setup is pretty easy offering far better options for posting and modifying entries then the web based plug-ins for WordPress blogs. A list of categories are available as well as the current status of your entry. The ability to post pictures is a much welcomed addition as well as a preview option for reviewing posts prior to posting. Kudos to the WordPress team and for making it Open Source
Tags: iPhone, iTunes, Open Source, WordPress
Apple Now Third Largest PC Vendor in US
Apple is moving up the charts, toppling Acer to become the third largest PC vendor in the U.S., according to a survey from Gartner. Apple defied a weakening economy to record a 38.1 percent growth rate in U.S. PC shipments, according to Gartner. Overall PC shipments in the U.S. grew just 4.2 percent to 16.5 million units during the quarter. Looks like Apple with its hold on hardware and the OS might be on its way to becoming the next big monopoly. I just hope they keep producing good hardware and software.
Tags: Apple, marketshare, PC Vendor