LinuxChix Los Angeles

The latest posting at LinuxMedNews seems to indicate things are heating up a little. What has been getting interesting has been a rising tide of voices including politicians both in the US and Canada as well as OSS vendors. Now there’s an Open Source Letter to President Obama online where the general public is invited to add their comments.

Woe to the unsuspecting Veterinarian not using proper species biometric logins!

(Absolutely couldn’t resist)

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages posted by James Iry is a wonderfully funny, and irreverent look at software development. My favorite?

1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

Yup, that’s Perl.

Makes me think of my history (herstory?). The first computer I ever worked on was the Apple IIe that included the C/PM card for the full 80 column computer experience. Ah, the memories of WordStar and playing Pong on that Apple.

I see Mr. Obama’s group seems to believe in the use of Drupal.

Don’t ya just love leadership by example?

Perhaps the notion of open source EHRs is really on a roll. The Dept of Defense and Veterans Health Administration have long been criticized for the lack of interoperability between their 2 healthcare systems. The VHA is open source and the DoD has been proprietary. Now, in a stunning turn of events, it sounds like they are thinking about having a more open EHR for the DoD.

Let’s see, we’ve now seen a US Senator, the Wall Street Journal and now even the land of proprietary procurement purchases talking about open EHR systems. What next?

The VHA’s home-grown electronic healthrecord system is open source (through the Freedom of Information Act) and freely available to anyone who wants to download it from the VHA’s website. The Wall Street Journal has recently suggested it might be a viable solution for medical facilities seeking a lower cost alternative to proprietary EHRs. (Those of us VistA watchers have been saying this for a long time.)