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Thinking About Programming

HIPAA, Your Healthcare Privacy, And ITAugust 6

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HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) is a big law which covers a whole host of things in the realm of healthcare in the U.S. Although the phase-in of its many parts are almost complete, the changes are still rippling across the country. Why a topic for this blog? I recently worked at a healthcare company and got to learn a whole lot of about it and its impact on privacy, security and IT.

Why Should I Care?

If you are alive in the U.S. HIPAA affects you. Most people have very little idea of what it is and what those affects (both public and behind the scenes) are, so I thought I would share what I learned.

HIPAA Overview

HIPAA has a number of sections, divided into two Titles (I) Health Care Access, Portability, and Renewability and (II) Preventing Health Care Fraud and Abuse; Administrative Simplification; Medical Liability Reform. Title II is further broken up into a number of rules (1) Privacy (2) Transactions (3) Security (4) NPI and (5) Enforcement.

Generally (I) and (II,1) are what the general public sees. Everywhere you go you need to give permission for people to look at and access your healthcare information; and finally you can take your healthcare coverage with you when you switch jobs (provided you follow the rules) and not be denied coverage. At my local pharmacy for example you can't stand in line direct behind someone pick

A Tale Of Two WaterfallsMay 6

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Before I poke waterfalls with a stick, a couple of stories.

Story, Waterfall One

Project Manager: What are your requirements?

Customer: I want to float on the Niagara river.

Project Manager: What would you like to float with?

Customer: A boat?

Project Manager: What type of boat do you require?

Customer: Maybe a canoe?

Project Manager: OK, sign here and we will build you a fine canoe!

[Later]

Project Manager: Time for the customer acceptance test, please try it out.

Customer: Hey it works great.

Project Manager: OK, project complete, good luck!

[Customer floats down the river, falls over the edge of the waterfall]

Customer: Wait, this isn't what I need!

Project Manager: Sorry, you agreed to it. Request a change order...

[Customer dies horrible death]

Story, Waterfall Two

Project Manager: What are your requirements?

Customer: I want to float on the Niagara river.

Project Manager: What would you like to float with?

Customer: A boat?

Project Manager: What type of boat do you think you might need?

Customer: Maybe a canoe?

Project Manager: OK, we'll try that out first.

[Team builds a

Writing Multithreaded Code Is Like Juggling ChainsawsFebruary 6

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Writing multithreaded code is like juggling chainsaws; amazing when it works and truly sucky when it doesn't.

Right now at my job I am writing the foundation for a transaction processing cluster in Java, so I'm immersed in lots and lots of threads and interacting applications. When you are processing 8000 of something per second, any problems in your approach or in your choice of frameworks is magnified.

In job interviews, a popular question is "what is the major problem you have to solve in writing multithreaded code?" Generally, if they have read a little about it, they often say "avoiding deadlocks". If they have done a bit of thread coding, maybe in Swing, they might say "protected shared data". Only the truly experienced in complex threaded coding will say "avoiding doing nothing".

What's do bad about nothing? Assuming you can avoid deadlocks (generally not hard if you're disciplined) and understand when to protect data, when working in a complex high speed system you want to accomplish both of those basic requirements without slowing down the real work your threads are doing. In a Swing app, so a couple threads block for a while, or even less of a problem is a few waiting around for something to happen. In a large cluster of servers, having threads sitting around doing nothing is a waste of money. If Google is processing millions of searches daily, and half of their cpu's capaci

If Java Is A Dinosaur, Then I Must Be In The Triassic EraJanuary 9

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I keep reading blog posts where people equate Java with Cobol, that it's a dying language not suited for work today, and that people who use Java are generally less intelligent about programming in general. Given that dinosaurs ruled the earth another 50 million years or so after the Triassic period, I'd say Java still has a long useful lifespan.

Not that it's perfect at all, but I've been using Java for almost 10 years now, and compared to my years of C and C++ I am fairly glad I moved on. I've worked for years starting with Basic, then Fortran, Pascal, Assembly, C, C++, Objective-C and finally to Java; I've seen a steady improvement in my ability to be productive with my language and its entourage (frameworks, libraries and communities). Like the dinosaur, every language eventually falls out of favor as new "mammals" appear but rarely does a language die out completely. Like most animals and plants, they survive and even thrive in different environments way beyond the general evolutionary landscape that might otherwise kill them off. How else can you explain Object Cobol?

For me I find I can do almost anything in Java, provided a reasonable set of choices for the environment I am writing code in. I dislike most of J2EE but there are so many better ways that have sprung up to write Java applications unless you are forced to use the worst of breed "standards". It's not the language that kil

Ask Me How Much I Hate XCode and CDecember 13 2007

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In the mid-90's I spent 5 years working exclusively in C++ after years of C. I learned all the ins and out of STL, templates, overloading and the like. Now after 10 years of Java I've spent a little time working with C++ again - working on some game code for WWIIOnline, rewriting my sound code again to support Core Audio in Leopard (and eliminating OpenAL use).

Argh, C++ is so painful to me now, and XCode as an IDE is beyond lame compared to my beloved IntelliJ and even the recently learned Eclipse. Poke me in the eye with a C# stick, it would hurt less.

XCode is the latest generation from Apple, going back to the early days of MPW in the 80's, and then passing through the tools from NEXT. Some days I really feel that the folks at Apple have never worked with a real Java IDE. Other days I feel sorry for them having to carry the baggage of a generation of make files and command line tools around all day. I mean IntelliJ and Eclipse are constantly compiling the Java source while I am typing it in, making it easy for the IDE to spot errors, inconsistencies, provide tips and hints and refactorings on the fly. C++ (and even Objective-C) despite on paper being faster in execution, apparently cannot be compiled fast enough to provide the same level of feedback. With IntelliJ I rarely ever see a compiler error. With Eclipse I rarely even see the compiler at all.

So working in C++ and XCode is