Princess Beatrice and Her Charities Have the Last Laugh
The price of her hat has now passed £75,000 according to the BBC.
Noone could call that anything but a good result for the charities she is supporting.
If you want to bid, the hat is still on sale here on eBay.
Poking a Hornets Nest
An unnamed footballer, who everybody who wants to know, knows who he is anyway, is trying to take action against Twitter, so that those that posted his name there can be hauled before the Courts to be punished.
All this will do is make matters worse, as many more Twitter users will just add to the posts.
The man, whoever he is, is an idiot and he is just pouring more money into the pockets of greedy lawyers. C did her first pupilage in defamation chambers and if she were still alive today, she would be cursing her decision to go into the much more rewarding field of Family Law, rather than stay in a more lucrative field, that relieves the vain of their easily earned money.
Alex Ferguson and Twitter
Alex Ferguson is quoted today as saying that his players should abandon Twitter and go to a library and read a book.
Why Twitter appeals to the average football and idiots of all kinds, is that because the character limit is 140 characters. Books are generally much longer than this!
On the other hand Boris Johnson was quoted yesterday after his first experience of Twitter was that this character limit makes you think about how to say something concisely. But Boris is a man who knows his words well, even if he sometimes puts both feet in his mouth occassionally.
Perhaps this thinking idea, is what Sir Alex should instill in his players. Lawyers wouldn’t be too pleased, as it would close off the quite a few routes, like superinjunctions of trousering a lot of readies.
Does the NHS Computer Records Fiasco Create an Opportunity?
I am certainly convinced and there are many others out there of the need to have a wordwide on-line database with the important details of my health records.
In my case, I think it should contain such things as.
- GP and specialist contact details.
- A health summary. Most people could write that themselves.
- Repeat prescriptions.
- Test results for things like INR, B12 etc.
- Eye and hearing tests.
- X-ray and other images. It is getting commonplace for specialist to give you these, but all we need is for them to be in a standard image form.
- E-mails from health professionals.
You would be responsible for the uploading of the data. In many cases it would just be ticking a box or writing a simple sentence.
Suppose someone was to provide such a service, then I would use it a shot. Someone might already have created such a database, but I’ve not heard of it.
People will worry about privacy, but then look at the average Facebook page. A lot of much more confidential information is often published there.
So go for it! There is a lot of money to be made!
And money to be saved by health consumers.
Imagine on a simple level you lose your glasses on holiday. If you’ve uploaded your prescription, you could probably walk into any optician and get new glasses quickly. Whether they’d want to supply without giving you an expensive eye test, would be up to the optician, but in most cases you’d be fixed up without trouble.
The NHS Computer Records Fiasco
Fiasco is not too strong a word for it, as this report shows.
Isn’t the whole NHS records missing project something here?
If I deal with my bank, solicitor, utility and phone companies, or many shops, I can go on-line to see what is there and communicate directly by e-mail, telephone or post as I require.
Where is that objective in the specification?
After all we can’t let patients see what’s wrong with them as it would be a breach of their confidentiality!
But my body and mind are generally under my control, so why shouldn’t I have the right of access? In some ways, it’s going that way, as my previous GP let me read my past records without any cost or hindrance. Also nearly everything about me from Addenbrooke’s has either been copied to me directly by post and in some cases e-mail.
Interestingly, when the practice nurse and I went through my records a few years ago, we could see the pattern of coeliac disease , which no-one had picked up. I know this was with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and nothing really serious was missed, but is the reason doctors don’t like patients seeing their records, is that they might get sued? Doctors have told me my atrial fibrillation is fairly obvious, so perhaps I should have been referred to a cardiologist before I had the first stroke?
But what is the past is best forgotten!
I should say one thing though. In Hong Kong when I had the stroke, they wanted to know my cholesterol levels, to check them against. As I put them on this blog, they were able to read them. So now, I put things like that up here, so that if I need them at any time, they are there.
Surely, this illustrates the power of an on-line database, where we all have a simple ID/Password system so that we can access the data.
If I could access my bank records from any Internet connection and a browser, why can’t I do the same with my health records?
Are There Any Delphi Programmers Out There?
Delphi was and in some peoples’ minds still is a visual programming system. On Wednesday, I bumped into an old friend on Moorgate. We had a coffee and I said that I was still ewriting software in a small way using Visual Basic 6.
He indicated that someone he knows, is looking for someone, who can program in Delphi.
Is this an indication that like good literature, good software systems never die?
Remember, that software is not like hardware in that it rarely has a shelf life. In fact application software usually is retired because you can’t find any hardware to run it on. At least with Windows, Microsoft seem to be providing the hooks into all new versions to run software like Visual Basic 6 and Delphi.
A few years ago, when I said to a senior executive of Microsoft, that I still programmed in Visual Basic 6, he said that Microsoft had lots of experienced programmers who still used the language, often in difficult situations, where something reliable and tricky was needed yesterday.
So perhaps, some programming languages and systems, are a bit like Shakespeare and Dickens. Not of this age, but still very much to be enjoyed.
Byron Hamburgers
I ate in Byron Hamburgers at Islington Green tonight. It was good and it made a nice change for me to have a real gluten-free hamburger and chips.
I also got to thinking about the similarities between my father and Lord Byron.
For a start they were both poets, although my father’s output wasn’t very large and was much less famous and was meant to be spoken with a Cockney accent. But then my father was probably a better printer than the noble Lord.
They both married women with the surname of Millbank, although Byron’s wife had a spelling of Milbanke.
And then just like I am a computer programmer, so was Lord Byron’s daughter; Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
But that’s as far as the links go.
Beware of Order.zip
I’ve got another of this nasty things this morning. This one was actually addressed to one of my main e-mails, so perhaps the spammers have modified them to make them more likely to get through. The structure of the e-mail always seems to be similar.
The title of those I have received is usually something like ORDER and a number.
All of the bodies are similar to this.
Dear customer.
Your order has been accepted. Your order reference is 94636.
Terms of delivery and the date can be found with the auto-generated msword file located at:
http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx/order2/Order.zip?to_client: zzz@zzzzzz.zzz
==
Best regards, Tel./Fax.: (168) 000 52 337.
Obviously the xxx’s and zzz’s obscure the danger. The zzz’s in one case were my e-mail address.
Note the phone number at the bottom, which doesn’t mean anything to me.
This form of the e-mail is the first I’ve seen. It will change in the future, once the anti-virus companies get their systems updated to stop these e-mails.
The last e-mail I got used a domain registered in Germany. The e-mail came from Russia.
Another Scam Like The CFX Group
I have just received an almost identical e-mail to the one I received from the CFX Group.
Hello!
Your order has been accepted. Your order reference is 198668.
Terms of delivery and the date can be found with the auto-generated msword file located at:
http:\creacioweb.net\xxxx.xxx
Best regards, Tel.: (734) 687 65 784
The e-mail I received was actually addressed to a legitimate company who supply milking machines. Note the xxx obscure the dangerous bit.
One characteristic of the e-mails is that they contain a link to a file called Order.zip. This file probably contains some sort of virus. There are more details here.
Interestingly, the web site http:\\www.creacioweb.net is registered in Spain. The site containing the virus in the CFX Group case also was registered there!
Super Injunctions and Deep Searching Software
I have written software that in the past has been used to deep search the Internet. I did it when a company asked me if I could help trace anybody stealing their IPR. I didn’t find anything at all and in that case that was a good result, as it meant there had been no theft.
However software like that could be easily written to deep search the Internet for relationships that shouldn’t be happening. Let’s say two well-known Premiership managers decided to have a good lunch together after the season in a good restaurant. As well they might! Someone might see them and put the story in a blog or tweet and unless someone else was searching for it deliberately it wouldn’t be found. But the deep search software would find it, if it was properly set up, say with a database of the names of all Premiership managers and footballers.
So just as Google tracks the links with its search terms, other software can be written to find relationships.
So celebrities had better be even more careful.
The Anonymous Widower 