I finally mustered up the spare time to move from the old system of FreeMED authentication to a pluggable system. I have only coded up two plugins for now: a “Password” plugin, which uses the old system of authentication and password checking, and a “Basic” plugin, supporting HTTP Basic Authentication. I’m also currently considering writing an LDAP plugin to allow FreeMED credentials and basic ACL information to be stored on an LDAP server, to really allow for enterprise deployments. On top of all this, I have been doing some “house cleaning” in the code so that FreeMED is more autonomous on startup.

My newest project with FreeMED has been to implement a way to securely warehouse medical data offsite. This relates to Dr Gnu’s article about disaster recovery. I have been using SSL WebDAV with a slim C client built on neon to push gnupg-encrypted SQL dumps (both incremental and full) to the archive server, which is perhaps temporarily residing at https://archive.freemedsoftare.net/. In this way, whoever is hosting the archive cannot read the medical data without the gnupg keys held only by the provider who “owns” the medical records. HIPAA compliance, here we are …

I have been working on an interface with Quest Diagnostics to be able to automagically import HL7 v2.3 messages into FreeMED. They were nice enough to furnish me with some documentation, and I have an alpha-quality implementation ready for some beating in one of our alpha sites. Now that 0.8.0 is out, I’m working steadily on a 0.8.1 release, with mostly bugfixes, some rearchitecturing, and a few nice features like this one (hopefully).

I have released the FreeMED 0.8.0 and REMITT 0.3 combination, along with phpwebtools 0.4.5. I’ve found that Subversion rapidly decreases my development time, as it allows me to focus more on the programming and less on annoying problems. I have also been working on some of Irv’s ideas regarding secure data warehousing, and the next version of FreeMED should support that “out of the box”, without the need to configure anything complicated.

I’m currently finishing up the final touches on the FreeMED 0.8.0 release right now, as REMITT 0.3 and phpwebtools 0.4.5 are already “ready to ship”. I’m also touching up a nice FreeMED Live CD, based on the kubuntu “Hoary Hedgehog” live CD, so everyone will be able to try out FreeMED REMITT without having to make the commitment of formatting a machine. Thanks to B-MAS, Inc for funding (and helping out with) the development of this live CD. As soon as the rest of the bugs are ironed out, it will be released on FreeMED’s sourceforge page. I look forward to hearing from everyone about this on the new FreeMED support list (support at freemedsoftware.org)!

It’s final; I have moved FreeMED, a six-year old project with a CVS tree that old, to a new replicated subversion repository system. This should let me spend far less time fighting with sourceforge’s CVS servers, as well as provide an easier way to maintain the large number of files and directories in FreeMED.

We’re less than a week from the launch of FreeMED 0.8.0, REMITT 0.3 and phpwebtools 0.4.5, which will be released together, and everything is in deep freeze, so I will be only committing packaging changes and extreme paper bag bug fixes over the next week. Then we branch the code into stable and unstable, and start some serious development work …

It has been a little while since I have posted anything musical here, so it’s about time to get back on that track. I’ve received two presents … from myself … a Line 6 Bass PODxt Live and a Behringer VX-2496 Vocal Processor. I have to admit, vocals and bass haven’t sounded that good in a long time. For those who don’t know, I have been an ardent bass player for years, and a Bass POD has been on the top of my list for years. I hope to post a few samples of output from that, soon.

I have been hard at work, getting our favorite medical billing engine to support generating patient statements, in addition to its current payer billing capabilities. In addition, I have been adding some rich font support for PDFs, while all font attributes are stripped out or ignored when generating plain text or other formats which do not support it.

In addition, I was reading an article on building an extremely low-latency box for professional audio, when I was appalled to see a comment that “the most obvious choice of operating system for musicians is still Windows XP Professional”. If I may rant a little, I really don’t think so. There’s nothing obvious about awful latencies, rarely consistent hardware support, and on-and-off blue screens. With jack, ardour, hydrogen, jamin, and other fine professional audio products, what is stopping you from making the move from the dark side?

I have been starting to consider changing distributions for the studio machine, lulled away from the safe confines of the known to something which seems to be much nicer in terms of user experience.

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite ready in the realm of low-latency audio, so I have been working at packaging up the most important applications, as well as putting together a nice low-latency kernel package for the 2.6.x series of kernels which Ubuntu uses.

We’ll give more progress as this progresses further. The kernel is building as we speak …

I’m back to work on REMITT, the REMITT Electronic Medical Information Translation and Transmission engine. (Yes, I know it’s a recursive acronym.) There’s a significant portion of development which is going into attempting to be more elegant in my code. We’re attempting to add trending and other important features to REMITT, as well as some that are probably best kept quiet until they are ready.

Work on FreeMED’s wxWidgets remote UI is coming along well; we’re working on patient entry right now. I’d throw up a screenshot or two, but maybe after the weekends’ coding time has come and gone …