Raspberry Pi:First Thoughts

Back in March, technology-circles were dizzy with glee when the Raspberry Pi went on sale. The websites handling sales crashed in a way strongly reminiscent of Take That tickets going on sale. And then... delay

 As a result of unexpected demand and a few unexpected glitches in the far east it took about two and a half months for my Raspberry Pi to arrive and become yet another piece of hardware that seemed a good idea at the time.  However, the question does arrive: what do I do with it now?

Give it credit where it's due, it's an amazing feat to create a functioning caseless PC in such a size and for such a cost.  It was never designed for people like me: a magpie-eyed technological-dilettante who never got beyond swapping PCI cards.  Just how do you hold it without touching human-static fragile components?

So I'm a bit left in limbo while people who it is designed at work out what to do with it.  Yes, there are some wonderful ideas coming through, but I'm limited by time, experience and talent from doing anything cutting edge with this cutting edge tech.

From the perspective of my living room, I'm feeling a bit like this infamous story from 1970s California where an early computer - the Altair - was the subject of much wonder and interest - but nobody could actually make it do anything useful

"Steve Dumpier set up an Altair, and laboriously keyed a program into it. Somebody knocked a plug out of the wall and he had to do that all over again but nobody knew what this was about. After all, was it just going to sit and flash its lights? No....
You put a little eh transistor radio next to the Altair and he would by manipulating the length of loops in the sofware - could play tunes....
The radio began playing 'Fool on the Hill'....Da da da, da da da....and the tinny little tunes that you could tell were coming from the noise that the computer was generated being picked up by the radio. Everybody rose and applauded. ... I proposed that he receive the stripped Philips Screw Award for finding a use for something previously thought useless. But I think everybody was too busy applauding to even hear me."

From Triumph of the Nerds PBS 2006 episode 1 : (Transcript)

iPhone clinical app wishlist

Let's have a thought exercise: Imagine you're about to give every junior doctor in a hospital an iPhone.  However, this iPhone will be crippled so that it's little more than a phone and a web-browser.  Before it's crippled, however, you have a choice of any clinical applications to install on everyone's iPhone - and then access to the appstore will be turned off permanently.

Obviously a clinical calculator would be good, but which one?  What other apps would be good for junior doctors?

(And yes, in this purely hypothetical scenario, let's assume I've already asked the doctors concerned what they want).

My small contribution to the Romney Bandwagon

I don't have an iPhone, so I can't download this not-particularly impressive social media application, designed to promote would-be-US-president Mitt Romney for his campaign for the newly-founded state of Amercia.  They'll need their own currency, I reckon - so here's my draft for US Lol-lars, and with a potential national motto.

No need to thank me, Mitt.  A trip to Camp Daffyd will do nicely.

Community Pharmacists: What's the worst that could happen

Today I found out that a hospital near me is considering that nearly all patients being discharged will get an additional discharge letters with instructions to hand them into their usual pharmacy.  The advice will suggest they arrange a targeted MUR, or alternatively discuss their medicines with the trusted local healthcare professional.

On the surface of it: great.  It directs patient to an aftercare service that us hospital pharmacists can't provide, where we can rely on any medicines problems being sorted out professionally.  It might even stimulate development of professional services so community pharmacy isn't as reliant on the current volume-based system.

I'm just wondering if it could end up not so rosy.  So I'm wondering if community pharmacists could have a think about what's the worst that could happen in this scenario.  Is there something that could go wrong, or is this my English skeptico-cynicism trying to pick holes in it?

Comments much appreciated.

What am I on about?

Last night I had an idea of having a look at what sort of things I tweet about on my main account @kevfrost.


I used the service Tweetbackup (http://tweetbackup.com) to generate a CSV file of recent tweets which I then categorised manually in MS excel.  It pulled off the past 837 and I've used the past 500 as my sample.  These 500 were tweeted over a 2 week period between 21st April and 5th May.


My self-defined categories of tweets are as follows

Computing      111             (Including social media, hardware, gadgets)

Humour            94

Pharmacy         73              (Including medical and other professions aligned to pharmacy)

Media              63              (Music, movies, TV, newspapers and other "old media")

Politics             50              

Interaction        48              (Tweets purely about interacting with other users)

Life                  26              (Tweets purely about what I'm doing now)

Work               17             (My day job)

Spectacle         10             (Photos etc that made me go wow)

Running             8

Now obviously, there's certain events that bias my results, this period covered the UK local elections 2012 and the London Marathon, so there's perhaps more about these than normal; and I wasn't running due to illness so there's less about that than normal.  This is to be expected in a reactive social media like twitter - I post to react and reflect on what's happening and what I'm seeing.

One in Thirteen Thousand (Giving Up Twitter For Lent)

Apparently 13,937 people gave up twitter for Lent. According to someone who's used Twitter's API to calculate this. A classic of selection bias if you ask me, but of course being an atheist, I'm the last person you should trust on matters of religion.

I'm one of them. But when does Lent end? I was taught in Sunday School and Church-sponsored primary school that it was 40 days from Ash Wednesday, to commemorate 40 days in the wilderness, but others tell me it lasts until Easter.

Ash Wednesday was on Wednesday, 22 February 2012. Easter this year is on April 8th. There's 46 days between them. This is one of many things that I find Christianity confusing. Perhaps that's why there's a whole field of study (exegesis) telling us why the bible doesn't mean what it appears to mean at first glance.

Anyway, I reckon my 40 days of ignoring the best source of news about the subjects and people I care about is over on Monday 2nd. It's been an interesting experience of determining the difference between savoir and connaitre in terms of habits and giving them up. However, I haven't suddenly started phoning people more or asking to see people in person - as some would think you might.

So what did I miss in my 40 days in the social media wilderness? Anything worthy of note?

Twitter isn't for Buddhists

I'm now about 32 days into a state of (almost) silence and deafness on Twitter. One thing I'm particularly reminded of is the Buddhist concept of "monkey-mind", and how social media entities such as Twitter and StumbleUpon rely upon and potentially exacerbate this state of mind.

For those who haven't flirted with Buddhism on occasion (or more), Monkey-Mind is a metaphor for "the random, uncontrollable movements of the monkey symbolise the waywardness of the native human mind before it achieves a composure which only Buddhist discipline can effect.". It's a bad thing, in other words. It points to the restless, magpie-like tendency of some people to reach for the next shiny thing. Twitter is all about the next shiny thing - be it a bon mot, a celebrity's indiscretion, the glamour of being retweeted by a celebrity or the repeated opportunity to bond with a group of like-minded friends.

Buddhism suggests that perhaps it would be better to be content without a constant stream of shininess. Another monkey metaphor comes in handy here - that of the monkey trap. You stick a treat in a box that a monkey can stick it's hand into but can not pull the treat out of with the treat in it's grasp. The monkey doesn't let go, because it wants the treat and doesn't realise it's trapped until it let's go. Buddhism is all about letting go of that which is temporary and alluring in the material world and focusing on the bliss of the calm soul.

At the moment, I like shiny. And I like shining. I like the passion I get from caring about this temporary and alluring universe that I find myself in. It's nice to be reminded that there are other paths though.