கருவாச்சி காவியம்

I am back in pre-independence days @ Sokkathevanpatti. 150 pages away for back home.

New year routines

It's time again for predictions. This is the season when people make predictions for the new year and invent reasons for the failed predictions of the year - A lot of them are already floating around.

Being open is good

The Opendocument format used by the OpenOffice.org suit has become an ISO standard. As always microsoft is creating its own standard based on xml called the Office XML. I really hate it when people fork things at least when there is no significant difference in the goals - It's mere waste of energy - now somebody has to provide the Office XMl to/from ODF converter. I appreciate that this time around M$ has at least placing their specifications open. Only last week I was blaming about their proprietary formats which made it unfit for batch processing. Life is more fun when things are open - World, Open up!

Arm emulators

Early this year, I was searching for some arm9 emulators and found the following:

• Skyeye
  
• Softgun
  
• Swarm
  

Of these, Skyeye had the best support for ARM9 - AT91Rm9200 board in particular. I was able to bootup u-boot and the kernel successfully. Now, when I revisited Softgun, it seems to have a pretty impressive list of supported peripherals.

At Medica - Siemens exhibiting functional scenario of Germany's healtcare programme

• All the information of a patient is stored in a centralized server.
• The patient card called an eGK serves as a token to authorize the patient to access information from the server.
• HBA is the health professionals card that authorize doctors to access limited information of patients.

This scheme seems to be tighter and more centralized than the French government's "Sesam Vitale"

Germans marching towards better health care

Smart card otherwise called Chip card or IC card has been finding use in every field ranging from debit cards to driving license, cell phones to passports, Pay TVs to cryptographic IDs and now it is used in health care. The German government will be providing their citizens with an electronic health card - the obvious advantage will be easy searching/location and better management of user health history.

Google’s 56 forgotten (secret) pages

Makes an interesting read

http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html