When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, we knew that Epocrates Rx was coming. Strangely, it took forever for some of the obvious other medical utilities to appear….
For those who don’t know, in my “other life” I am an academic hospitalist. Having appropriate medical utilities on my iPhone is quite a boon - no more carrying my palm pilot AND cell phone around…
This is just a collection of random thoughts about various iPhone applications….
There have been a flood of iPhone applications since the App Store opened. Some of these applications are useful and well designed, and some are utter crap. I’ve bought a few that I shouldn’t have, and I’m sure there are some gems I have not discovered.
This will be where I track which applications I am using the most (subjectively), and leave comments about some of them.
For anyone who watches this site regularly, you will want to update your syndication URL’s for the new setup. The old ones weren’t great, but with the new configuration, they’re broken.
Getting a real website to work with Internet Explorer, without resorting to endless tricks and workarounds is a real pain in the ass. Someone needs to just delete all the source code for that program so that we can just move one…
However, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon, unfortunately.
from xkcd.com
After getting MultiMarkdown and SmartyPants to play nice, I realized that all of my old pages and entries were formatted to use either MultiMarkdown or Markdown and SmartyPants, depending on which features were more important. I did not relish the idea of changing them all manually.
I’m not sure what happened, but I once agained copied the perl scripts from my home installation to my web host installation of Movable Type. I swear I had done that before….
I finally got the OpenID server for Movable Type working. This means that I can switch my OpenID that is linked to my web site from a 3rd party. I had previously used myOpenID as the provider, but I wanted to run it myself if I could.
It took a bunch of playing around, but I finally got things working (I think) so that I can have both MathML and comments.
In enabling MathML via converting the site to XHTML 1.1 compliance, I appear
to have broken the comments system. I need to dig into this further, so the
site is back to being served as text/html, and MathML doesn’t work for the
moment.
More to come.
Some books I have read that were interesting. In general, I will leave out most medical stuff and fiction. I’ll try and focus on books that are applicable to different aspects of life, science, and business…
For a while I’ve been intrigued with some of the statistics used for rating people at certain tasks, e.g. chess. There are several mathematical systems for assigning numerical ratings to chess players. For example, there is the Elo rating system and the Glicko rating system. I don’t really play chess anymore (arguably, I never really did), but I’m still interested in how the ratings system works, and how well it could be applied to other areas.
Some of my favorite movies, in some semblance of order, starting with #1:
I modified my Movable Type setup to serve compliant XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0.
I have been experimenting with the CSS on this site to attempt to apply some basic principles of typography. It definitely makes a difference, and I hope to continue to learn more about this.
After lots of trial and error, I think I finally have a fairly solid handle on what it takes to get a web page to properly display MathML. Depending on your situation, you can follow one of the sets of instructions below.
Previously, I used the SDF Public Access UNIX System as my web host. I was happy with the service I received for the price ($36 for a lifetime of use!), but I wanted to try something new.
I am currently using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET as my web host, which offers pretty good rates. Currently, the cost is $1.00 per gigabyte of bandwidth, and $0.01 per megabyte per month of storage.
This page is a placeholder for links to various color related tools on the web.
by Robert Pinsky
by W.H. Auden
I recently discovered Context Free, a nice program for using simple mathematical models to create some pretty interesting graphics.
I struggled with getting postfix to send outgoing mail using Gmail for quite a bit — I followed various directions on the internet that seemed excessively complicated. It turns out I was right - they were needlessly complicated.
Turns out it’s pretty simple.
Just as a warning — as I continue to tweak the Movable Type setup, there will be some intermittent strange happenings here. For example, I realized that I would have to move my “static” content to Pages, so that I could have date-based permalinks for the “blog” type content (such as this entry). Otherwise my root folder of the site would become absolutely cluttered beyond all hope. So, if you can’t find what you’re looking for — check again in a minute or two.
Thanks!
I have moved the MultiMarkdown content away from OddMuse and into Movable Type. I hope to find an easy way to move the comments over, but that may be tricky. We’ll see what I come up with.
I’ll continue to post status updates periodically.
