The Massachusetts Department of Public Health started publishing, on April 14, 2020, epidemiological data for each of the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns. The results come out once a week each Wednesday. They publish them in .pdf and .docx format. And, they don’t keep previous weeks’ data on their web site. Here is a .csv file containing all the data… Read more →
Electronic Health Records considered harmful
Wow. Authorities finally figured what doctors have been saying for years. EHRs suck time and attention. The primary-care doctor who sees me works for a gigantic health-care conglomerate. He uses his own money to hire young people to sit and type mandatory gibberish into EPIC while he examines patients like me. Everybody knows the purpose of EPIC is CYA: to… Read more →
The Field Epidemiology Manual: Communications
The US Centers for Disease Control publishes a Field Epidemiology Manual with lots of great material on how to handle epidemics. There’s a great chapter on communications during an epidemic here. (Infosec incident response planners would be wise to read this material; lots of it applies to communicating about data breaches. Back to the topic at hand.) Communication starts with… Read more →
The first robin of spring 2020
Web Services in C#: Payloads: PUT, POST, PATCH
We send data to a web service via POST, PUT, or PATCH. All these web requests carry a payload: one or more items of data. How do we code these web services to accept data? Read more →
Web Services in C#: Status, Parameters, Cookies
Status Codes Real Web services have to be able to pass back a status code. Maybe it’s a plain 200 success code, or a 404 not found code. Whatever. We have to be able to control it. Here’s how. We’ll use the NegotiatedContentResult template class in the signature for the Get method. We have to cope with the pickiness of… Read more →
Web Service APIs in dotnet C# made easy with ApiController: Part 1
Setting up your web service Dotnet’s stuff for developing web applications includes an inheritable class called ApiController. This makes it easy to develop REST-style web services, either for standalone API servers or in the context of larger servers. To start using ApiController, however, requires navigating lots of Microsoft documentation; as of early 2020 that documentation is pretty much all machine-generated… Read more →
JSDoc configured
JSDoc is a way to put programmer documentation in Javascript code. It’s in the tradition of Doxygen , Javadoc, and C#’s documentation comments. And what a sorry tradition that is. Tools for extracting that kind of documentation and making, well, documents from it are just atrocious. (Set me straight in a comment if I’m wrong.) Sure, the various IDEs use… Read more →
Hoarding? What? Really?
I went to Market Basket this morning to buy groceries. Market Basket, with their crew, is a major civil institution stabilizing life these days. Love ’em. There’s TP (“bog roll” to English and Scottish friends) available again. I guess the people who’ve laid in several decades’ worth of supplies have figured out they don’t need more. The ramen is almost… Read more →
Cloud adventures in CPAP
My dentist, the competent and honorable Dr. J. P. St. Clair, has been pestering me for more than a year saying, “You snore. I can tell by looking down your mouth. Do something about it!” So I finally did. I took a “home sleep test” and the sleep clinic people said, yes you should do something about it. Plus Carolyn… Read more →