Fred Trotter

People often do not get why I am so convinced that only GPL Software should be used in Medicine. I can understand why. Without understanding the nature of Healthcare, people assume that I am being religious about the issue. This is the furthest thing from the truth.

It has been a while since I have blogged over at GPLMedicine.org. In fact you can see that I still have some site maintenance to do. But recently more attention has been given to the issue of Open Source and Software Freedom in medicine.

The Software Freedom Law Center has just released a paper called Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices

Awesome title. Even more awesome paper.

The form of the argument is so simple:

1. Hey you are putting hardware AND software in my body? yep.
2. I cannot look at the software? nope.
3. And the software is hackable? yep.
4. Well that kinda sucks.

Feels kinda icky don’t it?

One thing I love about people with pacemakers or other implantable medical devices, is that they know they are cyborgs. Most people living in modern countries are cyborgs, but unlike people with pacemakers, they do not see it that way, because they carry their electronics, rather than implanting them. Makes no difference. In fact lets play a variant of “You might be a redneck“: I call it “You might be a cyborg..”;

• If you leave your cell phone at home, and you -must- to leave work to go home and get it, you might be a cyborg.
• If you will sleep through the morning unless a machine wakes you up, you might be a cyborg.
• If your spouse is jealous of your cell phone, tablet, laptop, server or workstation, you might be a cyborg
• If not wearing a watch makes you uneasy, you might be a cyborg
• If you view any relationship you have with an online service as an addiction, you might be a cyborg
• If you try to avoid walking more than 100ft in favor of a segway, bicycle, golf cart, or automobile, you might be a cyborg
• If you try to avoid walking more than 100ft in favor of a lawn mower, you might be a cyborg and a redneck

Our relationship with technology is becoming more and more personal, and the operating system to your mobile phone, the software your medical devices uses and the EHR system that your doctor uses to track your health information make software freedom ethical issues into personal freedom ethical issues.

Today, its people with pacemakers, but tomorrow, there will things that people consider normal to do with their own bodies that will either use software that the user controls, or software that some random company controls.

Thanks to the Software Freedom Law Center, for helping to make this issue more personal.

-FT

I use vi for development.

I keenly remember one of Dr. Eggen’s early lectures to us.

“There are other editors out there, but if you learn to use vi, you will have a powerful editor on every unix server you ever use…” (or something like)

It took me the about halfway through the compsci intro class to get used to command mode vs. input mode, but since then I have never looked back. Using keyboard commands to perform editing has become second nature to me, and I find myself constantly typing ESC then yy on windows text editors… Then I promptly install vim for Windows. Making Dr. Eggen’s point even more valuable.

However, I have gotten used to gvim. Its really the best of both worlds. You can use mouse based cut and past, but all of the command mode goodness still works. I must admit that I have never memorized the search and replace syntax and the fact that it is a dropdown menu on gvim really helps.

More and more I have been programming in the cloud. Which means I am frequently (for hours each day) using vim over ssh. But I miss gvim and the helpful menu items. I have been looking for a way to easily use gvim on a remote host for some time. Sharing an X session over the internet has always felt a like overkill to me. No cloud server should have X installed in any case.

The answer sshfs. Here is a link to a tutorial to using sshfs.

Basically the idea is that you have scp mirror a whole directory content, in real time, to a local directory. Because it is a local directory, gvim works fine. Of course, it takes an extra second for files to load… but now I can use gvim to my hearts content. It also means that I can edit ten different files at once, a pretty important feature if you are doing serious development work. This lets me code for the cloud in the cloud, which is lovely.

-FT