/home/jeff/blog

Archive for the ‘FreeMED’ Category

It’s final; I have moved FreeMED, a six-year old project with a CVS tree that old, to a new replicated subversion repository system. This should let me spend far less time fighting with sourceforge’s CVS servers, as well as provide an easier way to maintain the large number of files and directories in FreeMED.

We’re less than a week from the launch of FreeMED 0.8.0, REMITT 0.3 and phpwebtools 0.4.5, which will be released together, and everything is in deep freeze, so I will be only committing packaging changes and extreme paper bag bug fixes over the next week. Then we branch the code into stable and unstable, and start some serious development work …

I have been hard at work, getting our favorite medical billing engine to support generating patient statements, in addition to its current payer billing capabilities. In addition, I have been adding some rich font support for PDFs, while all font attributes are stripped out or ignored when generating plain text or other formats which do not support it.

In addition, I was reading an article on building an extremely low-latency box for professional audio, when I was appalled to see a comment that “the most obvious choice of operating system for musicians is still Windows XP Professional”. If I may rant a little, I really don’t think so. There’s nothing obvious about awful latencies, rarely consistent hardware support, and on-and-off blue screens. With jack, ardour, hydrogen, jamin, and other fine professional audio products, what is stopping you from making the move from the dark side?

This weekend I have been putting in some enormous amount of overtime, working on a rehaul of a few of FreeMED’s features. In particular, I have been pounding away at getting the scheduler completely rewritten, since the current one was only supposed to be a temporary hack. We’re moving to a template-driven resource-based scheduler, which so far seems to out-perform the old one in terms of usability and efficency. We’ll see if it progresses far enough for me to replace the old scheduler in CVS.

I’m also working to try to set up “ticklers”, which allow the system to perform actions at specified times (even when no one is logged in, et cetera) and “notifications”, which can be set to remind providers of impending events, since even the most fastidious would forget to follow up on something that occurred six months ago with no notification.

In summary, development is steamrolling along. Everything is being documented as we’re going, so hopefully other people won’t be so bashful about contributing code …

I just added the ability to span directories in FreeMED’s module discovery routines. (Actually, they’re implemented in phpwebtools, but the idea is the same … ) This makes it much easier to seperately version portions of FreeMED, either for branding purposes or just for non-official modules, by allowing entire directories to be seperately versioned.

This probably doesn’t make anyone nearly as happy as it makes me, but it’s a step in the right direction for doing things the Right Way^TM.

Well, that and the fact that I have been putting this change off for months and finally got around to doing it … For anyone interested, it’s currently in the CVS versions of FreeMED (0.8.0) and phpwebtools (0.4.5).