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BLOGS/TECH: Brief musings on technology

Just brief musings for Thursday, after I blew way too much time on the HillaryCare piece earlier this week at the neglect of paid employment….

Browsers: I have downloaded Firefox 1.0.6. You may recall that I went back to Internet Explorer after the Firefox 1.0.4 update slowed my surfing to a crawl despite everyone’s help. Well sad to say the 1.0.6 update doesn’t seem to have improved it at all….still way slower than Explorer. Explorer does suffer from more annoying pop-unders though. Any suggestions? Please put them in the comments.

Bloglines: I finally broke down and started using Bloglines. Actually I stole Enoch Choi’s Bloglines subscriptions, then kicked out the stuff that he likes and I don’t on Wine and Parenting, and added in my own stuff on Soccer and Politics….Thanks Enoch! Then I went through all his links and added a few of my own. Bloglines is far superior to My Yahoo as a usable user interface, and I am now more or less up to date on lots more blogs than I used to know about.

Links: Which leads me to another modest gripe. Because THCB has a reasonably good traffic (i.e. in the hundreds rather than in the tens) I have been getting lots of requests to share links. Some of them are dinged immediately because they are from online pharmacies, but many are from other good looking health and medical blogs. So as of today I’m putting out a new request. Please if you want me to link to you send a URL of your RSS feed which I cant stick in Bloglines. If I think that your site has legs over time and is worth a link (i.e. not in the first 2 weeks) then I’ll add it to the links as I get around to it occasionally — or when John explains to me how to add links in Typepad!

Devices and Security: Finally some substance from a blog which will definitely get a link when I get around to fixing my links. Medical Connectivity Consulting has an article about whether medical devices are regulated by HIPAA (and the answer is yes!). This is less obscure than it sounds, as the issue of security of medical devices is becoming a screaming big deal. I have heard 3 stories lately of entire hospital networks being infected by viruses that originated from medical devices like ultrasound machines.  These devices are often on the network, but the CIO’s team can’t do things like add virus protection software to them because the manufacturer claims they’re FDA regulated and can’t be touched. This hasn’t stopped them picking up viruses or being hacked via modem, and in one case the network was accessed via one such device and turned into a porn server. Tricky stuff and becoming more tricky as more devices become digitized.

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6 replies »

  1. Gadly
    Thanks. I tried all those (apart from the last one as its browsing not loading that’s slow and….) still about 1/2 the speed of IE. I give up

  2. Some sites with Firefox tweaks:
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts
    http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/8007.htm
    http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive/2005/01/28/48720.aspx
    Then there’s this one:
    Prefetch
    This tweak changes how Windows loads Firefox. If you prefetch the application it will start much faster. Edit your Firefox shortcut to read:
    ‘ “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” /prefetch:1 ‘
    That will prefetch the required .dlls and make Firefox load much faster each time you load it. Just make sure to keep that prefetch code in the shortcut and to run it once per-reset for the prefetching effect.

  3. Linkmeister is right….
    I covered the Vista issue in FierceHealthcare this morning….and will have more to say about that soon so please stay tuned. Meanwhile if you don subscribe to FH, please feel free to do so. It’s free at http://www.fiercehealthcare.com
    Meanwhile thanks to Enoch and I’ll try to make my bloglines public when I get a chance to figure out how..