At home, I’ve used the Internet to learn – googling unknown terms, reading blogs with ECG challenges, learning about the body’s processes and how we affect those. I’ve researched specific conditions or drugs that I’ve come across and am unfamiliar with. I’ve witnessed discussions on blogs and on twitter that have made me think about my treatment, my handling of patients as well as conditions that I come across.

Out in the field, I’ve used my Blackberry to great effect:

• Drugs – I’ve looked up drugs that I’m not familiar with and some that even the paramedic on scene hasn’t seen before. There’s an enormous array of drugs out there and it’s important for us to be able to find out some key information.
• Conditions – we frequently attend to transport patients who have been diagnosed by their GP. Not only are Doctor’s handwriting notoriously bad, but they on occasion use terminology I’m not familiar with. A quick google normally sorts that out and gives me a better understanding of the patient’s condition and how to treat them for the short time they’re with us. I have even, on occasion, passed this information on to the nurse who’s taken our handover.
• Finding a location – ah, the perennial problem of ambulance work: finding the patient. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used Google on my Blackberry to find nursing homes. Google maps has helped us navigate there when TomTom has failed.
• Getting into a house – yeah, not your usual use of a mobile phone this, but I did once make use of the Internet to find the telephone number for a patient’s family to find out where the spare key was kept. 1am, standing outside the patient’s house, freezing cold and stomping around in the snow with no way of getting in, I was very glad I had my mobile with me.

I’m actually considering getting the BNF on my phone at the moment to help us with understanding drugs – the drugs a patient is taking is often helpful in giving us an idea of what the patient is suffering from when the patient can’t or won’t tell us.

I’ve even, on occasion, been known to use my phone to make phone calls.

So, how do you use your phone? How has it changed the way you work?

The two not-so-important things were to look up what a bruit was and the second to find out what Tramacet is (a strong painkiller). The second resulted in an interesting conversation with the A&E nurse after we’d booked our patient in.

The other use was a little more…immediate.

A job came through to us around midnight, asking us to go to the local A&E and pick up an elderly lady from a corridor and take her home as she’d been waiting for some time. These kind of jobs are lovely because they’re simple, there’s little or no medical problems to worry about (and while I’m in this for the medicine, it’s occasionally nice to know that your patient isn’t going to die on you. Probably.) and people are supremely grateful. So we tromp into A&E, find our patient and sit her in the ambulance to driver her home. She’s a lovely old lady with a cracking black eye and mild dementia – she’s lucid but isn’t too good at remembering things.

So we get to her address and park up. There’s some talking from the back as I fiddle with the radio for a second to let control know we’ve arrived. A head appears next to me as my attendant sticks her head through the partition. “We can’t find her key.”

We help her look through her pockets. We help her look through her bag. Twice. No key. I run down and check the door, yes it’s locked. Shit. Wait – that’s a keysafe, great. I run back – does she remember the number to her keysafe? No. Shit. Any relatives? No. Son or Daughter? No. Do the neighbours have a key? No. Does she leave one under the mat or a plantpot? No. Carers? Yes, but they’re private and she doesn’t remember the company name.

Right, contact control who have nothing on the incident record. However, she was taken in earlier in the shift so the controller goes to dig around to find the original incident. Right. We empty her bag out. Still no key. Control get back to us saying they’ve spoken to the original crew who mentioned a son. Wait, a son? So I jump in the back and skirted around the earlier questions with a more direct approach.

“What’s you’r son’s name, my love?”

“Chris.”

My colleage stares at me open-mouthed.

“Where does Chris live?”

“In LittleVillage.”

This is bad news – LittleVillage is about 90 minutes West of where we were at best. Still, let’s try for his address to see if I can get his phone number. She remembers the house number and can describe the street where he lives but doesn’t remember the road name. So I get my phone out. Luckily LittleVillage is about 2 miles from where I grew up and her description of the street is one I recognise, so I don’t bother with Google maps.

Onto the BT directory enquiries page. I look up the details. Hrm, nothing in that street. Check google maps – the house number is quite large, almost 200 and there aren’t that many long streets in the village. Try this one instead – aha!

I call the number. “Hi, this is the Ambulance service here…”

“Oh, thank God, you’re taking my mother home?” Right, sounds like we’ve got the right one then.

He knew the keysafe number. And knew where she normally kept her key. So we got her in, put the fire on, made a cup of tea and helped her warm up.

Would we have got her in without the internet? Probably – control could have looked up the number for us, but it could have taken longer. Did the internet help? Yes, without a doubt – I could use the information that I had to find the address quickly and confirm it easily with the patient. Is this the most important use of the internet that we will have? No, without a doubt. I’ve already had twitter increase my knowledge of chest pain in adolescents (thanks Kal!) and teach me about conditions I might come across. We’re humans, not encyclopedias – we will come across things that we don’t know or need reminding of.

I really do think that with the arrival of Airwaves in the Ambulance service we should see smarter devices being rolled out with access to medical databases for looking up medications and conditions or illnesses. I’d like to see medical records being accessible to the front line as well – though I understand the privacy concerns. We have to be careful not to overload the guys on the front line, but access to the information when they need it really can save lives. We need to make sure that we have sources that are definitive and trustworthy and not just wikipedia.

People said that the end of the last century and the start of the new millenium was the information age. Is this the age that we see information being distributed to every person wherever they are, whatever they’re doing?

So when it arrived and I plugged it in, I was very happy…until I hit Alt-F2 which is the combination in KDE to bring up the “Run…” dialog box. Nothing happened. Hrm. Ctrl-Alt-F4 to try to change to a virtual terminal. Nothing. More frustrated attempts. Nothing. My F-keys didn’t work. And once I started fiddling, neither did the other keys, the “media” ones at the top etc. Damn. What’s going on here?

I’ll not go into too much detail (this Gentoo page on this specific device does that admirably) but it seems as though this keyboard is slightly odd on top of which the FreeBSD USB Keyboard driver has behaviour that clashes with it. So for those of you who find this via google and want to get your keyboard to work, someone has raised a bug report and attached a patch – it at least gets you back to the point where the F keys work – it will require compiling your kernel, though that’s not that challenging on FreeBSD.

So what are my views so far? Well, it’s a highly competent CMS for starters - at one point I despaired and started looking at Joomla, but the way it models content disgusted me even more so that Drupal. Now, in this respect, I’ve probably been very lucky. In my last job, I worked for Box UK whose main product is Amaxus, a CMS. Amaxus has been designed from the ground up by some very smart cookies – in fact, mostly by one very smart cookie indeed - Dan Zambonini. The conceptual design for Amaxus is, quite honestly, a work of genius. The model that it uses is simple, easy to grasp and provides incredible flexibility. Of course, it does mean that rolling out a site is quite a lot of work, but with a commercial CMS, that’s where your money comes in – the implementation is the gravy; the professional services part of the contract is normally for this kind of product worth far more than the product itself. So from that perspective, I’ve been spoiled. I’m used to an excellent model to work with…and that’s where I got stuck.

Quite simply, the amaxus model is this: take a navigation tree. Each node is a page made of blocks. Blocks can do anything from picking a single piece of static content, to providing a list of content that’s picked uniquely for each visitor depending on their browsing history through the site. Content is created independently. One piece of content can exist anywhere in the navigation structure more than once. Once you get your head around that lot, you start to see just how powerful this is. Drupal is…well…slightly different. It took me a little time to get my head around it, so here’s a quick run down for anyone currently trying to get theirs around it.

In Drupal, content is the key. The navigation system is only there to provide a convenient way for a user to get to some content. Therefore, the content has to exist before the navigation structure. Now, Drupal makes it easy for you by adding a panel in the content creation page that lets you add a menu item to that content piece, but it’s a paradigm shift for me. The other thing to realise is that blocks are configured on a site-wide basis. So instead of configuring blocks in each node, you configure the blocks once – however, each block has a whole bunch of options you can specify that tells the block when to appear. I’ve used this on our website to provide different kinds of users with different menus – members, non-members, content editors and admins. I have to admit I’ve been frustrated a few times by trying to create a menu before the content, although I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now.

Anyway, I’m impressed. I’ve built a fairly complex site in less than a week and I’ve learned a lot about Drupal in the meantime. Development will probably slow down a little over the next month or so as I learn about the next two things I want to implement – a workflow engine and the associated flows, and a custom content type and associated views for callouts.

Taking everything back to first principles, we got a bunch of people together and tried to work out what we actually want from a website. It rapidly became very clear that the website was key to how we communicated not only with team members, but with external organisations. With that in mind, we decided that a complete redesign of the site was in order, with different sections of the website for different people – members, other 999 services, the press, the public, prospective members etc. That’s a whole lot of work and more importantly, is a layout that isn’t compatible with one person doing all the work. So we need a CMS of some sort.

Over the past few days I’ve been trawling through some CMS software. Specifically I’ve been looking at Open Source ones in order to provide flexibility and keep costs down. It has to be easy to use so that people can publish content. It has to be customisable and templates fairly simple to play with. I’ve looked at over 20 different CMSes and several names stick out as software that’s competent, well-written and easy to use while at the same time being flexble:

• WordPress – technically not a CMS, it is nevertheless very popular and has an extremely simple interface. It isn’t however powerful enough for some of the things we want to do.
• Joomla – this is currently one of my top runners. Very competent CMS from looking at it, it’s one of two going forward to the trial stage.
• Mambo – Very close 3rd, it just lacks a few features compared to Joomla that I wanted.
• TikiWiki CMS – This was recommended to me, but following reviews and comparisons, it’s probably bottom of the shortlist
• Drupal – Currently the top runner. My once concern is its complexity, but if the complexity is limited to the admin side, that’s fine – I’ll be the admin so I don’t mind learning my way around.

I suppose I’m fairly lucky that in my last job I worked for a company that wrote a CMS so I’m familiar with certain concepts and principles relating to CMSes – personalisation, taxonomy, navigation, content types, etc. That will probably hold me in good stead as I set up Drupal and Joomla for trialling. Hopwefully a clear winner will emerge from the two, though at the moment, Drupal is almost a full head in front of Joomla after just reading the docs.

I use screen lots – for example, my IM client is a command-line curses-based client (centerim) running in a screen. This means that when I go home, I can log into it by attaching to the screen instance from there, but it allows me to keep it running in the office. It’s ideal for doing major work when you’re on the road, as 3G is still flaky in most parts of the country and screen allows you to just reattach and get on with it.

It’s got quite a few options for using – well worth reading the man page to find out some of the more unusual ones, but one of the places I’ve used it a lot is for training – showing people remotely how to do something. You get them to log in and run a command that connects to your screen and you can then demonstrate while they watch. Thing is, I’m forever forgetting the multiuser options of screen, so when I found this page today (thanks Google), I figured I’d better remember it.

Have fun!

I’m also part of a community known as UKNOT. UKNOT has an RSS aggregator that grabs a bunch of blogs and presents them nice and neatly. Only problem is that since my blog’s been on there, the text in the titles has not been parsed correctly – if I have a character in the title that turns into an HTML entity, then it goes all pear-shaped.

Today I tracked down why (which will probably make a bunch of UKNOTters very happy). When my post gets sent to LJ, it has the special characters in the title. Take my last blog entry as an example:

“Therrre’s been a Murrrrrderrrrr”

Fine. Nothing wrong with that. Comes up in the RSS feed as:

 <title>&#8220;Therrre&#8217;s been a Murrrrrderrrrr&#8221;</title>

For those of you who aren’t technical, that’s how those special characters are embedded within the RSS feed. They’re parsed as HTML entities and converted by your browser to something pretty. Obviously this means that if I want to put an ampersand into my document, it has to be encoded as &amp;.

Problem is this – look what LJ’s RSS feed does:

 <title>&amp;#8220;Therrre&amp;#8217;s been a Murrrrrderrrrr&amp;#8221;</title>

Yup, its converted the ampersands into HTML entities. I’ve checked what I can – everything seems fine apart from LJ’s RSS generator. So, LJ, you’re broken. I don’t know why I expected anything different…

[Sidenote: Thanks to Joel for updating the planet link to my blog so quickly. It's all fixed on Planet now]

In principle, I have no problem with this – in fact, to a degree, I welcome it. It brings Skype back to the realms of telephones in terms of law enforcement and contrary to Big Brother theorists, despite even my own somewhat dubious police experiences at times, I do believe that this is a good thing and that the law enforcement agencies are, in general, trying to Do the Right Thing.

Today I stumbled across a new geektoy. While quickly documenting my workspace for Pixel Rigs (a flickr pool started by Rands), I started reading the others and came across Synergy. Now you can have one keyboard, mouse and pastebuffer across multiple machines (each with its own monitor). It’s a bit of software, works over TCP. And by works I mean, it just works. I love it.