Category Archives: cs-wsu

Clean Coder ch.4:Coding

This chapter was full of excellent tips and many hard truths. I would love to believe I work better by listening to music, but it is not the case. Recently, I have stopped listening to music while doing work and I get things done much faster. The writer of Clean Coder knows that it is usually distracting as well, and advises others not to multi task as it either leads to distraction or what he calls “entering the zone”. He makes the point that entering the zone is not a good thing because while you may get more done when you are extremely concentrated, you may make bad decisions that will later cause you to go over that code again to make changes. This is a valid point, but for me personally, I seem to always be in either one of two states: concentrated or distracted. If I am focusing on something, every thing else is a blur. If you talk to me in this state, I probably will not hear you. And if I stop and go do something else, it takes a bit for me to concentrate again.

Some of the other points he made was the distractions of worrying, interruptions, and writers block. These are all real life situations that get in the way of our thinking, and we need to find our own ways of combating these inhibitors. Worrying causes us to always be thinking of our situation than what we need to work on right now. Interruptions can cause us to snap at others for breaking our concentration. And writers block is the inevitable situation we find our selves in from time to time that stunts our productivity. His solution was pair programming, and while this is a good thing to keep in mind, we can’t always work with someone else. Sometimes we do not have access to another person for insights.

Lastly, he also goes through the debugging process in detail, explaining why debugging is so important. Debugging is not a waste of time or something that just has to be done, it is a part of programming and is just as costly as the program itself. Debugging is what tells you the quality of your code. Without it, you are basically taking a test without finding out how you did on it. Lastly, he mentions how time allotment and scheduling is important as well, and how bad pacing can cause late submissions. Being late is what we strive not to do, but when it does happen, we need to alert others as soon as we realize our blunder.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder ch.4:Coding

This chapter was full of excellent tips and many hard truths. I would love to believe I work better by listening to music, but it is not the case. Recently, I have stopped listening to music while doing work and I get things done much faster. The writer of Clean Coder knows that it is usually distracting as well, and advises others not to multi task as it either leads to distraction or what he calls “entering the zone”. He makes the point that entering the zone is not a good thing because while you may get more done when you are extremely concentrated, you may make bad decisions that will later cause you to go over that code again to make changes. This is a valid point, but for me personally, I seem to always be in either one of two states: concentrated or distracted. If I am focusing on something, every thing else is a blur. If you talk to me in this state, I probably will not hear you. And if I stop and go do something else, it takes a bit for me to concentrate again.

Some of the other points he made was the distractions of worrying, interruptions, and writers block. These are all real life situations that get in the way of our thinking, and we need to find our own ways of combating these inhibitors. Worrying causes us to always be thinking of our situation than what we need to work on right now. Interruptions can cause us to snap at others for breaking our concentration. And writers block is the inevitable situation we find our selves in from time to time that stunts our productivity. His solution was pair programming, and while this is a good thing to keep in mind, we can’t always work with someone else. Sometimes we do not have access to another person for insights.

Lastly, he also goes through the debugging process in detail, explaining why debugging is so important. Debugging is not a waste of time or something that just has to be done, it is a part of programming and is just as costly as the program itself. Debugging is what tells you the quality of your code. Without it, you are basically taking a test without finding out how you did on it. Lastly, he mentions how time allotment and scheduling is important as well, and how bad pacing can cause late submissions. Being late is what we strive not to do, but when it does happen, we need to alert others as soon as we realize our blunder.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Radiology Project part 1

For the openMRS radiology module, so far I have installed Vagrant and a virtual machine and am currently in the process of fixing errors that have arisen, as well as dealing with authorization issues. Here are the steps I have done so far:

  1. Download Vagrant – Vagrant Download Here
    1. Download the software for your computer version, run the .msi file, and follow the default options unless you want to change something.
    2. What is it? – A quote from the developers of Vagrant, here is their mission statement so to speak: “If you are a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you are used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.).”
    3. Do I need it? Yes, the radiology module is currently setup to utilize Vagrant, and even though it takes a few minutes to install, it will automate the VM setup and meld it with openmrs for you.
  2. Download Virtual Box – Download Here
    1. Download the version you need, preferably the most recent Stable version.
    2. Run through the setup, and choose what settings you feel comfortable with. However, keep in mind that it can only use what memory you let it use, so if you will not be using any other heavy hitting programs simultaneously, give Virtual Box a good chunk of your RAM (preferably 6gb or more) so that it can run efficiently.
    3. You do not have to create any vm machine instances, just install the program right now. Vagrant will create a vm for you automatically.
  3. Clone the directory:  https://github.com/teleivo/puppet-openmrs-radiologydcm4chee.git
    1. You will need a git account if you do not have one, but if you are a programmer you should consider using a git account as it not only works as a version control software, but also as a portfolio of sorts.
    2. Make sure you remember where you cloned this folder. You will need to refer back to this source folder so keep it somewhere easily accessible.
    3. What is this? – This will help you by running a server which will contain both openMRS and dcm4chee (An open source medical application/utility).
  4. Let Vagrant do your work! – Just use any console to navigate inside the git folder you just cloned, and type “vagrant up” and hit enter.
    1. Now you wait, a while. Walk away and get some coffee while vagrant sets up your vm and server fuctions. It takes about 30 minutes on a standard internet connection, and it will bring up a new line in the command prompt when it is finished.
    2. Taken from the programmer’s page who setup this project here: “This will download a virtualbox VM with Ubuntu 14.04 64bit, install all necessary puppet modules via r10k and run the manifest/site.pp which:”
      1. Installs mysql server
      2. Installs dcm4chee and deploys DICOM viewer weasis
      3. Installs tomcat 7 and deploys OpenMRS version 1.11.4
  5. Access openMRS – you can now open a localhost window in your internet browser (firefox not confirmed to work yet).
    1. To do this, just type “localhost:8080/openmrs/” into the url.
    2. This is an exact word for word step guide on what settings to choose which is also obtained from teleivo’s gitHUb page:
    3. In the wizard select/enter the following:
      • Which type of installation do you want? => Advanced
      • Step 1 of 5, Do you currently have an OpenMRS database installed that you would like to connect to? => No
        • If no, what would you like to name this database? Database name => openmrs
        • A user that has “CREATE DATABASE” privileges must be specified here…
          • Username => openmrs
          • Password => openmrs
      • Step 2 of 5, Do you currently have a database user other than root that has read/write access to the openmrs database? => Yes
        • If yes, specify the login user name and password for that database user
          • Username => openmrs
          • Password => openmrs
      • Complete the remaining steps of the wizard
  6. At this point, you should have a working environment, but I ran into a few issues.
    1. First, even though I created a user account, I am unable to login when booting up the server instance. I have tried every account I have setup as well as default accounts or leaving the fields empty. I know someone else had this issue, so once I figure out what it is I will edit this post with the solution.
    2. For a while, when I was running the program, every other program running in the background of my pc was terminated abruptly. I did not lose anything, but I could not have any other windows open. This might be my specific pc, but be careful to save any work you have before running this.
    3. When running the ‘vagrant up’ command, it failed twice on me before running properly. Could be a connection issue, but try running it a few more times before searching for fixes.

And hopefully that is all you should need. There is a Slack group for people working on this project, so if you need help you can ask there or directly on the openmrs talk page. Feel free to fiddle around with the features as you are on a local host you will not ruin any data.

What I learned:

  1. That an installation and setup process can be made to be automated
  2. What dcm4chee is and how it is relevant to this module
  3. How openmrs functions/runs
  4. When something says it is needed, it is NEEDED (should be obvious).

How would I proceed differently:

  1. I would make sure I had all requirements before starting
  2. I would make sure I had the correct version of Virtual Box
  3. I would be more attentive to other people’s errors in case I encountered them as well

Applications:

  1. This whole process will come in handy when creating programs in the future. This process makes installing things much easier, especially if I had to install this on multiple computers throughout a hospital.
  2. I will be able to apply some of this knowledge on any local server project I work on.

Credits to:

  1. teleivo on gitHub
  2. Vagrant software by HashiCorp
  3. Virtual Machine
  4. dcm4chee

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Radiology Project part 1

For the openMRS radiology module, so far I have installed Vagrant and a virtual machine and am currently in the process of fixing errors that have arisen, as well as dealing with authorization issues. Here are the steps I have done so far:

  1. Download Vagrant – Vagrant Download Here
    1. Download the software for your computer version, run the .msi file, and follow the default options unless you want to change something.
    2. What is it? – A quote from the developers of Vagrant, here is their mission statement so to speak: “If you are a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you are used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.).”
    3. Do I need it? Yes, the radiology module is currently setup to utilize Vagrant, and even though it takes a few minutes to install, it will automate the VM setup and meld it with openmrs for you.
  2. Download Virtual Box – Download Here
    1. Download the version you need, preferably the most recent Stable version.
    2. Run through the setup, and choose what settings you feel comfortable with. However, keep in mind that it can only use what memory you let it use, so if you will not be using any other heavy hitting programs simultaneously, give Virtual Box a good chunk of your RAM (preferably 6gb or more) so that it can run efficiently.
    3. You do not have to create any vm machine instances, just install the program right now. Vagrant will create a vm for you automatically.
  3. Clone the directory:  https://github.com/teleivo/puppet-openmrs-radiologydcm4chee.git
    1. You will need a git account if you do not have one, but if you are a programmer you should consider using a git account as it not only works as a version control software, but also as a portfolio of sorts.
    2. Make sure you remember where you cloned this folder. You will need to refer back to this source folder so keep it somewhere easily accessible.
    3. What is this? – This will help you by running a server which will contain both openMRS and dcm4chee (An open source medical application/utility).
  4. Let Vagrant do your work! – Just use any console to navigate inside the git folder you just cloned, and type “vagrant up” and hit enter.
    1. Now you wait, a while. Walk away and get some coffee while vagrant sets up your vm and server fuctions. It takes about 30 minutes on a standard internet connection, and it will bring up a new line in the command prompt when it is finished.
    2. Taken from the programmer’s page who setup this project here: “This will download a virtualbox VM with Ubuntu 14.04 64bit, install all necessary puppet modules via r10k and run the manifest/site.pp which:”
      1. Installs mysql server
      2. Installs dcm4chee and deploys DICOM viewer weasis
      3. Installs tomcat 7 and deploys OpenMRS version 1.11.4
  5. Access openMRS – you can now open a localhost window in your internet browser (firefox not confirmed to work yet).
    1. To do this, just type “localhost:8080/openmrs/” into the url.
    2. This is an exact word for word step guide on what settings to choose which is also obtained from teleivo’s gitHUb page:
    3. In the wizard select/enter the following:
      • Which type of installation do you want? => Advanced
      • Step 1 of 5, Do you currently have an OpenMRS database installed that you would like to connect to? => No
        • If no, what would you like to name this database? Database name => openmrs
        • A user that has “CREATE DATABASE” privileges must be specified here…
          • Username => openmrs
          • Password => openmrs
      • Step 2 of 5, Do you currently have a database user other than root that has read/write access to the openmrs database? => Yes
        • If yes, specify the login user name and password for that database user
          • Username => openmrs
          • Password => openmrs
      • Complete the remaining steps of the wizard
  6. At this point, you should have a working environment, but I ran into a few issues.
    1. First, even though I created a user account, I am unable to login when booting up the server instance. I have tried every account I have setup as well as default accounts or leaving the fields empty. I know someone else had this issue, so once I figure out what it is I will edit this post with the solution.
    2. For a while, when I was running the program, every other program running in the background of my pc was terminated abruptly. I did not lose anything, but I could not have any other windows open. This might be my specific pc, but be careful to save any work you have before running this.
    3. When running the ‘vagrant up’ command, it failed twice on me before running properly. Could be a connection issue, but try running it a few more times before searching for fixes.

And hopefully that is all you should need. There is a Slack group for people working on this project, so if you need help you can ask there or directly on the openmrs talk page. Feel free to fiddle around with the features as you are on a local host you will not ruin any data.

What I learned:

  1. That an installation and setup process can be made to be automated
  2. What dcm4chee is and how it is relevant to this module
  3. How openmrs functions/runs
  4. When something says it is needed, it is NEEDED (should be obvious).

How would I proceed differently:

  1. I would make sure I had all requirements before starting
  2. I would make sure I had the correct version of Virtual Box
  3. I would be more attentive to other people’s errors in case I encountered them as well

Applications:

  1. This whole process will come in handy when creating programs in the future. This process makes installing things much easier, especially if I had to install this on multiple computers throughout a hospital.
  2. I will be able to apply some of this knowledge on any local server project I work on.

Credits to:

  1. teleivo on gitHub
  2. Vagrant software by HashiCorp
  3. Virtual Machine
  4. dcm4chee

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder ch.3:Saying Yes

Chapter 3 in this book contrasted the last chapter, because the subject this time was saying Yes. We cant always push things off till later and tell our boss, “I need time”. Sometimes it just needs to get done, or at least made progress on. If you can’t commit to doing the whole thing, make a commitment to doing parts of it. Also on that topic, if you can’t do something, do not say you will try, or that you will see what you can do, just tell it like it is. Say only what you intend to fulfill.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder ch.3:Saying Yes

Chapter 3 in this book contrasted the last chapter, because the subject this time was saying Yes. We cant always push things off till later and tell our boss, “I need time”. Sometimes it just needs to get done, or at least made progress on. If you can’t commit to doing the whole thing, make a commitment to doing parts of it. Also on that topic, if you can’t do something, do not say you will try, or that you will see what you can do, just tell it like it is. Say only what you intend to fulfill.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Clean Coder Chapters 2-3

In the reading for Chapters 2-3 I read about knowing when and how to say yes and that it is okay to say no. The biggest thing that I took from this reading that I hope to use in my professional career is to not make promises or say yes to something I know will not get done or not be finished on time. It is better to be honest and tell the manager or boss that you won’t be able to do a task. I hope to be more upfront with people as stated in the yes chapter where he mentions what commitment sounds like. There is no uncertainty and there is no hesitation. I believe that after the readings there is a clearer understanding for myself what saying yes and no really means and when to chose to say either of them. It is the simple words yes and no we use everyday but as a professional in your field you need to know it means more than just a work to make someone happy, you gave them a commitment that you are expecting much like you are expecting your co workers to do their part in the project.

From the blog CS@worcester – Greg Tzikas by Greg Tzikas and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder – Chapter 2 and 3

I continue to enjoy reading this book and am gaining a lot of useful knowledge to further my career and mold myself into a professional developer. The topic of Chapter 2 is something I have difficulty with – Saying No. Management always wants to squeeze as much work as possible out of their developers in the shortest possible time frame, and often they may have unrealistic expectations. It is detrimental to oneself as well as the company if one can not assert their position that a particular task can not be completed by the timeline management has laid out. Saying no can be difficult, but doing so early can prove to be beneficial by managing expectations of what is possible.

The topic of Chapter 3 – Saying Yes is obviously the opposite of saying no. However, a lot of the lessons from Chapter 2 still apply. One must present themselves as a professional and assert their positions, but also be realistic with what they are capable of. If a developer can complete an assigned task, then they should have the confidence to say so. They should be willing to commit to the task at hand and never shy away from their responsibility.

I look forward to continuing my reading and applying what I’ve read to help achieve my career goals.

From the blog cs-wsu – Spencer Leal by spencerleal and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS Setup

OpenMRS was not too difficult to setup, but there were a few bumps that I encountered. Cloning the code from GitHub was easy enough, but getting it into IntelliJ was a challenge. IntelliJ was not recognizing any packages or other imports, but a friend was able to help me find a way to add the packages to the scope of the program. After that, all code compiled, and all tests passed that were able to be run. However, I ended up moving over to the Eclipse environment as it works better for the purposes of the project. Importing into eclipse was easier, but did not have all the settings needed, so I had to install a few eclipse add ons such as Maven Integration, a better version control interface, and server options in case debugging in eclipse is needed. Next I set up the legacy ui by adding a module to the openmrs project webapp, and after it built and ran, I was able to view the ui in a local instance in a web browser. The sample data that can be viewed is rather odd however. I could find only 2 people in the sample data set and they were at positions 100 and 101. No other index has a person created. Not sure if this was purposeful or an accident, but I can atleast see what the database looks like and how it works.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS Setup

OpenMRS was not too difficult to setup, but there were a few bumps that I encountered. Cloning the code from GitHub was easy enough, but getting it into IntelliJ was a challenge. IntelliJ was not recognizing any packages or other imports, but a friend was able to help me find a way to add the packages to the scope of the program. After that, all code compiled, and all tests passed that were able to be run. However, I ended up moving over to the Eclipse environment as it works better for the purposes of the project. Importing into eclipse was easier, but did not have all the settings needed, so I had to install a few eclipse add ons such as Maven Integration, a better version control interface, and server options in case debugging in eclipse is needed. Next I set up the legacy ui by adding a module to the openmrs project webapp, and after it built and ran, I was able to view the ui in a local instance in a web browser. The sample data that can be viewed is rather odd however. I could find only 2 people in the sample data set and they were at positions 100 and 101. No other index has a person created. Not sure if this was purposeful or an accident, but I can atleast see what the database looks like and how it works.

From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.