WEB DEVELOPMENT

jet5.com (This website)

PHP5 files and a single CSS2 style sheet all hand-coded in a text editor. Many nested PHP functions to separate content from layout.

The Jet5 logo: bird (one of my photographs) plus "Bleeding Cowboys" font from ...

Links

Google Charting API

Google's charting API - a simple and IE6-friendly method of embedding professional charts in a website. Let Google's servers do the donkeywork for you. The easiest method is to call the chart api using an img tag. The above pie chart was entirely generated with the following code:

<img src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart ?cht=p3 &chtt=A+Pie+Chart &chs=480x170 &chd=t:20,20,36,20,20,20,8,20 &chl=Hello|World|Jet5|Hello|World|Jet5|Hello|World &chdl=Hello+10%|World|Jet5|Hello|World|Jet5|Hello|World &chco=FF0000,888888,00FF00,FF00FF,0000FF " />

Line charts, bar charts, many complex chart types - check it out ...

HTML5

HTML on steroids: aiming to integrate all your web needs - interface elements, movies, databases etc If you have a modern browser (Chrome 11 currently best for this), try the demo.

WINDOWS PROGRAMMING

DELPHI 7.2 (Pascal for Windows)

I worked with Borland Delphi 7 Professional for years and grew to like it a lot for Windows programming. Subsequent Delphi versions were based on .NET and grew bloated and equivalent versions mind-numbingly expensive. At some point the spiralling costs mean hobby-programmers like me fall off the upgrade-loop.

Anyway, Delphi 7 is still widely used, so some kind person took version 7.1 and fixed a heap of annoying bugs that were not going to get fixed any other way because development had stopped. The fixed version (7.2) is stable and excellent.

Apparently the latest version (Embarcadero Delphi XE) has about 1000 bug fixes from earlier versions, some bugs that went back over more than 10 years. So might be worth checking out. Though still only 32bit programming, and no Mac support.

Jet5 Windows Software

Jet5 Rota Program

Easily the biggest project I ever tackled, and probably the most useful. Running the rota in a large Anaesthetic Department is a complex and demanding task. A large number of variables impact on the multitude of decisions that have to be made: some in advance, others in real-time. Faced with a 2-year stint running the rota, I realised exactly what I wanted software to do. Capable commercial software was not available (it is now) so I wrote my own.

My wife will tell you about the effective loss of a husband while I was doing this ... but the results have genuinely made a difference to the hospital I work in - and now three other local hospitals where I have installed the program.

Artificial Neural Network

I became fascinated with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and possible applications in anaesthesia. I wrote my own back-propagation network, and the framework that allowed me to present training data, test data, and to store the resulting trained network.

My aim was to develop a propgram which could predict patient death in the ITU. I had access to large amounts of physiological data collected during the use of APACHE2 process. This gave me both the data and a benchmark. My ANN, after a weekend of blind-training, was better able to predict death than APACHE2. This was a stunning result because APACHE2 had been tweaked by mathematicians for years specifically to do this prediction.

It was never published. At the time, all the major professional journals were refusing papers based on amateur computer programs. Too many "this is a program what I writ" type papers I guess. I saw a paper published years later where researchers had bought ANN software and done the same study - reasonably competently (perhaps didn't fully appreciate the problem of "over-training"). Sadly the paper had little impact. Basically we can identify those patients in ITU who are more likely to die - um, what do we do now?

I still have my ANN software if anybody is interested.