Connectathon Day 3

Dinner last night was down the street from the hotel after a brief reception honoring the current Director of IHE for HIMSS. After dinner and a short cab ride back to my hotel, I spend several hours catching up on the "day job" and e-mails. I spent fifteen minutes trying to VPN to the office before figuring out that my network card was still configured for connectathon. That was at 2 am. As usual this week, I've stayed up too late.


So, now it is 9:04, and time to reset the network connection for the connectathon.


Just to give you an idea of the processess I have running on this laptop for connectathon:

• Microsoft SQL Server -- Hosting a database I have containing a lot of standards information.


• Oracle SQL Server -- Hosting my EHR application's data


• 2 different Copies of Eclipse -- One used for the web services I'm testing, the other used for interfacing.


• My favorite XML Editor -- which supports XSLT debugging and Schematron validation. I do a lot of both. I used to work with one of the the co-chairs of the XSL workgroup in the W3C, and in the office next to an author of XPath. It has an Eclipse plug-in, but I've found I run out of memory in Eclipse a lot sooner if I use that.


• Acrobat Standard -- Viewing the IHE profile and some JSTL documentation


• A web browser (with about 3 tabs open) -- Connected to NIST's CDA document validator, this blog, and the IHE PCC Web page.


• Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel -- more documentation, my e-mail containing various connectathon communications, and a spreadsheet I'm using to track testing.

I upgraded the memory from 1Gb to 3Gb last year just so I could get through testing without waiting forever for processes to swap.


9:22 Hmm, I seem to missing some data. Ah, it's the Change proposal we applied this year to address sections that have nothing to report (e.g., no allergies). Need to go fix that.


9:45 "Does a section require a title?" gets fired at me from a connectathon monitor. "Yes, I believe so, let me look it up... wait is this a section defined in CCD?" "Yes." "All CCD sections require a title." However, I note that we need a Change proposal for the PCC Technical Framework to include that requirement for all sections it defines, because not all of them come from CCD.


9:46 "How many PIX consumer tests do we need to do?" "Three." "Ok, I've already done two, I'll go work with ...", "Nope, you can do that later, go work with ... to get them going."


9:50 Overheard: "I basically blew up vendor A's actor B because I didn't have an (indecipherable technobabble)"

10:15 I've usually done this weeks in advance, but this week I'm still writing code for my stretch goal. You aren't supposed to be doing that at connectathon (as one of my mentors observes). However, in my own defense, I was going to drop this profile. Someone asked me to stay in so they can get credit for it. I've been in similar situations before, so I'm going to do what I can.

12:12 Over lunch we discuss the structure of the Public Health Alerting scenarios for the demonstration. The CDC is obviously very interested in this scenario.

1:13 I argue HITSP terminology changes with one of my co-workers. I like simple words that engineers already understand. He thinks that other terms are better. We agree to disagree.

By mid-day, I have my stretch goal done (with one retest required). Since it's a CDA document, and I helped write the profile there's a lot of laughter that I got failed the first time through. Read the free manual...

2:02 This afternoon it's time to do T81 (InfoButton testing) for the public health alerting scenarios. I wrote the test spec, so now I have to follow it. But... but. There's some things I forgot about when I wrote it back in November. We'll deal with that tomorrow. For now, I just update the argument table and resend.

2:45 One of my test partners for this test just got back. He had to take a call (common), and also hadn't realized that connectathon is a casual dress event (unless you are a docent for the connectathon conference which was yesterday), so came back in his jeans. We test our scenario. After about ten code changes (most on my side, and a couple on his), we get it working. It took all of fifteen minutes. We both mispelled Notificiation the same way, but I had corrected it earlier when starting my T81 testing. On my side, it was a copy and paste error from the spec I wrote several months ago. I fix the spec too.

3:43 An engineer asks me what value should go in a particular message. It's in a profile I don't know, so I ask him what the profile says. "I don't know". Well, read the profile, then ask me... I follow up with him later to point him to resources that will know if he's not able to figure it out.

5:00 Time for the HIMSS demonstration meeting. I listen in from the other end of the hall. Technically I'm supposed to be there, but someone else is covering for me, and its the same sort of thing that I've heard countless times before. We also see again the unveiling of the dreaded scenario spreadsheet that will likely be updated several times before the end of the week. It's pretty solid by now so I need to look at it.

7:20 Still here, working through some other problems. One of the systems that we've been having problems with all week was misconfigured. The engineers worked it out and are on to the next issue...

Dinner tonight is at Brasserie Jo. They have a nice collection of Belgian beers, and some interesting food. I had the Shrimp Bag. It's shrimp and vegatables in a lobster sauce, wrapped in Philo dough and baked. Yum!

2:29 AM. Time for bed. Need to get up for an early Domain cochairs meeting.