Esoteric Ruby Blog

I have been involved in a new Wiki to work together to assist the relief effort for Hurricane Katrina. We have been coordinating among all the various organizations, people, and communication networks to try to help people. We have gotten a lot of press from CNN, AP, BusinessWeek, NPR, and others. And we are getting about 300,000 hits a day at last check. Have a look at our website at http://katrinahelp.info/ (or http://katrina.internet2.edu/ if that name above doesn't work) We have a massive dual processor system for this project to take heavy loads. We have gotten an army of volunteer typists transcribing missing person records into a database. About a dozen people have written scripts to grab data off other sites and convert them to this XML/RSS format called PFIF, the PeopleFinder Interchange Format. The major importance of this format is that it is made for sharing info from the ground up instead of hording all missing person info in one central database. I have been doing a little Ruby scripting myself to convert to this. The problem now is one of final integration and front end work; I am not that good at XML yet but given we have more than 100,000 records already collected it would be a shame if it is only PHP and Java that works out. Are any of the Ruby masters available for saving the world? If so please check out our status on the website and see if you might enjoy saving people's live and helping them be happy during a very hard time. We can also promote Ruby a lot with this press and show how good Ruby is for this kind of thing just for Ruby. I would also like to have just a 1-screen dirt simple Rails app going and wonder if there is any wider interest in the community. I hope to see some of you on the website soon.

I'm not sure how many have noticed, but this year is very exciting not just for Ruby. And not just for Rails. Things are taking off in all sorts of directions now that blogging seems to have tipped off a sort of digital renaissance of writing, interaction, and understanding across all types of boundaries. Now I am going to try something a bit new, and suggest that some of the cohesion we have developed over the years in the Ruby community may be put to good use. It involves WIPO, the international treaty on intellectual property rights. And science, medecine, the nature of politics and capitalism, and many more strange and surprising things are in the mix.

It happens that politics are not always aligned with science, and sometimes the discrepancy can be severe. This fact is nowhere more obvious to me than my own personal experience trying to cure a potentially fatal degenerative liver condition that I have suffered my entire life. It is called hepatitis C, and it kills many more people in USA and Japan than AIDS does. For several reasons, research regarding this disease has been drastically underfunded, to the tune of about 100 times less money per death than HIV. Unfortunately, due to the nature of hepatitis C (HCV), it often goes undiagnosed for decades before causing serious liver problems, loss of ability to work, and death. Another problem is the lack of political capital in the affected groups, primarily jail prisoners and injection drug users in the United States. As these groups have essentially zero political power at this moment in time, they have been given near zero funding over the course of the last 15 years as this disease has come out into the public eye. In practical terms, this matters to me because I received HCV from a tainted blood transfusion at birth and my liver has been slowly degrading all my life. I understand that in Canada and the UK, there is government compensation for the HCV-tainted blood victims. I understand in USA there is over 100 thousand dollars per case compensation for HIV tainted blood victims.
here are some funding statistics
How come USA has not yet even acknowledged officially that there was a problem with infecting thousands of people like me with HCV from a tainted blood supply? I can tell that in not many more years I will be unable to work without medical advances. Which is why I am asking any of you now who might be touched by this story to look a little further and consider putting your name on the following petition for more funding from anywhere:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/signatures/703119152?page=1

Don't get too hung up on the bad spelling etc on the petition. I didn't make it. I think we need many concurrent efforts to really drive this home. The reason I post this to the Ruby blog is because I understand that Japan also shares with USA a unique problem with HCV, and indeed Japan has been a leading HCV research center worldwide. Some communities in Japan have HCV rates in excess of 20%. I expect that there are more than a few people across the ocean in the Ruby community that have been touched in some way by HCV, that may have something to say about this, and may even be moved by my story. If this could be you please consider adding to the commentary at
http://www.wipo.int/roller/comments/ipisforum/Weblog/theme_seven_how_is_intellectual
where I sketch out a personalized (real-life) story of how intellectual property law affected my life, and what I think needs to be done to fix it. If you're moved by this consider also adding to the Wiki at
http://hcvaction.org/
Also, I think it's important as open-source and serious Ruby programmers for us to defend our intellectual turf from takeover from the noncreatives. Finally, for the value proposition, I submit my work in progress at
http://complearn.org/
which is a handy C library for data mining that also has a Ruby binding. So even in purely economic terms, perhaps it makes sense to fund HCV research a bit more. Let's please have this discussion. And have it in more than a few online forums because it's really important to many people right now. And some of these people are people you know. Due to the stigma associated with HCV, most likely you have not yet heard about them unless it is very close family or friends.

If you think this issue deserves more attention, or you just want me to continue to be a productive member of the Ruby community for many years to come, then please consider signing the petition above, adding to comments at the WIPO forum, or reposting this or similar information anywhere you can think of to improve visibility to get this desperately needed funding. Usenet, message boards, relevant email lists, anywhere. I cannot tell you how much I would appreciate it if you guys manage to get some real money allocated on this issue from any source. But I will be able to show you, over time.

To a better tomorrow,

Rudi

class Array
  def scramble() dup.scramble! end                          # scramble v. 0.15
  def swap(i,j) self[i],self[j] = at(j),at(i) end           # by cilibrar
  def scramble!() each_index() { |i| swap(i,i+rand(size-i)) } end
end

It has been about ten days since we first started writing the AsiaQuake realtime relief database system. Two programmers using Rails (and learning all the 1.0 features) managed to accomplish this much functionality:

• a login system with four levels of permissions: read, write, manage, and admin
• a missing person database
• a phone number database
• a volunteer database
• variously sorted table listings for all of the above
• search boxes in all tables
• export of all to data XML and CSV
• approximate matching and soundex search

Our next items are

• a table for infectious disease outbreaks like measles
• a table to track supply requests, shipments, fulfilment, and use
• a hospital table
• email alerts based on status changes for persons or supplies

So far, we’ve been very pleased at the level of functionality we have achieved in this short timeframe, and we think it validates Ruby and Rails promises to be many times faster than the older CGI approaches.

If you’d like to find out more, check out our application at:

http://www.asiaquake.org/

Anybody can get an account without an email address now so feel free to poke around. Feedback will be much appreciated.

To read the first part in this series, please see http://cilibrar.com/~cilibrar/erblog.cgi/Tsunami/TsunamiReliefRails.txl

Ever since the incredibly powerful earthquake and subsequent Tsunami hit Asia, there has been a terribly critical logistics problem that we are only beginning to solve. Millions of people need food, water, and shelter, and infrastructure is wiped out in many places. In an effort to assist relief work, I have created a simple Rails application to follow several areas of relief related information including:

a) Phone numbers of governments, relief organizations, volunteers, etc. b) Missing / Living / Dead person listing c) Supply tracking

I have created an Instiki Wiki for the cause at

http://wiki.asiaquake.org/

And there I give a rough layout of the goals.

I have also begun work on a database and so far part a, the phonelist, is working and populated at:

http://rails.asiaquake.org/

This is a perfect opportunity to put Ruby and Rails to the test: does it really deliver in a very-short-timeframe development cycle? We will have to wait and see how this application turns out in a few days. I have been at it just a few days so far and must say it has been quite a learning experience, but so far we are liking the architecture, especially the excellent improvements in Rails 0.9, which seems a lot better than 0.7. I’m still not familiar enough with rails to be confident with it, however I find I am easily picking up what I need to know from the straightforward organization most of the time, which is quite a bit more than I can say for most other frameworks I have tried.

Are you moved to do something to help the Tsunami victims, and do you know Rails? If so, send me an email at cilibrar@ofb.net or a Yahoo instant message to cilibrar and tell me your interest and skills. I have already set up a dedicated server and control all aspects.