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 Post subject: Lee Hirz [Searching 4 Delphi Instructor]
PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 11:09 am 

Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 10:29 am
Posts: 2
Real Name: Lee Hirz
Began Programming in MUMPS: 01 Jun 1972
Hi,

I recognize some names in the membership. I sincerely hope they all feel they are my friends. I've been away for a while, but now I am back and I have a group of VistA programmers with 1000 years of experience in the M and FileMan and Kernel that would like to get back into development, something we haven't been really allowed to do too much of for a while.

We see we can make local enhancements to some Delphi applications and we have some ideas of our own. And we think, just maybe we can make something happen in the new "Open VistA" world they say is coming.

So, we are looking for someone that will come and be paid to give a week long course in using Delphi integrated into a VistA environment with the Kernel and Broker. The window of opportunity may not be very long. So please don't hesitate to contact me.

You don't need a fancy brochure, just a one page class description with bullets for topics covered and kind of show you know what you are talking about.
My phone number is 202-745-8000 X 4018. My pager is 202-516-3104.


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 Post subject: Re: Searching 4 Delphi Instructor
PostPosted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 4:57 pm 
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Joined: Mon Nov 01, 2010 1:58 pm
Posts: 205
Location: Seattle, Washington
Real Name: Frederick D. S. "Rick" Marshall
Began Programming in MUMPS: 15 Jun 1984
Hi Lee. Welcome back, and welcome to Mumpster. I hope you'll take a few minutes to introduce yourself more fully, because we have many new students coming along who need to get to know the members of the community.

To help nudge Lee a little bit, he was the developer of the Mail Manager package for most of its history. He worked at the Washington VA Information Systems Center. He worked on Mailman after Tom Munnecke, the original author, and before Gary Beuschel.

And yes, he has many friends in this community. I'm glad to be one of them.

_________________
Frederick D. S. "Rick" Marshall, VISTA Expertise Network, 819 North 49th Street, Suite 203, Seattle, Washington 98103, (206) 465-5765, rick dot marshall at vistaexpertise dot net
"The hidden harmony is best." - Heraclitus of Ephesus


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 Post subject: Bio
PostPosted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 5:57 am 

Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 10:29 am
Posts: 2
Real Name: Lee Hirz
Began Programming in MUMPS: 01 Jun 1972
OK Rick. I'll take that as an invitation to rant...

I currently do support at the Washington DC VA Medical Center. I work mostly with COTS packages and solve problems that require multi-disciplinary skills. A good example of a long term task I recently accomplished was making electronic consents work without any wrinkles throughout the hospital. It took 2 years and required cooperation with many different people. There were networking issues, problems with the vendor software (that they have admitted, but only tangentially), issues with Sentillion (Vergence Locator -- we now have a new version that the users can't misuse) and user education problems. There is a very long story on this.

A medium term project was writing an M application to assign responsibility for equipment to users. A national package that did the same thing (and has been a lot harder for our users here to work with and understand) then preempted this.

I have also been given the responsibility for interacting with Surgery. I spent a long time being nice, helping with device and software issues and generally making sure that whenever they had a problem, they got instant service. I have, therefore, learned OR protocols and how to put on a Smurf suit in less then 2 minutes in order to go into an OR to make equipment work properly just before a surgical procedure.

Previously in the VA, I worked at the Washington DC IRMFO, previously known as the Washington DC ISC. I came from a medium-sized MUMPS shop and had done tracking and billing systems. With my team, I traveled around and installed this software at a lot of hospitals. When I was hired I was put onto some tasks doing screen managed applications for managers that weren't impressed with what was the VA standard then, roll and scroll. I met the Kernel people and worked with them to get the Terminal Type file to include escape sequences for screen control and eventually introduced them to escape processing (which is how screen managed software allows the user to navigate with tabs, back spaces and arrows...), wrote a prototype work processor, which served as an example of what could be done and how. I also introduced the idea of the FileMan reader (DIR) and wrote the prototype. This innovation allowed Alerts to be announced to users no matter what they were doing in VistA and helped maximze the use of program buffers as most users are usually "read hung" and, therefore, only one routine needs to be in the buffer for all of them.

In the process I met a lot of powerful, smart people. I was very lucky to have known and worked with these people. They were very interested in results, and had the confidence to teach others and cooperate with anyone that had something to offer. VistA was a team effort that included clerks, technicians, medical service providers and administrative staff. In those years everybody wanted to help. People were being taught FileMan so they could write their own reports and databases. It was Camelot.

Because the "national email node" (FORUM) was in DC, I was given responsibility for the MailMan package when Tom Munneke left. (BTW: I had dinner with him a couple of months ago and you might want to see what he is doing now -- still quite the innovator). I worked with Milt Roberson and Jack Divers and made FORUM capable of handline up to 1,000,000 message units a day. I worked with people at Austin, where the national data center is, to speed up transmission of data via email, which was originally across dial up lines and developed new transmission protocols. Later I worked with Micronetics to develop the first ability in the VA to receive email across a TCP/IP channel (basically a clone of Inet-servers -- the original Unix code), a capability that generalized for all potential services, and allowed us to develop the Broker.

I left the VA in 1995 or so and worked with some private companies. I did pharmacy robot interface support and development. I learned SQL and Oracle PL/SQL and managed a large resevoir of PL/SQL code that converted old data into a new database for the Coast Guard Fleet Logistics System. So, I now understand RDBMS.

I was an accountant before all of this. And I have since earned a MS in Telecommunications management. Therefore, I can also do cost accounting and have been known to write an occaisional rant (managers call them studies or analyses) that includes references and a bibliography.

Right now, I have a couple of ideas for development. The model for the future of VistA is "Open VistA". I can buy into that. I believe that this idea is supposed to make if possible for more COTS products to enter the VistA environment. I see that as a plus and a minus. But I think that creating an environment that makes it easiest for all who do development in VistA to use VistA tools is the best model. Therefore, the following.

FileMan needs an option that allows data to be "published". The current print capability needs to remain. But when data is reported and distributed to less computer oriented people, including medical staff, managers and especially users, it needs to be structured and easy to read. There needs to be the ability to output the data in a way that it can be printed to distributed electronically. Right now HTML seems to be the best candidate. I envision a process that includes the design of some default style templates and allows users to clone these and create their own so that reports can be output through with the style template as the model for the document. I do not think this will be terribly difficult. And I think that if the user starts in a GUI environment, the output can be directed in many different directions.


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