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Toronto Notes – Clinical Information Set 2007 for Pocket PC

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This new edition of the clinical information set includes an updated database, an improved search feature, support for Pocket PCs with Windows Mobile 2003 and newer, and all the features of the 2006 edition described below including continued support for Palm OS. All packed into a new automated Windows installer. It will be available this year with the Toronto Notes 2007 textbook.

The Pocket PC application was developed using CeGCC, a project to provide cross-development tools for Windows CE using the GCC compiler and other GNU tools. Also new this year is a PHP/MySQL solution for the Toronto Notes editing staff, providing a much easier way to modify the contents of the database.

Toronto Notes – Clinical Information Set 2006 for Palm OS

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Included with the Toronto Notes 2006 textbook published by Toronto Notes for Medical Students, Inc. at the University of Toronto, the Clinical Information Set is a Palm OS application for quick reference in the hospital ward. It includes over 1000 cross referenced pages categorized into Specialty, Chief Complaint, Diagnosis, or Medication. Each category is individually searchable on four separate index pages. It is compatible with Palm OS 3.5 or later and includes support for newer features such as memory cards or higher resolution screens with a virtual input area.

Development was done in Linux using the prc-tools package which is a collection of open source tools for programming with the Palm OS API in C or C++. This includes the m68k-palmos build of GCC as well as other tools for generating the .prc and .pdb database files for the Palm.

A Pocket PC version for Windows Mobile 2003 and newer as well as updates to the Palm version is in the works for the 2007 edition of the Toronto Notes textbook.

Zeroconf Service Discovery for Player Robot Server

The Player Robot Server provides a network interface to a variety of robot and sensor hardware. I wrote an addition to the libplayerc client API which allows client applications to easily discover or be notified of player servers on the local network. Clients can narrow down their search for player servers by specifying the drivers or interfaces the servers must have.

This was written in C using the Howl library which is no longer being developed but is still available on a wide variety of platforms. Most Zeroconf libraries still in development, including Apple’s Bonjour, are compatible with Howl. My addition to the libplayerc library will hopefully be available in a future release of Player.

Scribe Mail

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Scribe Mail was designed and written for CMPT 470 – Web Information Systems at SFU. It is a webmail application intended to replace regular desktop mail applications by allowing users to check e-mail accounts from as many IMAP and POP3 servers as they like. Most importantly, the e-mail is downloaded and stored in a database on the Scribe Mail server to make searching easier and much faster than in traditional webmail applications that use IMAP.

Scribe Mail was written using PHP 5 running in an Apache 2 server. The independent back-end process, also written in PHP 5, gathered e-mail from the remote mail servers on a fixed schedule and then stored it in a MySQL 4.1 server.