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    Wednesday, February 11, 2009

    How Does the Magician Get What He Wants?

    As I started developing the core of the "platform" I realized that I had undertaken a huge task, a task I was not sure I could finish in any short amount of time. This caused me some angst but I figured that I would just have to move on, doing my best to develop my way out of an impossible situation. Not a fun position to be in.

    Then, sometime around the end of December, a buddy of mine pointed me in the direction of a product called Presto, developed by the company JackBe. I thought that I had stumbled into my own brain on the web!

    Keep in mind that the concept I was working on was that the platform would map gadgets together in such a way that we could dynamically generate them with ease, rapidly prototyping processes to see how they worked. In effect, the gadgets would be web services and the thing the platform would create would be a mashup.

    As I said, I had envisioned something similar to PopFly, the ability to visually create mashups and then do something meaningful with them in our efforts to prototype processes. Presto is this and so much more.

    First and foremost, Presto has a beautiful visual mashup maker called Wires. In Wires, you drag services from a palette onto your canvas and connect them. You can also drag in actions, blocks that allow you to do something with the results of other services. So, in the basic example I worked with, you have two RSS feeds. You can take the data from each feed and "merge" them (where merge is an action block) so that you effectively have one RSS feed from two. Then, you can add a filter (another action) which can take a dynamic input. In this way, you can create very complex mashups from some very basic building blocks.

    If the complexity of Wires is not enough for you, however, they have a markup language for creating mashups called EMML. What you do in Wires is distilled down to EMML, but Wires doesn't offer the full capabilities of EMML (which is not to say that Wires is not fully featured, there are just some rather tricky things you can do with EMML that you can't do with Wires as they don't have a visual representation).

    What's even cooler, and something that spoke to a need we had, is that each mashup is published as a service itself. So, you can include mashups in other mashups! The modularity is great.

    But, you might be asking, how do you get the services in so that you can use them from the palette?

    Well, Presto has a "Service Explorer" which allows you to import services from wherever they may be and "publish" them in the Presto server. However, there's a little more to it than that. Presto comes complete with a user authentication system that can be standalone or hook into LDAP or AD. When I import a service, I can assign rights to it, and only those in the appropriate groups can even see the service, or any mashup in which the service exists. You can also assign rights to mashups themselves.

    So, that gave us the mashing capability that we've been looking for, but the goodies in this bag didn't end there!

    What we have up to this point is a unique view of the data, but no visualization of the data. Enter the mashlet!

    A mashlet is a view of the mashup in a portable and embeddable package. It is created in JavaScript. Once you've created a mashup, you can attach a mashlet to it so that others can see what the mashup provides. There are 5 prebuilt mashlet types: RSS; grid; chart; Yahoo Map; and XML. If your data fits into any of these predefined views, creating a mashlet is as simple as selecting the mashup or service, selecting the view, then publishing it. If you need a more complex view of your data you can create a mashlet by hand. The process for creating a mashlet by hand is rather well thought out and not all that hard to grasp.

    Once a mashlet is published you can do one of several things with it.

    The mashlets are served up from the Presto server in much the same way that any JavaScript object is. Right out of the gate, you can view a mashlet standalone, if you so choose. However, the real fun comes when you realize that you can embed mashlets into any HTML page you wish by simply including a script tag. You can also embed them in a MediaWiki, NetVibes or as a GoogleGadget. You can't ask for more flexibility. From what I understand, there are more embeddable objects coming, including things such as JSR-168 portlets.

    So, from our perspective, Presto offers us 3 incredible capabilities: the ability to capture services from across the web; the ability to create mashups in an easy and visual manner; and the capability to add a face to the services and mashups we create, then embed that face wherever we need.

    We've committed to Presto as the core of our platform and it puts us months, if not years, ahead of where we were.

    Friday, February 6, 2009

    Success!

    I am pleased to report that Dr. Mahafee successfully implanted a Portacath in Cole today. The surgery was not all smooth sailing but the end result was success, and that is all we can ask. Cole came through it like a champ and we couldn't be prouder of him.

    One little note: When I was getting Cole ready to sit down with me while we were in the PACU, as I was bundling Cole into my arms, Cole said, "I'm tired of fighting this freaking battle!" While I don't necessarily want my 3 year old using "freaking", I can totally agree with the sentiment!

    Thursday, February 5, 2009

    Cole's Current Treatment

    Here's a note from Dalynn regarding what we're doing in Cole's treatment right now.

    Hi everyone! I hope you are all doing well! I know times are tough for so many of you right now, so I appreciate you still taking the time to read this.

    Since my last email we have seen GI, surgeon, sleep specialist and our oncology doctors. Our oncologist did agree to a one time try of a steroid taper. Thank you for your prayers regarding this. We did a three day taper and Cole did not have any episodes of waking up gray, zoned and nauseated and vomiting. We monitored his blood sugars and they stayed between 60 to 80. Thank goodness. Now here comes the hard decision, to continue doing the steroid taper or not. According to the oncologist it is not an easy decision. They explained it to us this way. . .to give Cole extra steroids one time during his 3 1/2 year treatment is not a big deal, however to add more steroids every 4 weeks for the next 2 years is a much bigger decision. This is because long term usage of steroids can have side effects.

    Which leads me to our next appointment, which was with the GI doctor, Dr. Kobak. Cole has been having tons of abdominal pain and many poop issues. Dr. Kobak thought one of Cole's main issues is reflux and therefore switched his Zantac to Prevacid. He basically said two of Cole's medicines were probably the main cause of this. Steroids are known to cause gastritis, as well as, methotrexate. Dr. Kobak was involved in a case of a little boy who got a methotrexate tablet lodged in his throat and it caused an ulcer. Cole takes 5 tablets of methotrexate every Tuesday night. So needless to say, we need to stay on top of keeping his stomach and intestinal lining coated. Since starting the Prevacid Cole has not been complaining as much of belly pain. Also he told us to stop Lactulose, a laxative, because it is causes gas pain, bloating and cramping. We are to give Cole a more consistant dose of Miralax and our goal is to have "Dairy Queen Soft Serve Poop" once a day. We also had an abdominal ultrasound, which showed Cole was full of poop, so we had to do a "Bowel Cleansing". We were successful and Cole definitely seems to feel better. The ultrasound also revealed Cole has osteopenia, which is bone density loss. This is due to the long term usage of steroids. (Which is why we and the doctors need wisdom regarding the steroid taper because this is just one of the side effects that can come from steroids) We started him on Viactiv twice a day to help with this.

    We also met with Dr. Mahaffey, the surgeon, to discuss the possibility of reattempting to insert a permant line, a Port-a-cath, in Cole. The first line was unsucessful due to a blood clot in Cole's heart. After discussing our options with the doctor, we decieded to go for the Port-a-Cath again. It has been almost one year since we tried last time and the blood clot should be reabsorbing and not getting worse. We are scheduled for the procedure this Friday, Feb. 6th. There is no good way to look at the blood clot prior to surgery and we are doing this to prevent Cole from getting stuck 3-4 times every time we go to clinic. Our prayer is the blood clot will be gone and there will be no issue with inserting the port-a-cath!!! PLEASE PRAY!!!

    Last, we saw a sleep specialist, Dr. Dubik, yesterday since Cole is not sleeping well. He spent over an hour with us just discussing Cole's case. The doctor is going to try and let all of us rest first for a couple of weeks and then try to tackle the behavior issues. We have started Cole on Ambien, not for long term, but just to get him some rest for a few weeks. We tried it for the first time last night and everyone slept till 5:30 AM. It was Amazing! We are emailing the doctor everyday with updates on how it is going and making adjustments on the time and dosage of the medicine. Please pray for us about this. Because in 4 weeks we will have a new baby, a 17 month old and a child with cancer trying to tackle sleep behavoior issues. Needless to say we need your prayers!!!!!!!!!!

    Okay, so to recap on Prayer Request:
    1. To do a steroid taper or not
    2. Daily Dairy Queen Soft Serve Poop (did you ever think someone would ask you to pray that):)
    3. Healing of osteopenia-bone density loss
    4. Prevacid controls the reflux
    5. Sleep and tackling sleep issues
    6. This Friday, port-a-cath sx goes Awesome and there is no more blood clot!!

    Thanks for all your continued prayer and support. We don't know how we would endure without you!!

    dalynn