General Practice

For the next 5 weeks, I will be spending time at General Practice (GP) clinic. This means that I will be having lots of opportunities to clerk patient individually and present the findings to the doctor. This will be the best time for me to get lots of procedural skills done.

During winter holiday, the medical school asked us to choose 10 places for our GP placement. Unfortunately, since many medical students choose city placements, not many were able to get their place of choice. In my case, my placement was not even in my list. I was given rural GP placement which is quite far and close to the border of Victoria. I might be celebrating Eid over there as well. There won't be any Muslims within 50-70km radius from my GP placement.Now, that is something that I would call as celebrating Eid'ul Fitr in a foreign land.

I don't think I would be able to get free internet access over there. Hence, no more blogging or even facebook-ing in the next 5 weeks. As this will be my last post before going to my GP placement, please forgive for all my wrongdoings and Happy fasting. Happy Eid in advance too.

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Energy efficient of Google search

Taken from Google Blog

Activity	Google Searches
CO2 emissions of an average daily newspaper (PDF) (100% recycled paper)	850
A glass of orange juice	1,050
One load of dishes in an EnergyStar dishwasher (PDF)	5,100
A five mile trip in the average U.S. automobile	10,000
A cheeseburger	15,000
Electricity consumed by the average U.S. household in one month	3,100,000

read more

p/s: I found it funny to compare the number of Google searches with a glass of orange juice

Favourite Firefox extensions

These are my favourite Firefox extensions in Firefox 3.0.

1. Adblock Plus. I certainly recommend my reader to install this popular Firefox add-on. It blocks 95% of website advertisement and this also includes flash ads. It certainly helps me on having faster loading of any websites and have better internet surfing experience.
2. DownThemAll. A useful download manager. It contains download accelerator and help me to organize all my downloads.
3. IE Tab. I used this for any websites that stubbornly have to be displayed using Internet Explorer. This add-on is also useful if you are a web designer.
4. Web Developer. It helps me whenever I'm designing this blog layout. It also help me to gain further understanding on how each website works.
5. Greasemonkey. This allows me to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.There are various JavaScript available to be used with Greasemonkey. It certainly useful if you would like to try various JavaScript available on Greasemonkey
   

Related: My favourite Firefox extensions [2007]

clearing up alerts

Right now, I am reading all the alerts in my Google Reader. There are thousands of alerts that need to be clear up. This is the result of not accessing my Google Reader in the past two months.

I subscribed to all of my friend's blogs and it was surprising to read what have happened in the past two months. Few of them quit blogging for good and few of them stop temporarily.

It was interesting to see what have happened in the blogging world. Most of the blog that I subscribed to are Malaysian bloggers and it was fun to see how each blogger responds to each issue happening in Malaysia.

Each person is entitled to their own opinion and despite all of their differences, I learn to respect their own opinion. After all, no one is perfect in this world. If we are able to tolerate each other, and spend time to listen to each other problem, we are one step closer in achieving unity and peace

Internet Addiction = Mental Disorders?

Found via Malaysian Medical Resources

In the March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Jerald Block proposed that Web abuse be added to his field's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Block cites research from South Korea, where he says, the affliction is considered a serious public health problem....

Read more

If this can be classified as a disorder, I believe that many people have already been infected by this disease and I can add several sub-classifications for this disorders. Under internet addiction, I should add addiction to Facebook, Myspace, Friendster and ?blog :)

Some of my friends are being strongly addicted to Facebook and it is certainly not a good thing to do when the exam is just around the corner.

How to tell whether you are an addict? Here are the questions that you should answer.

1. Have you ever felt you should cut down on your time surfing the internet?
2. Have people annoyed you by criticizing your internet surfing habit?
3. Have you ever felt bad or guilty about your internet addiction?
4. Have you ever had to go online first thing in the morning (as an “eye opener”) ?

Modified from CAGE questionaire which is for alcohol addiction :)

p/s: you can try to modify this questions if you think you are addicted to caffeine too, which is relatively common especially among students.

Firefox 3.0

I have been using Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2 for few weeks now. I can proudly say that this version is faster, safer and snappier than Firefox 2.0. There are several big changes in the user interface and I think they are quite useful. They have also managed to fix the problem with memory leak. As a web designer, I am also happy to know that Firefox 3.0 has passed Acid 2 Test which test the internet browsers against the web standard.

Please note that some of the extensions are still not being updated to Firefox 3.0. Please check on your favourite extensions before you upgrade.

Last but not least, the complete version of Firefox 3.0 will be released this Tuesday, June 17th. Let us make this as a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours :). Currently, there are only 5888 people in Malaysia who have pledged to download Mozilla Firefox 3.0. Come on, we need more people to download this amazing software :)

Firefox Download Day 2008

Are you human?

Interesting article.

Every web surfer, in the course of his or her browsing, has been forced to stop and perform this weird little task: look at a picture of some wavy, ghostly, distorted letters and type them into a box. Sometimes you flub it and have to retype the letters, but otherwise you don't think about it much. That string of letters has a name; it's called a CAPTCHA. And it's a test. By correctly transcribing it, you have proved to the computer that you are a human being.

read more

CAPTCHAS represents a race between programmers and spammers, with user in between. CAPTCHAS prevent spammers or hackers to create email account and indirectly reduce the number of spam we received in our email.

The most difficult CAPTCHAS I have seen so far is to choose letters that contains cats. Those letters are quite difficult since each letter has an animal on it and it is not easy to see whether it is a cat or something else since the picture of the animal is quite small. I have to try several times to get it right.

I wonder if CAPTCHAS is going to be more difficult in the future since spammers always able to find way to overcome CAPTCHAS.

Style Switcher

This entry is related to web-design. It may contain technical terms that might confuse you.

What is style switcher?

• It is a technique where the web visitors are given several options to change the website accordingly. They may be able to change the colour, font size, theme or general layout of the website.
  

Is it useful?

• One of the objectives of this technique is to be user-friendly to web visitors. Anyone will be able to change the website according to their own preference. Hence, everyone will be happy and no more angry web visitors.
• It can be helpful to disabled people. For example, you can provide the options of changing font size or change the colour to more suitable colour range.
• However, some people say by giving too many choices, it will spoil the visitors. Too many versions of the website may not be useful in the long-term. A web designer is supposed to be able to predict the best option for any web visitors.
• Personally, I don't mind of implementing style switcher provided that it won't interfere with the content of this blog. Inappropriate usage of style switcher can cause significant increase in loading time of the website or the changes degrade the usefulness of the content.
  

Related links:

• Style switcher are back: Ideas, Examples and a contest - Smashing Magazine. There are lots of examples in this link. Check it out.
• How to create a CSS style switcher.

Your online identity and Google

I read an interesting discussion at Pro Blogger. It was about searching your online identiy / real name on Google.

How important is your identity on the search engine?

Personally, I believe that it is quite important for your online identity or your real name to be on the first page in any search engine.

If you met someone new, the best way to know the person is to search online. The person who will be searching for your name could be your potential employer, clients or web visitors. If your website is not in the first page, you could be in trouble.

In my case, the potential people who will be looking for my name would be patients. Although I'm not yet a doctor, but this is something that I need to think seriously.

If I was a consultant and the patient could not find my name on Google, I would be losing lots of referrals. If a doctor has lots of negative remarks on the first few pages of Google, I don't think many patients will come to that doctor.

In fact, anything that I wrote on this blog will be scrutinised by anyone on the internet. This can have important effect in my future career.

At the moment, if I'm searching for my real name, the first website that come up on Google is my Facebook account and followed by my fotopage. This blog does not come up in the first page.

If I'm searching for hafiz238, this blog will be on the first page :)

Guard the password to your email account.

Few of my friends had the experience of losing their email password. Losing your email is equivalent of losing your online identity and could lead to severe impact towards your life.

Losing the password to your email should not be seen as a trivial matter. You should be extremely careful of not losing your password to any of your email accounts.

Imagine this scenario. Another person managed to get the password to your email. There are several things that they can do to your email.

1. Change the password which will prevent you from using that email. After this, they can use your email for spamming to anyone in your address book / contact. Imagine how surprised your friends will be when receiving spam email from your email. This is certainly will not help building good reputation about you for a while. However, this is only a temporary effect and can be resolved by telling your friends what has happened to your email account.


2. Using your email to gain access to other important accounts which are related to your email. This is a serious consequence that you need to consider. If there is one thing that you should remember from this post, this is the one.
   
   If the hacker has enough information about you, they can hack your online bank account. They can tell the bank that you have forgotten your password to the online bank account. The bank will send the new password to the email which has already been hacked. Then, the hacker will be able to access your online bank account and stole money from your own bank account. This scenario can also be applied to credit card and various online services around the internet.
   
   To make things easier, sometimes the inbox is filled with emails containing passwords and you may not realised this until it is too late!

Losing the password to your email should be taken seriously and email should not be seen only as a tool to send or receive message. Losing your email has serious consequence.

Ways to prevent from losing your email password

1. Don't ever give out your password to anyone or type it on the internet. When a social website asks you to provide your email username and password; for them to inform all of your friends in your address book, STOP. This is equivalent of handing the key of your safe to the thief directly. Hackers can use this method to gather lots of passwords in a short amount of time. Even if the website seems credible and has good reputation, you will never know when the site will be hacked. A good social website should not ask their users to provide access to the email account for advertising their website.

2. Use a strong password. Use a combination of numbers and letters. Choose a password that is unique and known only to you. If you suspect the password is known to someone else, change the password immediately. A good practice is to change email password regularly but this could lead to difficulty of memorising the new password.

3. Improve the security of your computer. Defend you computer from being invaded by hackers, spyware, virus and various malwares with strong firewall, virus and anti-spyware. There are lots of good free anti-virus or anti-spyware available around the internet. Use them.

4. Practise good surfing habit. Don't visit any suspicious websites that may contain spywares that could gather lots of info from your computer including your password. Surf wisely and beware of any attempt to hack into your own computer.

5. Knowledge. Educate yourself in term of the danger of identity theft. Hacking techniques evolve over time and you should be one step ahead of them. Read a lot and be careful of your surfing habit.

I hope this post has illustrate the danger of losing the password to your email account.

Related link: How good is your password?

UPDATE 5/6/2008: Added related link.

heavy website

How fast your website can load? It is an important question whenever I design my blog layout. Not many people have fast internet connection and many people tend to discard any website that is slow to load.

There are several things that will slow down the loading time of websites. Having too many advertisements, images and Flash objects will hinder the loading time of any websites. Putting complicated JavaScript might cause internet browser such as Internet Explorer and Firefox to stall or crash.

One of the tools that I used to check my blog layout is Pingdom Tools. It gives detail analysis of what is being downloaded whenever someone is visiting this blog.

Here is the snapshot of the analysis. The full report is here.

The current layout for my blog at the moment is a bit heavy since it has few JavaScript and various small images. If I have time, I might redesign the entire layout to make it simpler than the current design.

internet resources

Since I've started my clinical years, I have changed my method of looking for information. Previously back when I studied at university, I used to borrow lots of books for my revision. I will go to the library and borrow some books that is usually on loan for short period of time. That method was sufficient at that time.

My current rotation requires me to modify my way of searching for medical knowledge. I need more up-to-date information and books can sometimes be outdated. This explains my reliance on internet resources. It is good to be a student under two institutions which are the university and the hospital. Both provide subscriptions to few excellent resources. At the moment, I frequently used Access Medicine, UpToDate and Clinicians Health Channel. Besides that, there are also free resources available on the net such as eMedicine and Online Medical Dictionary.

Even doctors rely heavily on these internet resources. I'm not sure how I am going to cope without internet. The medical field is always changing and we need to be updated with any medical breakthrough in term of treatment and management of patient.

I'm not sure about the situation back in Malaysia but I think I might be dependent on the internet in the future. I hope the internet service in Malaysia will be more competitive and cheaper to the people. High internet broadband penetration in any country will bring more benefit in the long term.