This morning, I took my wife to the hospital for routine blood tests that had been scheduled for some time. Everything was going smoothly: check-in, number, waiting room. Suddenly, everything came to a halt and shut down. I was connected to the hospital’s public Wi-Fi and noticed that my connection also went down.

Having managed a couple of similar facilities, I immediately understood what had happened. I saw the staff panicking and calling the technicians, but they quickly reorganized within 10 minutes. They managed to process everyone who already had a number and then proceeded with the others in the order of their arrival. Despite the ten-minute delay (even though people started complaining right away), they were extremely efficient.

I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud.” The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.

For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.

Everything essential must always be accessible locally and, in special cases, it should be possible to physically access the servers and connect directly to them, bypassing any network/switch failures.

There has been only one interruption in the past, due to human error. Today, we have redundant servers (not HA on virtualizers, but two machines running the same software with replicated databases - on separate power lines) so such an issue shouldn’t happen anymore.

Not everything can be anticipated, but history is a great teacher. The Internet connection will eventually be interrupted :-)

When it comes to the health and survival of people, there are no compromises.

#IT #Internet #Networking #Outage #Health #HA #Cloud #CloudComputing #OwnYourData

As bad as the Internet Archive Open Library ruling seems, it is actually much worse

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/05/second-circuit-says-libraries-disincentivize-authors-to-write-books-by-lending-them-for-free/

I've been getting a lot of requests lately, both in DMs and publicly, about implementing ActivityPub into AudioPub. I would like to address these requests here because I'm getting quite a lot of them.
AudioPub is going to stay independent. That's a decision I've carefully considered, and I believe it's the best path forward for the project's health.
When I open-sourced this project, it wasn't a step towards joining the Fediverse. It was about sharing the code, not changing AudioPub's fundamental nature. The open-source nature of the project does mean you have the choice to fork it and add federation yourself into your instance if that's something you're passionate about.
I like the community here, but the Fediverse culture isn't quite the right fit for AudioPub. Moderation would become overwhelmingly more complex for a single person or even if we get a team in the future. And honestly, it's just not the direction I want for this project.
I hope this clarifies my stance on the matter and the requests stop. Thank you for your understanding, and I'm willing to discuss this if you have something to say.

#audiopub

Those are 13 things that i have been sure about by my experiences:

1. "If you distance yourself from old friends as you make new ones, you will end up with no friends at all."
2. "Don't lose your moon while counting the stars."
3. "True friends are like stars; they shine brightest when the night is darkest."
4. "Always find a place in your heart for a friend."
5. "Good friends are like four-leaf clovers, hard to find and lucky to have."
6. "Old friends are gold, new friends are silver."
7. "Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies."
8. "A friend is someone who is there when you need them."
9. "Friendship is like one hand washing the other."
10. "Friends keep you standing during life's tough times."
11. "True friendship is not measured by distance."
12. "A friend is someone who cries with you and laughs with you."
13. "Friendship defies time and never fades."

Calling All Blind and Low Vision Users!

Exciting news! I’ve reached out to Apple Accessibility, and they’re on board to collaborate with us. They’ve asked me to put together a team so we can work directly with their team and engineers.

Are you passionate about improving accessibility features for blind and low vision users? Do you use VoiceOver, Zoom, or other low vision features on your devices? We need your help!

We’re looking for individuals who are interested in providing feedback and testing new features from our point of view. Your input will be invaluable in making technology more accessible for everyone.

If you’re interested in participating, please fill out the form below:

https://forms.microsoft.com/r/eRQAsmMb7C

Let’s make a difference together!
Feel free to share this post.

Best,
Matthew Whitaker

#Accessibility #BlindUsers #LowVision #VoiceOver #Zoom #AppleAccessibility #TechForAll #Inclusion #AccessibilityMatters #blind #lowvision