I just read about Googles plan for online storage here. But the question is, how useful would this be?

Don’t get me wrong, Google has some great services such as Gmail and Google Docs. But the problem with the GDrive is nothing Google can control: Download/Upload Speeds.

With time bandwidth speeds have been getting a lot better. But I don’t think we are close to being able to have a majority of our storage online. Imagine going back to the days of slow read/write speeds on a CD drive. That is what would happen if we moved to a model like this. Imagine trying to upload all your images, movies, docs, and backup info. Now most in the US are lucky to have an upstream of 1mbps. At that rate for every 24hrs of uploading you would be able to upload almost 9GB of data. Now if you want to upload your 250GB drive of data to start syncing to, it would take 28 days of non stop uploading just to get setup.

Now maybe I am being a little bit pessimistic, but I feel unless our speeds can increase by at least ten times this will not be viable.

Tell me what you think.

I just published a new version of software for the Medical Passport. This version (v1.3.0) has a number of new features.

• Easy Saving - The sofware no longer requires you to click a button to save your information. This helps prevent losing your information beacuase you forget to press the save button.
• Prefered Medical Facility - In your personal information you can have a preferred medical facility. This shows up in the summary.
• Dentist - Under the physicians there is now a place to add a dentist.
• Charting - This is much improved and pulls in more information for doctors to easily start and finish a chart.

There are other small bugs that were fixed plus small other enhancements that have been taken care of, but this software is turning out to be a great asset to doctors and patients alike.

I have been working on the new PlasmaCAM site for awhile. It employs a number of technologies.

The home page was made using Flash. We made sure and added links at the top and bottom for SEO value. The home navigation of the slides were done using Actionscript 3. All the slides are called from a loading php page in Actionscript, and all the slides are separate SWF files. This allows the ability to create a new SWF file and ‘plug it in’ easily without making any changes to the loading SWF file or the php code.

The rest of the site is database content driven. This is going to allow the ability to change text without going into the html and changing it. It is the step PlasmaCAM needed in separating the content from the style.

Other parts of the site, such as the owners community, uses jQuery and ajax functions to save user data and perform client validation.

So far the result are favorable, the conversion rate has almost doubled and the length of visit has gone up by almost a minute. This has been pretty consistent as it was launched at the end of November.