UPDATE !

My buddy Joel Schroeder met their goal - thanks to everyone who helped on the Dear Mr. Watterson - a cinematic exploration of Calvin & Hobbes fund raiser.







They raised the 12k in a mere 21 days using Kickstarter.

Enjoying my visit with my very first Grandson, Jonas Matthew Jahn here in Lancaster, NY.

Here is a picture of the parents, my Son Eric and his wife Heather

Yesterday, November 23rd at 6:48pm EST - at Sisters Hospital in Buffalo, NY - in Birthing room 8 - my son Eric and his wife Heather gave birth to Jonas Matthew Jahn - 8 lbs 10 oz, 20.5 inches long. He is just beautiful and we are so excited for them! This is our first grandchild!



He is the cutest Jahn of all time. While Jonas can't talk yet, I suspect he will be beating his father at Erics favorite Skee Ball iPhone app in no time!

I have some nice pictures posted in a Google Picasa web Album

http://picasaweb.google.com/michaelejahn/Jonas?feat=directlink

My Son Eric is a big Weezer fan - one of his favorite songs by Weezer is "My Name Is Jonas" - hence the name.

Great new iPhone app from Code Line !

I normally am a very upbeat, super optimistic, glass is half full type.

As a product development and hype spewing evangelist, I remind my clients of a Dogbert line in a Dilbert cartoon... "there is a fine line between marketing and fraud" which I say with a big smile, and then we get to work crafting the press releases about what the product will do.

Today, I feel like a person who Spiro Agnew was speaking of when he spoke of - "Nattering nabobs of negativism" - while Agnew said this, it was actually their speechwriter William Safire who coined it... but i digress...

I am working on a project that is making my brain melt.

Today, while doing some research, I stumbled across this.

Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, who describes what he calls the Seven Laws of Projects:

1. A major project is never completed on time, within budget, or with the original team, and it never does exactly what it was supposed to.

2. Projects progress quickly until they become 85% complete. Then they remain 85% complete forever. Think of this as the Home Improvement Law.

3. When things appear to be going well, you’ve overlooked something. When things can’t get worse, they will. (Murphy’s Law says, “If something can go wrong, it will”—this is a corollary).

4. Project teams hate weekly progress reports because they so vividly manifest the lack of progress.

5. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long as expected. Also, ten estimators will estimate the same work in ten different ways. And one estimator will estimate ten different ways at ten different times.

6. The greater the project’s technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it.

7. If you have too few people on a project, they can’t solve the problems. If you have too many, they create more problems than they can solve.

Ain't that the truth.

Google Books Settlement Delayed Indefinitely

Read all about this --> here <--

I think that any delay is a waste of time - millions of books have been scanned and most of this is either out of copyright or orphaned works.

from the article by Miguel Helft of the New York Times;

"..Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

Horrible! A Waste of time and lawyer fees. Google is the new library, and this case has now been pending for more than four years - enough.

How is it that Apple was able to get the artists to see the vision of iTunes and the iPhone, so anyone can listen to anything anywhere - and here we have greedy fools like the heirs of authors, including representatives of the estate of John Steinbeck, all stopping what cannot be stopped - it is not about Google Books, it is about enabling the world access to books. What has the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers done to help with THAT ? NOTHING. They are as bad - if not worse - as the RIAA.

For the record - I am all about reducing using paper as a method to exchange data / information. It is slower, takes up more physical space, can't be mirrored easily and more often than not ends up in some landfill.

I am a contributor to the CATO institute. That should help explain a lot of things to you about my views, but perhaps this post might seem contradictory to the first part of this blog post...

I had always thought that Books and Newspapers are legally different than any data or information distributed using a cable, broadcast and satellite - and it seems that they may not be !

This is one of the questions being answered in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission


Important stuff to us all...

http://reason.com/blog/show/135999.html

In the above link there is a Cato Institute video, based on the first round of arguments in Citizens United, highlights the lengths to which the government has been driven in defending Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) speech restrictions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested (link is a PDF) that books are already covered by the electioneering communications ban, which applies to messages carried by satellite as well as cable and broadcasting, when they are read on devices like Amazon's Kindle.

Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart agreed.

This is totally insane.

I love books. I love eBooks even more, as they are lighter and take up far less space. I also happen to consult with IoFlex, a company that provides software that enables people to scan a book and apply image processing return it to its original, ready to print condition. We have some very large customers who scan hundreds of thousands of books. Unlike the Google Books project, where they are mostly interested in capturing book pages to make them searchable for research, IoFlex customers want to preserve the fidelity of the images. IoFlex BlackBox offers image processing that removed the halftone dot patterns from printed images, cleans up dirt and that sort of thing.

Once of IoFlex's larger customers - Bibilolife - provides services for Libraries. Below is an interesting video about that.

Shelf2Life Demo from OPP on Vimeo.

I have been working on a project that requires us to design PDF forms and a form data workflow for a homecare health service provider.

Part of the prototype will eventually be able to upload data to a Google Health account.

If you are not familair with a Personal Health Record, or PHR - this short video from Google should help.



My project is far from finished, but I thought I might share some of the concepts in a slide show - check it out here ;

http://www.myhealthcarestuff.com/presentation.html

Enjoy !

Wow. You can actually opt out of Google everything !



read all about the village by clicking here ! --> opt out ! <--

I am working on a project for a healthcare service provider that offers home care.

Here is a short presentation that describes a few of the issue we are required to addressing and an interesting "hybrid" paper and PDF form data capture and conversion for EMR systems.

As far as the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life thing goes, Maira Kalman really nailed it in her July 30th NYT Opinion piece

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/can-do/



Yes.

I love What They Think - and you should subscribe !

WhatTheyThink.com is a member-driven Website that delivers comprehensive industry news and market intelligence for the printing and publishing industry. Our in-depth commentary and analysis from top industry experts is at the core of the tools and services we offer our members. WhatTheyThink.com's editorial staff and contributors deliver vital information to help our members run their business more successfully. Updated on a daily basis, WhatTheyThink.com offers visitors and members the most up-to-date news and information on the printing and publishing industry.



--> click here to see an example <--

I am a PDF geek, and I owe much to Frank Romano of RIT - When I worked with 4-Sight, then later with AGFA, Frank asked me to write and "afterward" in a book named Pdf Printing and Publishing: The Next Revolution After Gutenberg he wrote with the help of a few of his RIT students.

You can read what I wrote so many years ago in that afterward --> by clicking here <--

My Son Eric received his very first plaque for his outstanding work at Time Warner.

I am very proud of him.

Open publication - Free publishing - More private key

Designed this for GHN - Good Health Network, Inc.

Good Health Network (GHN) and the GHN Security Service is a socially responsible healthcare technology company focusing on patient/consumer privacy and confidentially by protecting their electronic personal health data. GHN provides both an identity management service and a Personal Health Record (PHR) program.

GHN is a Credentials Service Provider (CSP) that empowers individuals with their digital identity by allowing one to electronically document their confidential information and to securely share data such as protected health information or financial records with others via the Internet.

GHN is a CA or Certification Authority with a specific focus on healthcare. A CA is defined as a trusted entity that issues and/or revokes any public key certificate which is a digital file issued and digitally signed by the private key of a certification authority that binds the user name to a public key. The user is identified in the certificate as the one who has sole control and access to the private key.

As noted above GHN verifies an individual’s identity through an electronic authentication process known as e-Authentication. This process establishes a confidence level in a user’s identity when used over the internet. The e-Authentication process presents a variety of technical challenges in verifying one’s identity over a network. In order to establish a strong ID management process GHN embraces and follows the Electronic Authentication Guideline for federal agencies, NIST Special Publication 800-63 Version 1.0.2 . This guideline, published by NIST, establishes four assurance levels with Level 1 being the lowest and Level 4 being the highest

GHN functions as a CSP and is considered a trusted entity that issues electronic credentials and/or tokens to subscribers. Individuals who elect to enroll in the service undergo an identity proofing process in which their identity is first validated and then bound to an authentication certificate. The certificate is embodied into a token that the user either has (token) or controls with secret information such as a password which when used authenticates their identity.

Privacy - protecting the personal information from unauthorized use or intrusion.

Security - specifically addresses procedures and functions of how PHI is managed, shared, protected and stored in an electronic environment.

Confidentiality - a process by which personal information is kept private. In doing so, controlled access to protected health information is not available or disclosed to unauthorized persons. The information stored on a system is protected against unintended or unauthorized access.

Authentication - the process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be. Most systems have a unique verification process using biometrics and multi-factor credentials for validating an individual’s digital identity. e-Authentication is the same process over the Internet.

Identity proofing - a process used by a registration authority to validate sufficient information to uniquely identify a person ((FIPS 201and Real ID).

In case you have not heard, Amazon was forced to recall two eBooks that it had sold via its web site for use on the Kindle eBook Reader that Amazon developed, markets and supports. Amazon WhisperNet is the wirelss distibution method they use to send and authorize eBooks, so when people logged into Amazon, these two books were simply removed (deleted at the Amazon server) - which meant they were then removed and deleted from the users Kindle account.

This has cause a HUGE uproar with Knidle users, many of them very very upset.

I personally believe that Amazon would have done this without being forced to. I still can't understand the vile and hatred. The two books that this effected were by George Orwell - Animal Farm (published in 1945) and 1984 (published in 1949) are a hardly new books, but very popular and not yet in the public domain, so the publisher still retains copyright in the USA where Amazon/Kindle does business.

One can purchase either of these books almost anywhere used for 10 cents. This recall was not about money, as they were sold for .99 cents - it was not about control, as they are a distributor - it was about their publishing partner Penguin telling them that Penguin own the rights, and that Penguin did not provide the rights to Amazon to distribute these as an eBook, and asked their distribution partner Amazon to please fix this mistake.

Think of this from another perspective - J K Rowling would never ever ever release a Harry Potter book in eBook format if Amazon had no method to recall an unauthorized copy.

Amazon made a mistake, but had a system clever enough to fix it. Authors, artists, musicians, Electronic Game designers, movie makes and any digital publisher are protected using this approach. The same is NOT true with Apple iTunes, BTW.

This was an very interesting a public demonstration of a superior technology. And you probably hated it. And yes, people whom have created things that are digital and have had them pirated and in awe going "wow, that was ugly, but it WORKED!"

People are thieves. Personally - I have no problem with these sort of hiccups. No one lost an eye or a limb. If you really really need an eBook from Orwell, it can be had unfortunately or fortunately, and that attitude would vary largely on if you are on the copyright protection team at Penguin Publishing or not.

But TRUST me on this one, Amazon made no money and had NOTHING to gain by doing this except prove it was a reliable partner for eBook distribution.

That's all I have to say about that.

I will update this blog post if it turns out that my take on this is incorrect.

There has been significant change to the digital book landscape.
California Digital Textbooks Initiative

A plea from me to self-publishing service providers, publishers and developers;
Please do consider standardizing on EPUB format.

Do not be fooled into thinking something else will do, or that you are more clever than the folks at Adobe and Google - do not waste your valuable resources - EPUB will win.

Google is already providing support (link), iBiblio will support you (link).

When there is confusion and chaos during a change event, everyone needs to figure out what approach, methods, technologies or file formats have the best chance of becoming widely accepted and wildly popular - EPUB is poised for that.

As evidence, consider that there are plenty of free EPUB books at The Gutenberg Project (link), Adobe is even behind it (link) and Amazon will soon follow (link).

For more information on EPUB

http://www.idpf.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

I work for a software developer that provides software tools that enable the user to scan a book and make it ready for eBook conversion - but this blog post is not about that - but if you are interested in that, --> click here <--

Check out the new PDF Healthcare video/audio by Dr. Steven Waldren on Monday June 15th edition of Mr.HISTalk blog

http://bit.ly/aooSL






Steven Waldren, MD, MS, director of the Center for Health IT for the American Academy of Family Physicians, did an 11-minute slide overview (complete with his own casual narration)

Overview of PDF Healthcare from Steven Waldren on Vimeo.

I am trying out a new small tool from AddThis
in this blog post.
http://addthis.com/



AddThis is easy to install, customize and localize. They seemed to have worked hard to make it the simplest, most recognized sharing tool on the internet.

And, it is free - 'nuff said !

Hopefully, I have not screwed things up, and the button melow actually works - thanks to Jon Bishop my swami guru buddy at Magicomm.bz for an endless stream of useful twittery facbooking goodies!

So, today - I am posting on my blog about my new found PDF love - PDF Healthcare.

PDF Healthcare is simply advice for developers and users of PDF in the health care industry.

There is a very active AIIM PDF Healthcare committee (AIIM is the Association for Information and Image Management) that has a goal to describe generally unknown attributes of the Portable Document Format (PDF) to facilitate the capture, exchange, preservation and protection of healthcare information.

PDF Healthcare allows health care providers and consumers and healthcare system and solution developers to develop a secure, electronic container that can store and transmit relevant health information, including but not limited to personal documents, handwritten clinical notes, laboratory test result reports, electronic forms, scanned images, photographs, digital X-rays, and ECGs, important for reliable exchange of the important data for maintaining and improving one's health.

Unlike PDF/X - which is an ANSI and ISO standard - PDF Healthcare is simply advice for developers and users of PDF in the health care industry.

I have been focused on PDF Forms.

I have created a page you can review with some samples and examples of a PDF Healthcare form that contains HL7 XML data.

you can --> click here <-- to visit my Adobe Buzzword document.

Hope you enjoy it !

And now you know exactly why I am so very interested in EHRs !



News from my son Eric and his wife Heather - 13 weeks! - due November 21st 2009.

Looks like I will need to invest in a walking cane and a ear trumpet as it looks like this old man will become a gram-paw !

Since 1991, I have been involved with the development and marketing of tools for creating reliable digital documents for exchange in high end printing environments - PDF/X. PDF/X is popular for high quality, reliable exchange of newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs or any document that might be viewed or printed.

Recently I have become involved with a project for medical document exchange. Issues that revolve around EHR (Electronic Heath Record) are similar in that a reliable exchange normally requires metadata be exchanged, and often this exchange requires that the PDF exchange might require that PDF - or metadata - be in a form that is machine 'readable'.

Like PDF/X - PDF Healthcare files might need to be 'preflighted' - or automatically searched and verified that it is in the required condition before it is actually accepted - much more than checksum.

Examples of a PDF/X "plus" metadata are exchanges for book marketing materials (like ONIX) or exchanges between advertisers and magazine and newspaper publishers (AdSml)

Like JDF exchanges, where the associated JDF may come before, with, or after a PDF/x file is transmitted - one important part is JMF - Job Messaging Format - The language used to communicate between JDF agents and controllers.

Unlike PDF/X and JDF exchanges in publishing environments - With PDF Healthcare - there are additional privacy issues - anyone that works at a hospital and knows that if a medical record is sent to the wrong party, this is a serious HIPPA incident which may expose the party to lawsuits and sizable fines.

Most medical data today is transmitted via FAX - while many think this might be more secure than an email, well - not so much. Lets say we have a healthcare professional who is trying to fax some medical data.

When someone sends a FAX - they can see that it was sent from their end BUT...

1. They do not have a method to verify if the party that it was sent to was the right party (just imagine how many times you have dialed the wrong number)

2. They do not have a method to know if the fax actually printed (The FAX receiving end might out of paper, jam, low toner, etc...)

3. They do not know if anyone actually read it (no simple confirmation, like we have in email, we KNOW it was at least OPENED)

If we have a JDF / JMF like FAX system, the above could be possible of course.

In the world of secure PDF exchange, many developers use things like Adobe® LiveCycle® Rights Management ES - or products and technologies "like" that

http://www.adobe.com/lifesciences/solutions/livecycle/

Unlike PDF/X - where Adobe and print vertical vendors worked together to add things to the PDF specification - PDF Healthcare is NOT PDF/H

- PDF Heathcare is simply a best practices guide - here is a link to that;

http://www.aiim.org/documents/standards/PDF-h_Implementation_Guide_2008.pdf

If you are interested in viewing examples;

http://www.aiim.org/standards/article.aspx?ID=33284

Here is a great blog that talks to many of the issues that revolve about digital data exchange in a medical environment

http://www.geekdoctor.blogspot.com/

I think these particular post related to scanning paper and managing documents were very interesting.

I have experience with scanning paper documents to and then performing data-scrapes, as well as building workflows to convert a room full of documents into a searchable PDF archive.

In the case of the US Dept of State, they could not install any applications and needed a method that would work with Adobe Acrobat Reader. In this case, they wanted to search across a specific set of PDF files searching for specific key words - to speed things up (there were thousands of PDF files) this required a creation of an index - and then, teach them how to use Adobe Acrobat Readers Advanced Search options to search through an index to find the specific PDF files.

http://issuu.com/michaelejahn/docs/20080520_onsitescanppt_jahn/

Stay tuned for more on this !

Google Settlement with the Publishing Industry

View more presentations from Dave Kellogg.

Man, and I growing tired of all this news about the melting ice caps !

I mean, come ON already, the earth is over four billion years old. We've collected - on average - about 30 years of data. Many people are trying to claim there is a trend based on less than a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent. We have what - .00000075% of the earth's climate history and they're trying to declare this as some "unnatural trend" and we all have to 'change the way we behave? I declare bullshit! The earth's wobble around it's axis peaks in 2012, and as the current angle, the earth's northern hemisphere is getting more and more direct sunlight because of this increasing angle of tilt. After 2012, we'll be getting less and less, and the Arctic ice caps will start getting exposed to less and less heat and guess what? *gasp* -- the Arctic ice caps start lasting longer and start getting thicker again!

Do people NOT study basic astrophysics before spewing this crap?

My son and Best Man Marc "Roasts" his brother at the Eric and Heather Jahn wedding on Friday, February 6th in Buffalo, NY. SNL level for sure...Joan and I traveled back to the snow to attend and we are still recovering from frostbite, unwise limbo-ish dance moves and tantric chicken wing ingestion. We had a wonderful time with the perfect ending - being bumped, given $600 in flight coupons and then moved to First Class on our flight home.

Click on this picture to watch - trust me, it is hella-funny

From 20090207_Eric_wedding

--- for more pictures --> click here <--

My brothers David and Herb rented Harleys while visiting my Mom in Cathedral City, CA

Here is a picture of my Cousin Kelly's daughter Candace!



Candace was featured in a recent Newspaper article --> click here to read it! <-- and has won a soccer scholarship from Eastern Carolina University

- oh yeah baby, it is all GO PIRATES 'round these parts now !