The Buddha Says

I was browsing Google Videos today and clicked on the 'Top 100' link and chose 'India' to see what was being posted by my countrymen. I was very surprised to find two videos that were over 2 hours long at the first and third positions. The first one had 158,314 views and the third one had 33,453 views. They both turned out to be complete Bollywood movies. Now, if this isn't copyright infringement, then what is. Google does not have an easy mechanism to flag a video as copyrighted material. Check out t his page for yourself to see what I mean. One of the videos was posted by a site called megaload .com. (no hyperlink here to save you the trouble. Take my word for it when I say...) It turns out to be a parked domain with only a zillion pop-up ads to boast. Come on guys...if you want to watch a movie, pay for it. But, just look at the number of views and the ratings. I bet most of these have come from outside India. I live in the UK and it is not very often that

I am making this entry from an internet kiosk in Amsterdam Airport. I am on my way to Ethiopia as part of a team from the Southern Ethiopia Gwent Health Link . After a month of hectic preparation I am hoping that I can contribute to this visit. I will be teaching health professionals in Ethiopia how to make the best use of computers in medicine. The primary focus is going to be E-learning. We are hoping to get them to interact with us more via the forum that I have created at the link's website. If I get one out of every four attending the course to register on the forum and start posting, then my visit would have been a fantastic success. Well, of all the zillion other problems that they have, I wonder if they will have the time to sit in front of a computer and bother to post to forums. We will know in a few days time. More from Ethiopia.

My best time at a laparoscopic cholecystectomy yet - 36 minutes flat. My previous best time was 45 minutes. And, no I wasn't racing against time. Honestly. It is always a bad idea to race against time, especially in elective surgery. I just got lucky this time. Like a boss of mine said, the more operations you do, the luckier you get.

I have created a new MessagesTa.php for the Wikipital project. This contains a larger number of translated messages in tamil than the default file that ships with MediaWiki 1.7 . A lot has been derived from the work done for the Tamil Wikipedia but I have added a considerable amount of stuff. This file, I hope, will be very useful for all Tamil Wikis. Remember to replace விக்கிபிட்டல் with your own project's name or {{SITENAME}} before you install using this file. You can download this file from here . While at it, also check out விக்கிபிட்டல் . Please link to this blog to download the file until I upload it to a more permanent location. I don't want people cursing me for a broken link to my googlepages.

Wikipital is now available in Tamil. There are a few issues that I will iron out over the next few days. It took a good deal of work to get the MessagesTa.php file in order inspite of the fact that many of the messages have already been translated for the tamil wikipedia project . The completed file has got a much larger number of translated messages than the default tamil translation file that comes with Mediawiki . I am sure this will be useful for numerous Tamil Wiki projects.Check out my exclusive entry to download this file. விக்கிபிட்டல் உடல் நலம் மற்றும் மருத்துவம் சம்பந்தப்பட்ட தகவல்களை இலவசமாகவும், கோட்பாடின்றியும் அளிக்கின்றது. கூடிய விரைவில் மற்ற மொழிகளிலும் விக்கிபிட்டல் உருவாக்கப்படும்.

How many signs do we see everyday on average? Little boards telling us where to go, what to watch out for, where to tread carefully and a lot more. Shops, roads, cars, buildings - there is a signboard in every one of them. I work in a hospital and have for the past 18 months taken exactly the same route to the surgical ward on level 3. I am curious to see how many signs my eyes glance at everyday. There are plenty - but have I ever read them? Let me try and recollect. 'Cosultant Obstetrician On Call', 'Maternity...???', '???Access to Theatres, ITU, CCU Only', a board on the inside of the lifts listing out all the wards and what floors they are on, 'Ward 3/4', '??Access for Staff Only', etc. I am sure that these are only a fraction of the actual number. I will pick up a dictaphone tomorrow and actually read them all into it as I walk the walk. Oh, and on a completely different note, I completed uploading the tamil version of Wikipital. It is now

Wikipital is finally online. Thanks a lot to my brother-in-law, an SpR in Paediatrics, the site is online and content is increasing by the day. I am still working on the translation files for Tamil, my mother tongue. That should go live hopefully within the next fortnight. I have used Mediawiki to do this. More later. The site is at www.wikipital.com

The worst of partialities is to withold oneself, the worst of ignorance is not to act, the worst lie is to steal away. - CHARLES PEGUY (1873-1914) A few months ago, I was faced with an exceptionally difficult situation. It was fairly routine to start with. A 68 year old man was brought into A&E with a leaking abdominal aneurysm. He was in hypovolemic shock and I was the surgical doctor on call. It was obvious that he needed urgent surgery and I spoke to the vascular surgeon on call and agreed to transfer the patient to the oeprating theatre while he got to the hospital. The patient was on the operating table, fully anaesthetised, 30 mins after I first saw him in A&E. And, he was deteriorating fast. The consultant anesthetist asked me if I had clamped the aorta before. I said that I had never done it before though I had assisted numerous aneurysm surgeries and knew how to do it. I said I probably could do it if the situation was desperate. At this stage, I asked the theatre s

I know there are plenty of wikis around. I got interested in contributing to the wikipedia quite recently. I had another project on my mind - inspired by a friend. A website for Indian patients. The aim would be to provide simple, reliable, evidence-based, health/disease related information in english as well as every regional language of the country. The lack of a strong regulatory body for the medical profession combined with the collective ignorance of the common Indian public results in some very sad situations. I have often been a part of this in the past - a hapless spectator watching the system fail again and again. The surest way forward in my opinion is to empower the people with knowledge. With knowledge comes enquiry. With knowledge comes the freedom of choice. Patients can question the decisions taken by their healtcare providers. The informed patient is a formidable entity who can take on the medical practitioners whop often try to squeeze every last paisa out of a sick p

After much persuasion by my boss, I decided to switch from Suse 10 to Ubuntu 6.06 . And, like all proper decisions this was taken at 1 am when I could barely keep my eyes open let alone think straight. I have had Suse for over 6 months now. I spent a month installing it. That is right. Just under a month. For a variety of reasons. First and most importantly, it was my first linux install. Then I had to find all the drivers for my Dell laptop bits. I had quite a job getting and configuring Suse to play mp3 and mpgs. And, I am not even mentioning manually editing the xorg.conf file. Phew! And what a difference Ubuntu is. It is the easiest linux distribution to install. It took me little over 30 minutes to do. And, it is a breeze. It comes with a prepackaged set of software that should set your computer up to do most daily chores. You get OpenOffice , Firefox , photoediting tools, some games and more. There aren't any fancy complex programs as these are all available on the online re

Is this meant to drive you crazy? I have spent over two weeks now desperately trying to configure a new desktop for under £600. I thought this would be relatively easy. I only had two non-modifiable factors: first, it would be a AMD dual core processor based system and second, it will run only linux on it. I decided to build a system to run only linux for a number of reasons. The most important is out of respect for the man I work for who has taught me a lot - in surgery, life and computers. The next reason is that it will force me to learn and become good at linux. And, this has huge implications when I go back home and start running my own hospital. A linux based network would be infinitely simpler to manage and cheaper. I have so far decided on the processor (athlon fx x 2 3800+) and the motherboard (an asus one with the nvidia ultra 4 chipset). I am yet to decide the rest of the stuff and hopefully should have ordered all the components before the end of next week. And, for the nex

Today I made my first entry into the world of wikipedia. I operated on a lady with an irreducible, painful femoral hernia a couple of nights ago. She did not have any clinical evidence of obstruction or strangulation. I chose to use the infra-inguinal approach as this is much simpler and a much lesser procedure. She had a bit of omentum incarcerated in the hernia. I excised this and fixed the hernia using sutures. My consultant had a little chat (the kind you get when you have done something silly) the next day. He thought I should have used the high-approach, so I would have had better access to the abdomen. This would have been useful if she had needed bowel resection. I was planning on opening the lacunar ligament to get bowel out through the femoral canal. This, he said, was not ideal. So, I decided to read up and was looking on the internet and came across a wiki stump. And, I decided to add some stuff to it. I hope to add to more medical articles in the coming days.