John Croson's Blog Home

Most healthcare professionals know at this point that all providers of health care, require NPI (National Provider Identifier) numbers. Without one, it will become increasingly difficult for claims to be paid by commercial payers, and impossible to collect medicare and medicaid payments. Since we are a coding/billing/collection/management agency, we have frequented the NPPES (National Plan & Provider Enumeration System) to lookup NPI information. Unfortunately, there have been brief periods of downtime of the site, causing us to implement our own solution: a backup of the registry. I have a daily cron job that downloads the NPI database, push it into MySQL, giving us an albeit slow, but accurate access to an off-line version of this data. The shell script below performs the retrieval: #!/bin/sh WORKDIR="/srv/htdocs/npi" LOG="$WORKDIR/npi.log" MONTH=`date +%b` LASTMONTH=`date +%b --date='1 month ago'` YEAR=`date +%Y` URL="http://nppesdata.cms.h...

I've been working quite hard at my new job at Integrated Healthcare Business Solutions . Just a small list of what I've been doing in that time: Migrate Windows 2000 Domain to 2k3, which required: New Server and SAN setup. Migrate Aquarius Document Imaging IIS application and SQL databases to new server. Migrate Data to new server. Heavily modify GPO's for new environment. Deploy WSUS for new environment. Set up Terminal Services on old server (complete wipe of 2k and new build of 2k3) This box also does AV (SEPM), Backups (SBE) and supplies us with FlexWiki Lots more I'm sure I've forgotten by now... Deploy 2k DC as backup auth server which also serves as: GFI FaxMaker 12 Fax Server IAS Server (for our ASA 5510) FireFTP Server Deploy a Linux server based on the Debian disto: Hyperic - server, application and network monitoring/metric tool Local Postfix SMTP server (Utility mail for GFI, etc.) Ntop services Intranet web Custom compliance reporting (read:whistleblowe...

Just realized with all my sporadic posts to "brag" about my tech-exploits, that I should note that I've got two websites I've designed. One is McDermotts Photo (web archive link...did that one a few years ago), and the other is Lord of Life Lutheran Church (quite recent). Lord of Life is a Joomla implimentation, and the theme is heavily modified from the creator, Shayne Bartlette . McDermott's was from scratch, using DreamWeaver and a few other tools, and much design help from my wife, Kristen. I've also set my own Joomla site up at pcnorb.homelinux.org , on an old PIII 450, that's getting too tired to serve the pages of my son I keep pumping into Menalto's Gallery implementation. Seems to be the latest and greatest CMS, according to Packt Publishing . That's good, because I just convinced the Racine Art Museum , one of my customers, to switch their web over to it. Their site was getting stale, over 5 years old, and needs a serious update, ...

I had a need to import user data into Joomla with the Community Builder RC1 component installed. After a bit of discovery I found a method. First, I had to export my users from a proprietory Access database to something I could import using phpMyAdmin. I ultimately found that MySQL seems to like tab delimited files better, since phpMyAdmin likes to have a character set surrounding each cell for import purposes, and Excel doesn't export csv that way (at least not to my knowledge). Before any of these changes were attempted, I exported the tables marked for updating. Backups are good juju.... Once that was done, I had to form the data to prepare for import. The first table I imported was jos_users. I used a nice php script found somewhere on the net. Replace $TABLENAME, $FILENAME, $DATABASENAME, $PASSWORD, $USERNAME, and $HOSTNAME with appropriate values. # first get a mysql connection $dbh=mysql_connect ("$HOSTNAME", "$USERNAME", "$PASSWORD") or di...

Much has been going on in my life. My wife had foot surgery, which is good and bad. Good because when we go on walks with the pooch [ I've been screwing around with more PHP and MySQL and want to do more! I like it, Mikey, I really do! We have a public calendaring program written in PHP from Able Design . It can be seen in action here . We have [or should I say 'had'] about 5 or 6 pages of static text describing our exhibitions, and it was getting tedious to update. Also a little rediculous to do both the calendar and static pages...especially when the shows change so much...sooooo I wrote a little script on each exhibition page to pull that data from the calendar, and format it correctly on the page. All the folks that input it have to do is conform to some input criteria, and it works great. Maybe some day I'll get around to modifying the forms and db.... $today = getdate(); $year = $today[year]; $currdate = $today[mday]." "; ...