I’m going to Heart Rhythm this year without my laptop for the first time in three years. In fact, it’s probably the first time I’ve gone much of anywhere without a laptop, and I’m looking forward to having a ligher load. I acquired a few items yesterday that should help me work without it, which I’ll talk a bit more about in the next post.
Category Archives: Tech
SGI Files for Bankruptcy – No Surprise
I was a strong advocate of moving our lab away from SGI, which was expensive and slow for our purposes, and on to Linux.
WSJ.com – Silicon Graphics Files For Chapter 11 Protection
Silicon Graphics Inc., a long-struggling maker of high-performance computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
A group of bondholders agreed to trade their debt for a stake in the company, which filed for Chapter 11 protection Monday morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.
Silicon Graphics is known for desktop workstations and larger server systems that are favored by engineers and others who demand sophisticated graphics, including Hollywood studios. But the company has suffered a long slide, partly due to competition from machines based on standard components used in personal computers.
I’m on Ducky… and I hate AIX
I finally got access to our new supercomputer, “ducky”, but it’s running AIX which is a total pain in the ass. Now I remember why UNIX kind of went away for a little while — all of these proprietary unixes, none of which are quite compatible with each other. I’m spoiled by Linux / BSD which are pretty much standard across the board, modulo some differences in filesystems.
ADDENDUM 2006-04-24 @ 11:11 CDT: Apparently some of my problems are because LONI (the Louisiana supercomputing network) is not allowed to carry Internet-1 traffic, only Internet-2. Probably because of the DoE, but they didn’t tell me exactly which party was concerned with it. *sigh*
Happiness is a Warm Cluster
| JOBID | USER | STAT | JOB_NAME | SUBMIT_TIME |
| 11058 | btice | RUN | *g_1mm.par | Apr 16 09:24 |
| 11059 | btice | RUN | *g_2mm.par | Apr 16 09:27 |
| 11060 | btice | RUN | *g_4mm.par | Apr 16 09:27 |
| 11061 | btice | RUN | *g_6mm.par | Apr 16 09:28 |
| 11062 | btice | RUN | *g_8mm.par | Apr 16 09:29 |
The queue’s not too full on easter. The cluster has been very busy for the last few months, which makes it hard to set up new simulations because you can’t interactively test the job scripts. Today things were open enough that I could do so.
ICDs, wandless telemetry, and encryption
Here’s something nobody has ever been able to tell me:
Do wandless ICDs (implantable cardioverter-defibrillators) employ any kind of encryption?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no.
Let me give you a little background. At the last Heart Rhythm Scientific Sessions (2005, in New Orleans) most of the big ICD companies were showing off their wonderful new “wandless telemetry” systems. Historically, ICDs have been programmed (after implantation) and interrogated with some variety of inductive communication. This was done by placing a “wand” over the part of the patient’s body where the device was implanted and then initiating communication. It has a short range, around a few inches. Device companies have begun to use radio-frequency (RF) communication instead, which has a longer range, something on the order of feet or meters.
This is a big problem.
Not one person I’ve asked (admittedly, sales people for the most part) has been able to tell me if the new RF (a.k.a wandless) telemetry communication is encrypted. I did some patent searching at uspto.gov, and found that no patents have been granted on anything like this yet. However, Medtronic did apply for a patent in September 2005. As the patent application says in its background, “With the advent of long range telemetry of messages, and the associated increase in communication range, the risk that a message can be compromised is increased. For example, a replay attack can be launched in which a message, or a piece of a message, can be captured and then maliciously used at a later time.”
So it does appear that someone is thinking about this. Most people don’t really think about or understand encryption, even technically-inclined people like medical device engineers.
Do you know anything about this? Do you know someone who might?