About me

Welcome to my personal website. I’m Jorge Herskovic, a (non-practicing) medical doctor, a PhD in Health Informatics, and nerd-at-large. Seriously, I have xkcd t-shirts. In my down time, I enjoy tinkering with Apple technology. I am also a Fellow of ACMImimi, not to be confused with ACMI.

I’m a biomedical informatician who specializes in data mining, concept extraction, research informatics, and large-scale clinical information retrieval. I also do medication reconciliation research, and currently lead the Pan-SHARP project.

I no longer work at UTHealth’s SBMI. You can now find me across the street at the world-renowned MD Anderson.

  • Stuart Norman

    I, too, began with Slackware Linux in 1993, downloaded on 66 floppy disks from Sunsite, now Ibiblio, at UNC_Chapel Hill. I’ve run PClinuxos for several years and nothing else. I’ve not found any other user with as long a profile, except, of course, Linus.

  • http://metamatt.com Matt Ginzton

    Hi, just read your Ars article on Lion-Server-at-home.

    I don’t understand the need for trickiness with Time Machine and network backups; in particular

    > Just like Lion Client, it wouldn’t let me use network volumes as a backup destination.

    doesn’t match my experience. Using Lion, I’ve had no trouble setting up TM network backups to network shares exported by any other Lion machine. If I go to the Finder, browse to another machine (running Lion Client), mount one of its shares, then go to System Preferences, Time Machine, “Select Disk…”, that mounted share shows up in the list.

    I recently wrote a blog post on this, http://blog.metamatt.com/post/161656493 … rk-backups, from the angle of how to get multiple client backups to exist on the same server volume, without each one wanting to completely fill it. I’m curious if Lion Server provides anything to help here.

    • admin

      Hi Matt,

      I can’t use network volumes as backup destinations unless:
      1. The volume is exported by Time Machine Server, or
      2. The client machine has the defaults I mention in the article.

      The second method is the one I used to use. Are you sure your clients were never “coerced” that way?

      The other nice thing about Time Machine Server is that you don’t need to mount the server’s drive to see the volume from the Time Machine pref pane.

      Jorge

  • Steve

    I read your Lion Server article on ars and found it answered the very question I asked myself only two months ago. Thanks! But I feel the section on the VPN was missing some important info. Does the VPN work and work reliably?

    • admin

      Yes, it’s worked reliably for weeks now. No complaints.

  • http://Currentlybeingsetup Roger Adams

    Hi Jorge,

    I really enjoyed you Ars Technica article on setting up a home server and have purchased a MacMini Server on which I will create my own. Like you, I am a huge Apple fan and really enjoy tinkering around with their stuff

    I thought that I would let you know that I purchased the book “Using Mac OSX Lion at Home”. However, I have been trying to download it now for three days but the file fails to decompress and, despite several emails to WeGotServed and 2CO.com, no-one has bothered to reply causing me some degree of frustration. Obviously, you have had no problems with either of these two companies since you mention the book in the Ars Technica article so I assume that they are both legitimate.

    I certainly do not hold you responsible for this situation, in fact I am grateful for the lead and, hopefully, someone at WeGotServed or 2CO.com will finally come to my aid to resolve the issue. As I said, this post is for your information only and I do not expect you to take any action on my situation.

    Thank you for your article. It was extremely informative and I will be using all of your ideas and suggestions when I begin to set up my server later this week. (Downloads here in Thailand, despite an ADSL connection, are very slow), I will also recommend your article to any of my friends who are contemplating setting up a home server.

    With very best regards

    Roger

    • http://Currentlybeingsetup Roger Adams

      Hi Jorge,

      Just a follow-up to my email below.

      WeGotServed came back to me very quickly and gave me an alternative download site. Apparently my emails disappeared into the ether therefore they did not know about the problem. Additionally, they did say that their server was having problems getting the download to decompress which is why my download continually failed to complete.

      All is now well and my faith in WeGotServed is now fully restored. My apologies for intruding like this but my frustration overrode my more cautious instincts.

      With kind regards

      Roger

      • admin

        Roger,

        Thanks for your kind words. I’m glad that you enjoyed the article, and that you got a quick response from We Got Served. I liked their guide.

        Best
        Jorge

  • http://blog.bigdinosaur.org pokrface

    Hi Herko!

    WordPress is so 2009. All the cool kids (read: me) use Octopress now! It’s a static site generator based on Jekyll and it gets you away from having to maintain mysql and php and wordpress and super-cache and php-apc and all that other garbage just to have a simple blog :D

    Also, let’s go have texmex and drink soon.

    • admin

      Octopress looks cool, and I really like the way blog.bigdinosaur.org looks. However… my cheap webhost will only take PHP, so WordPress it is for me.

      Absolutely, let’s go have texmex soon.

      • http://blog.bigdinosaur.org pokrface

        Ah, but that is the beauty of Octopress–or, actually, the beauty of Jekyll. No PHP. No database. It’s a static site generator and your webhost needs only to contain the CSS & HTML files.

        You need Ruby (via rbenv or RVM) and Git on the computer where you’ll be doing your post writing, and you clone the Octopress git repo to the same computer. Then, there are a series of automated rake tasks to create new blog entries, which are formatted in markdown and which you edit with the editor of your choice (I’m using vim with a markdown syntax highlight add-in).

        Your blog lives on your laptop or desktop as a git repo–you could even stick it into your dropbox folder if you want to do your blog creation on multiple computers. When it’s time to publish your blog, there’s a generate & publish rake task that can rsync your changes up to your web host via ssh.

        Couldn’t be simpler :) If you want your mind blown, google for “wordpress to octopress”. People are jumping ship in droves!

        • Jorge

          That’s pretty irresistible. Damn, I’m gonna have to start playing with it.

      • http://blog.bigdinosaur.org pokrface

        Check out the Octopress docs—I think you’ll be impressed :) http://octopress.org/docs/

  • http://blog.bigdinosaur.org Lee

    Hey, did you switch over to Disqus in the last few days?

    • Anonymous

      Yup, in preparation for the move to a statically-generated site. Thanks to you.

      • http://blog.bigdinosaur.org Lee

         I aim to serve. Or at least keep you busy with time-sucking projects :D