Month: January 2011

Get host name from IP

My networking knowledge is fairly limited. I know more than the average person, I’m sure, but when I start talking to people who are true network engineers, I realize very quickly that my knowledge is pretty cursory.

I had a need recently to get the host name from a windows server. I only had the IP address available. I was told about nbtstat, which allows you to request NetBIOS information from the IP address. I’m sure it’s useful for much more than that, but this was my immediate need.

Its usage is as follows: nbtstat -a ipaddress

Parallel.ForEach

I’ve spent some time off and on over the last year or so writing various versions of web crawlers to get different information off of the web. Some of it for a potential business idea, some of it just to learn a few things. One thing I had a hard time trying to figure out was how to deal with threading. I have a list of URLs that I wanted to crawl, but I had specific things that I wanted to try and do with each one, and there were various counters I was incrementing. Plus me and threading don’t jive that well I’ve found. Maybe I’m just not smart enough for it, who knows.

As I was doing my research/learning/reading about C# in general, I ran across the excellent Parallel Processing blog from MSDN. I was fascinated by the Microsoft Biology Foundation and how they were using the parallelism support in .NET 4. The blog is a good read in general. Those guys are a bit too smart for me to keep up with, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

I’ll let the smart guys at that blog explain it better than I can, but Parallel Processing allows you to execute additional threads if you have additional CPUs available. It’s important to note that you will not gain from this technique if some other outside resource is what is slowing down your processing. But in my case, I am going out to a website and pulling information from different pages. Parallel Processing allowed me to do this much faster than a regular foreach loop. Good stuff.

SQL Server Date Functions

Here are some handy date functions that I find myself looking up occasionally (especially the “last day of”-type things):

—-Today
SELECT GETDATE() ‘Today’
—-Yesterday
SELECT DATEADD(d,-1,GETDATE()) ‘Yesterday’
—-First Day of Current Week
SELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Week’
—-Last Day of Current Week
SELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,0,GETDATE()),6) ‘Last Day of Current Week’
—-First Day of Last Week
SELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,7,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Last Week’
—-Last Day of Last Week
SELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,7,GETDATE()),6) ‘Last Day of Last Week’
—-First Day of Current Month
SELECT DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Month’
—-Last Day of Current Month
SELECT DATEADD(ms,- 3,DATEADD(mm,0,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE())+1,0))) ‘Last Day of Current Month’
—-First Day of Last Month
SELECT DATEADD(mm,-1,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0)) ‘First Day of Last Month’
—-Last Day of Last Month
SELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(mm,0,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0))) ‘Last Day of Last Month’
—-First Day of Current Year
SELECT DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Year’
—-Last Day of Current Year
SELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(yy,0,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE())+1,0))) ‘Last Day of Current Year’
—-First Day of Last Year
SELECT DATEADD(yy,-1,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0)) ‘First Day of Last Year’
—-Last Day of Last Year
SELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(yy,0,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0))) ‘Last Day of Last Year’

—-TodaySELECT GETDATE() ‘Today’—-YesterdaySELECT DATEADD(d,-1,GETDATE()) ‘Yesterday’—-First Day of Current WeekSELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Week’—-Last Day of Current WeekSELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,0,GETDATE()),6) ‘Last Day of Current Week’—-First Day of Last WeekSELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,7,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Last Week’—-Last Day of Last WeekSELECT DATEADD(wk,DATEDIFF(wk,7,GETDATE()),6) ‘Last Day of Last Week’—-First Day of Current MonthSELECT DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Month’—-Last Day of Current MonthSELECT DATEADD(ms,- 3,DATEADD(mm,0,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE())+1,0))) ‘Last Day of Current Month’—-First Day of Last MonthSELECT DATEADD(mm,-1,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0)) ‘First Day of Last Month’—-Last Day of Last MonthSELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(mm,0,DATEADD(mm,DATEDIFF(mm,0,GETDATE()),0))) ‘Last Day of Last Month’—-First Day of Current YearSELECT DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0) ‘First Day of Current Year’—-Last Day of Current YearSELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(yy,0,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE())+1,0))) ‘Last Day of Current Year’—-First Day of Last YearSELECT DATEADD(yy,-1,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0)) ‘First Day of Last Year’—-Last Day of Last YearSELECT DATEADD(ms,-3,DATEADD(yy,0,DATEADD(yy,DATEDIFF(yy,0,GETDATE()),0))) ‘Last Day of Last Year’

I originally found them on the excellent SQL Authority blog.

HCPCS 2011 ICD9 Codes

There’s been a bit of activity on the OpenEMR lists lately about the ability to import the ICD9 codes into the application. Apparently there are some Perl scripts which go out to a particular website, extract the data, and pull it down for the application to use. I’ve been wanting an excuse to try the Parallel.ForEach functionality in C# 4.0 and see how it works with threading. This provided a perfect opportunity to write a quick program which would go out, parse the site and data, and pull it down. In addition to the Parallel functions, I’ve also used the excellent HtmlAgilityPack to parse the data.

I’m not exactly sure about where the data ends up yet (I’m not as familiar with the OpenEMR data model as I should be), so all I have for now is a tab-delimited text file which simply contains the code “type” (all HCPCS in this case), ICD9 code, and its description. I’ll have to poke through the OpenEMR code and database in the coming days and see what is done with the data. Perhaps then I can create a SQL file that someone can then load in phpMyAdmin inside of OpenEMR.

The file is located here: hcpcs 2011 ICD9