Author Archives: Chris Samuel

What Price Ideology ? – Mbeki, AIDS and the lost ARV treatment

Posted on by

Reading the New Scientist article on AIDS Deniers (which reminded me a lot of the Global Warming denial farce with its reliance on obsolete results, junk science and people who won’t let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory) I was very disturbed read about an assessment on the number of extra deaths in South Africa caused by the policies of its ex-president, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki did his best to block the use of ART’s in the treatment of AIDS, despite all the evidence that they were the best treatment. The number of extra deaths due to this is simply staggering, around a third of a million lives lost due to the false ideology that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. πŸ™

The journal article referenced for those numbers is called “Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa” and is published at the end of last year in Volume 49 – Issue 4 of the JAIDS Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The abstract for the paper puts the issue like this:

South Africa is one of the countries most severely affected by HIV/AIDS. At the peak of the epidemic, the government, going against consensus scientific opinion, argued that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral (ARV) drugs were not useful for patients and declined to accept freely donated nevirapine and grants from the Global Fund.

The cost was truly devastating:

Using modeling, we compared the number of persons who received ARVs for treatment and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission between 2000 and 2005 with an alternative of what was reasonably feasible in the country during that period. More than 330,000 lives or approximately 2.2 million person-years were lost because a feasible and timely ARV treatment program was not implemented in South Africa. Thirty-five thousand babies were born with HIV, resulting in 1.6 million person-years lost by not implementing a mother-to-child transmission prophylaxis program using nevirapine. The total lost benefits of ARVs are at least 3.8 million person-years for the period 2000-2005.

What a price to pay. πŸ™

ODF Plugfest

Posted on by

After the noise over whether or not the implementation of ODF (Open Document Format) in SP2 for Microsoft Office 2007 was deliberately broken for monopolistic purposes or incompetently implemented (or a combination of both) it’s nice to see that there is active interoperability work going on between vendors and developers at the ODF PlugFest, and the KOffice developers Jos van den Oever and Sven Langkamp attended and contributed to an article on the KDE DOT news website and Sven blogged about his positive experiences at the workshop.

It was first time I was going to such a workshop and I had expected that there would be fights between the different vendors like it happened in some blogs before the workshop. It was a pleasant surprise for me that the athmosphere was very friendly and productive. It was really nice to meet other people projects/companys, put the competition aside for some time, work and drink some beer together.

One neat feature mentioned there is the OfficeShots website which lets you submit an ODF document and then get back renderings of it (PDF, screenshot, ODF) from various ODF implementations. There are 8 listed at present (including KOffice), but sadly MS Word or Google Docs aren’t amongst them (yet).

ST31500341AS can be jumpered for 1.5Gb/s SATA

Posted on by

I’ve been struggling getting a 1.5TB Seagate ST31500341AS (CC1H firmware) to work on my ageing Mythtbuntu MythTV box (Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra 2) to store TV programs on, it would just stop after the SATA BIOS for the onboard Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112 card had ID’d it correctly, before returning its size. So I went to Jaycar and bought a two port Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 SATA card instead which seemed to work fine – the kernel booted and ID’d the card OK and I could partition it but then found that when I tried to make a filesystem I got lots of these:

ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x2400000 action 0x0
ata3.00: BMDMA2 stat 0x86c1009
ata3: SError: { Handshk UnrecFIS }
ata3.00: cmd 25/00:08:28:7b:a8/00:00:ae:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 51/04:00:2f:7b:a8/00:00:ae:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata3.00: error: { ABRT }
ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata3: EH complete

which caused I/O errors and the mkfs aborted. πŸ™ Some nice people on the LUV list suggested jumpering the card for 1.5Gb/s operation, but I found a post on the Seagate forums saying:

The manual for Seagate SATA drives pretty clearly states (on page 22): “1.5Gbits jumper block only applies to ST3320613AS, ST3320813AS and ST3160813AS models” So it would seem that you can’t run your ST31500341AS in forced-1.5Gb mode (though the drive does support auto-negotiation – but I guess your controller does not).

I thought I was out of luck, and then I stumbled a post elsewhere that said:

I just called to Seagate. They insist that even though the product manual (At their website) says that using the jumpers to force SATA1(150mb/s) speed not supported for my HDD(ST31500341AS) and also on top of the HDD never print the label anymore, you still set the jumper and it’ll force SATA1 speed. According to the tech support dude.

So, having a jumper to hand I decided to give it a go, and it does appear to work! Not only can I finally successfully make a filesystem, but I can also run bonnie++ on it continuously without issues and then rsync all 200GB of TV shows onto it.

Iranian Internet Controls – Targeting Flash and Email ?

Posted on by

Some very interesting investigations done by the Arbor Networks security folks looking into Iranian traffic engineering and filtering from the time of the Iranian presidential election onwards. They have both a preliminary investigation showing a dramatic fall in traffic at the time of the election and a follow up deeper look demonstrating that they appear to be specifically targeting streaming media (flash, et. al) and email, as graphically demonstrated by this graph:

Graph of video streaming bandwidth used by Iran around the time of the election.

Web and other traffic have been left relatively unscathed, prompting this comment:

Perhaps games provide a possible source of covert channels (e.g. Ò€œBring your elves to the castle on the island of Azeroth and weÒ€ℒll plan the next Ahmadinejad protest rally?Ò€)