Zuma vs Zapiro

January 16 2009




September 8 2008




September 12 2008

Mike Hanna reports on Gaza

Mike Hanna was a senior correspondent for CNN for many years, and his stories on South Africa have always been well researched and well written. Now he works for Aljazeera English. Today I saw his report on Gaza, where the death toll has crossed the 1000 mark (including 535 children), and over 4600 injured. The names of some of the children who died are here. Help stop the bloodshed. Gaza in Ruins special report.

Puran Defrag 6 released

Puran Software recently sent me information on version 6 of their excellent Puran Defrag product.
New features include:

• Multiple schedules are possible now.
• Added Idle Time Defragmentation.
• Added Screensaver Defragmentation.

Minor changes include:

• Percentage display when moving large files.
• Manual addition of file exclusion expression is now possible from main GUI.
• Removable storage can be accessed from main GUI.
• Changed registration system. Now with one permanent registration key for each user.
• Puran Defrag now remembers its window position.

I have also had the opportunity to test the beta version of the product, and it has some nice improvements and finishing touches that existing customers will appreciate. I am still amazed at the quality of the software, as well as the simplicity of the interface. The current version is on sale for US$19.95, and the upgrade will be free for existing customers. You can expect a review as soon as I figure out how to benchmark the defrag products being reviewed.
Update Mon 12 Jan: The product has been released and registered users have been sent their new registration keys. More to follow

Saving Soweto - 24 Hours of Trauma

"A woman born in South Africa has more chance of getting raped, than learning how to read".



Aljazeera English has produced a documentary series about "Bara", which you can read here. These videos are not for the squeamish. According to Wikipedia, "Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital is the largest hospital in the world, occupying 173 acres (0.70 km2), with 3200 beds and 6760 staff members. The hospital is in Soweto, Johannesburg. It is one of the 40 Gauteng provincial hospitals," and is under-funded and under-staffed by the callous, uncaring politicians who supposedly run this country, but who prefer to waste money on perks and dinners, while the people suffer. Our former Minister of Health has a lot of blood on her hands.



"We have no ventilators available, and no ICU beds available. We can't take rescuscitation patients at the moment because we have nowhere to put them."

"On average we see about 3000 trauma patients a month. Approximately 300 resuscitations a month. That's an average of 10 a day."

xkcd is absolutely right!

I found this cartoon on David Donde's blog. I couldn't help posting it again. The original is here.

PlaySound and DelayLaunch Improvements

PlaySound is a utility for Windows that allows you to play a sound file from the command line or from a shortcut. I find it useful also as a timer for the startup process in Windows. So useful, in fact, that I recently updated the setup program to do exactly that.
DelayLaunch is a similar utility, but it doesn't play a sound. It waits for a specified period of time, and then opens a specified file, which can be a data file, a batch file, or an application. I use this to fire up certain applications when my PC starts up, and the delay is used to make sure that all the programs don't try to start running at the same time, when the hard drive is still busy.
I have mentioned DelayLaunch before, but it hasn't been available for download until now. Now it is bundled in the PlaySound setup file, since the applications are so similar.

PlaySound.exe Replaces Beep.exe | PlaySound Makes Progress | PlaySound Download Page

Fixing G31M-S Realtek Audio Problems on Windows XP

My Sahara "FRAGG" PC uses an ASRock G31M-S motherboard, which uses the Realtek ALC662 Audio Codec. The problem arises when you try to use Windows XP instead of Windows Vista, because the Windows XP driver doesn't seem to install properly.
Even after downloading the WinXP driver (WDM_R213.exe) from the Realtek site, it wouldn't install. Then I did a Google search for "realtek alc662 winxp" and found this HardForum post, which explains how to delete certain "HDAudio" registry keys. I tried it, rebooted as instructed, and was initially disappointed, not noticing that WinXP wasn't finished. After being asked to reboot again, it now works!

Sabotaging Department Store Computers is Not Nice

Before Christmas I visited my local Game department store to buy a computer and a USB external hard drive. Because the computer was not properly labelled, and for other reasons, I only bought the hard drive.
I returned on Monday to see if the price tags had been fixed, only to find that someone had been fiddling with the machine. What they did was not nice, and clearly the store attendants have no idea how to fix it.
It isn't nice to go to the System Restore utility and restore the system back to a previous point. That effectively wipes out a whole load of carefully installed programs! Not good. In the old DOS days hackers used to type "format c:". At one computer show we renamed format.exe and copied siren.exe to the drive and called if format.exe instead. That caught a few perpetrators by surprise!
Another trick was to press Ctrl-Break on any machines running automatic demos, because the demo programs were usually written in BASIC and it stopped the demo dead in its tracks.
Today, demo machines should have the security locked down tight, or at least have screen savers with passwords on them, known only to the store staff. Alternatively, use Acronis TrueImage to restore the drive to a suitable image. But of course the technical expertise of a mass market department store is severely lacking. I guess PCs just aren't consumer items yet, and stores like Game can only compete on the basis of price.