Posts by Dave2

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

The trials I was thinking about were relating to articles in the Guardian:

"The UK has led the world in testing Covid treatments

The UK Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (Recovery) organisation has become the world’s largest collaboration for trials on people in hospital with Covid-19, with more than 180 hospitals and about 40,000 hospital patients taking part so far."

"The trials have been hugely influential. By March 2021, dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, was estimated to have saved 22,000 lives in the UK and more than 1 million worldwide. " ... "Recovery trials also established things that did not show clear benefits, such as hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma"

"it is both appropriate and extremely beneficial for the progress of medical research to know that 50 year old men with prostate cancer who take medication A live for longer than those on medication B."

Extremely useful but should be part of a properly conducted randomised trial. The NHS has made great strides with outcome analysis (in covid treatments) without needing to give data to 3rd parties. The properly anonymised data may at best indicate that a trial should be performed.

A big issue is that once the data has been given out there is no mechanism to later withdraw consent. (unlike organ donation for example)

Why not have internal NHS researchers?

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

Re: @DrXym - Whatever for?

unfortunately the Linux write NTFS support can generate files and directories that are not properly managed in Windows and MacOS.

Thus making NTFS a tricky option where an external drive is used on more than one OS.

GitHub is just like all of us: The week has just started but it needed 4 whole hours of downtime

Re: Eggs and Baskets

today's outage didn't stop my CI pipeline as it is on a locally controlled Jenkins PC and it is not difficult to point to a different repo if needed.

The big problem is it borked a pull request. I needed to push additional changes due to review comments. But the github pull request didn't update. I ended up pushing another change to force it to notice.

With git the code is safe (nicely distributed ...) but all the info, review comments etc are only in github (AFAIK). Migrating that extra stuff is where the pain is.

When I had a choice, I used gitlab since there is a locally hosted fallback option.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: It normally the Caps lock

Linux whole disk encryption has an issue with caps lock. The LED indicator doesn't light up so you don't spot you've hit caps lock rather than shift ...

The prompt doesn't warn you either (GIU logins often warn you if caps lock is on)

Re: Mouse mats with logos -avoid, avoid, avoid

One place I worked the IT department issued branded mouse mats with the help desk phone number on them. The only problem ... these very mouse mats caused problems for those with optical mice!

DevOps to DevOops: Docker Hub proves so secure that 430 Docker images out of 2,500 have no vulnerabilities

It all depends what you are looking for ...

I use docker for testing code against known configurations. Even if there is a security issue with a configuration I still need to test the code against it.

(+ add a new configuration to the test set with any security fix applied).

I'd be very concerned if tagged base images were being changed.

Once tagged that should be it. Have an update, use a new tag.