Useful Mac software

A friend of mine just took the Mac plunge so I've been sending him links about useful Mac software I use most frequently. I thought it might be nice to collect all those recommendations here.

ClamXav is a high performance virus scanner for Macs. With the Mac's steadily increasing market share, it's becoming a more attractive target for malware authors.

TNEF's Enough is a handy little utility which unpacks the strange attachments which some Windows mail programs use (usually called winmail.dat).

MacJanitor allows you to manually run the 3 cron jobs (daily, weekly, and monthly) used to do periodic maintenance on Macs. This can be important on laptops which typically don't get left on all the time or desktop systems which may be asleep when the scheduled time passes.

Flip4Mac is a free QuickTime component that allows you to play WMV files.

JView is the fastest image viewer I've found.

MonoLingual is a utility to remove unnecessary language files on Mac OSX. This can save a fair amount of disk space.

NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader I've found for the Mac.

Transmission is a good open source BitTorrent client.

The VLC media player can play most types of video files.

NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, an excellent and free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Here's an article on how to run Windows or Linux on your Mac in a virtual machine using some free software called VirtualBox. VirtualBox isn't the only virtualization software available for the Mac. At home I use Parallels which was the first virtualization software available for the Intel based Macs. At work I use VmWare Fusion.

MacVim

I'm a long time vi/vim user. I don't know that I'd recommend anyone who doesn't already know vi go through the heavy learning curve necessary to become proficient at using vi. There are a number of gui editors which are more easier for new users to learn. However vim (vi improved) is available on very nearly any computing platform you might use. I also find that vim allows me to accomplish some pretty complex editing operations faster than most of my former coworkers using other editors. Having used vi for over 20 years now, I have yet to find an editor which would make me more productive and believe me I've looked. I'm constantly searching for new programming tools in my spare time.

I've been looking for a decent port of vim for the Mac for a while now. The version pointed to by vim.org always seems to lag behind a version or two. It also has a few deficiencies. It used to have screen draw problems and would leave pixel residue behind after scrolling. It also never handled the "-" command line argument properly. This argument causes vim to read its data from stdin which is very handy for piping output from other commands into vim for easier manipulation.

My search is over. The team at Google Code has created a great port of vim for the Mac they call MacVim. It's fast and features none of the problems I'd experienced with other ports. Thanks guys for a great porting job!

Data recovery, part two

I've managed to recover a fair number of files from my stepdaughter's failing hard disk. You might recall I used a program called dd_rescue to do a raw copy of the sectors of the failing hard drive to an image file on a larger USB hard disk. That was important because the old hard disk seemed to be getting progressively worse, as hard disks which have experienced a partial crash are wont to do.

There was good news and bad news regarding the copy. The good news was dd_rescue managed to copy about 33 GB from the 60 GB drive before encountering constant errors. The bad news is that left about 27 GB of data which hasn't yet been recovered.

Next, I used a handy (and free) program called PhotoRec to recover photos and a number of other data types from the partial image of her drive. All told, it found about 4000 jpg files large enough to be her pictures. Some of them probably come from a browser cache but a good deal of them are vacation photos which she'd be pretty upset to lose.

So far it's been at least a partial success. I'll post more if there are significant updates in the future.

By the way, let this be a reminder to you to go back up your data. Hard disks sometimes fail with no warning and not all drives fail gracefully enough to allow some data to be recovered.

No-name router problems

I spent part of this morning doing some remote troubleshooting of a problem my in-laws were having with their broadband connection. Their broadband provider supplied a no-name router. Somehow it had decided that my wife's laptop had made too many outbound connections and therefore must have a virus. Once having decided this (and quite erroneously so), this poorly designed router continued making this assertion even when her laptop was no longer plugged into the router. In fact it seemed completely unable to determine which were active computer connections and which had timed out. Its status page listed two computers which didn't match any computers currently connected to the network nor had there been any such computers connected that my in-laws could remember.

You might wonder how I could determine that the complaint about too many outbound connections was erroneous beyond the shadow of a doubt. I simply enlisted the use of the "netstat" command. The netstat command exists in all major OSes (Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD). It allows you to determine the state of network connections for the computer on which you execute the command. Using the "-b" option allowed us to see which programs had open connections. As I suspected, only iTunes, Thunderbird, and Firefox had network connections and none of the three applications had an unusual numbers.

And yet this silly router continued complaining about the number of outbound connections from this one computer even when the computer was disconnected to the network and through several power cycles of the router. So I walked my stepdaughter through the procedure to disable this poorly implemented portion of the firewall (the detection of number of outbound connections) because it obviously wasn't working properly.

My advice is to stick with a name brand router (Linksys or Netgear) whenever you're presented with the option. Sadly since this router was supplied by their ISP, they don't have a choice in the matter. Using a no-name router may cost you more than any initial cost savings realized by purchasing a cheap device in the amount of troubleshooting time you spend on poorly implemented features such as this one.

Recovering data from a failing hard drive

I've been trying to recover the data off a failing hard drive for a family member. I've found a few programs which claim to be able to do just that but they always get hung up by the numerous retries the drive keeps doing in the failing areas. Then I came up with the idea of using the dd command to make a copy of drive image which I could then manipulate having gotten the retries out of the way during the initial copy process. I'd used dd pretty heavily during the development of an SD card driver I'd done at my last company. Once the drive image has been copied to a file, the resulting image file can be mounted using the mount command... well it can on Linux and Mac OS X at least. You poor folks running Windows are out of luck.

After looking around on the web, I discovered a great little program called dd_rescue which does intelligent retries if errors are encountered, slowly lowering the block size being requested to find the boundaries of the affected area. I think the standard dd command would try to do retries until the read worked or until the copy was aborted. dd_rescue also allows an offset to be specified when the command is invoked so the copy may be done in several stages. Since it's taken about 4 hours, off and on, to copy the first 33 GB from the failing 60 GB drive, I'm anticipating having to make heavy use of this feature to complete the copy process over the next day or two.

I made a few minor changes to the source to allow me to curtail the retries to speed up the copy. So far it's copied about 32 GB from the failing 60 GB drive. Once the data has been copied then I'll start trying to recover files from it. Wish me luck, I think I'm going to need it!

quick and dirty shell command

Today I was working on some old code at work. I discovered at least one duplicate include file which is a personal pet peeve. It's far too easy to allow multiple include files get out of sync so you have different versions for different source files.

What I needed was a quick way of finding all the duplicated include files within this project directory (and subdirectories). It turns out stringing together a few Unix/Linux/Mac OS commands with some I/O redirection makes this task pretty easy.

The first thing we need is to be able to locate all the include files. In the C programming language, these files typically end with the ".h" file extension. We can use the find command to give us a list of the files which end with .h.

The next problem to be solved is that the matching files will have not only their filenames but also the directory in which they're located printed out. So we need a way of extracting just the "base" filename. Fortunately bash has any easy method of accomplishing this with the basename command.

The next logical step in figuring out whether there are duplicate filenames is to sort the matching filenames to make it easier to see matches with the sort command.

Finally we can use the uniq command to show just the filenames which appear more than once. The uniq command has other options. You can choose to show just items which are unique as well.

If we put all the portions of this command together, we come up with the following command. It's doing a lot of work to save us the trouble of manually sifting through all the filenames ourselves. That's what computers are supposed to do for us, eh?

find . -name "*.h" -print | xargs basename | sort | uniq -d

Palm Centro

I've used a Palm PDA without interruption since the first one was introduced in 1996. I was working for U.S. Robotics which owned Palm at the time and the employee pricing helped me decide to take the plunge into PDA life. After all these years, I've come to rely heavily upon a few key PDA applications (in addition to the standard PDA applications).

I use SplashID to securely store the multitude of passwords I need to remember both at work and at home. Without it, I'd have to resort to using weak passwords in order to stand a chance of remembering them all which compromises security.

I use SplashMoney to record credit card transactions while I'm away from my computer. This ensures I stay within budget and helps guarantee that I recognize any erroneous charges which might pop up.

JFile is invaluable for storing databases I design myself. I use this to keep track of all manner of data such as books I've got and those I'm interested in reading. Before I did this, I occasionally bought multiple copies of a book.

SlovoEd is a portable dictionary which allows me to look up words I don't recognize when reading without a print dictionary handy. My Centro takes up a lot less space on my nightstand than a conventional dictionary.

Adobe Reader for Palm allows me to read PDF documents on my PDA. This is handy to ready books in non-traditional settings. It's nice always having a book handy to read for those occasions when unexectedly left with extra time to kill.

A couple months ago, the time seemed ideal to upgrade my phone and PDA. My wife's phone was acting up and my stepdaughter wanted a cheap PDA. So it made sense to get a device which fulfilled both those functions for me, freeing up my phone and PDA for them. This also had the added benefit of allowing me to pare down the devices I carried from two to just a single gadget.

The Palm Centro is smaller than I expected but keyboard surprisingly useable. The software upgrades work to make the smaller sized device more intuitive to use than older Palm devices. Is it perfect? No, but it does seem a better compromise device than the other affordable multi-use devices I've seen.

If you're interested in an affordable combination mobile phone and PDA device, check out this review from Engadget.