More about strokes

After a few visits with a friend who has recently suffered from a major stroke, I think it's a good idea to pass along some information because strokes are not well understood by the public at large.

It's important for people to learn to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. If you or your family members don't recognize the fact that you're having a stroke, you may not get treatment quickly enough to prevent unnecessary long term brain damage. It's especially important to remember when symptoms first appeared. The most promising treatment, TPA, must be given within 3 hours of the first appearance of symptoms. It can actually cause harm if given after 3 hours have passed.

The aftereffects of strokes are also somewhat misunderstood. Most people recognize the temporary or permanent paralysis of of one side of the body as classic stroke symptoms. The brain swelling which takes place frequently causes problems with speech or control of the limbs on one side of the body which can require months of therapy to correct.

You may also want to ask your doctor about taking a daily low dose aspirin as a preventative for strokes and heart attacks. For some reason the body seems more prone to developing blood clots as we get older.

A podcast I listen to regularly, Skepticality, features a host who had a major stroke a few years ago. He returned to podcasting after about 4 months. At first his delivery wasn't as fluid as it had been before the stroke but with continued speech therapy, it's now hard to tell that he ever had a stroke. I'm hoping therapy proves just as effective for my friend.

Leopard's Stacks feature

One of the first Leopard features I started using was Stacks. I used it to replace the program launcher I'd been using. The Dock is a great way to organize your most frequently used apps but since it also gets populated with an icon for every program currently running on your Mac, it can get a bit cluttered. Fortunately Stacks offers a great way to tame that unruly list of icons.

Leopard comes with two Stacks items by default, Documents and Downloads. I've gotten rid of Documents since I tend to keep my documents stored in a hierarchical directory structure rather than shoving them all in one big documents folder. I've also made a minor change to the Downloads item. Stacks has the annoying habit of changing the icon for the Downloads or any other Stacks item in the dock to icon of the first item in that folder. I find that disconcerting to have my Downloads folder sometimes look like a folder and sometimes look like the icon of whatever program I've happened to download. So I've added an alias for a folder called _0_dummy_folder to the Downloads folder (in your home directory). The name causes the folder to appear first in normal sort order so a folder icon is used for the Downloads Stacks item.

I've also added a few new Stacks items of my own to the Dock. I did this by following the procedure below:

1) Create a folder to contain the entries you'd like to appear in your new Stacks items. For example, I created a folder called ~/Dock/Utilities to hold aliases for all my frequently used utility programs. Note that the tilde is Unix shorthand for your home directory.
2) Create and drag aliases for each utility program you want appearing in this new Stacks item to the folder you created in the previous step.
3) Create and drag an aliases for a dummy folder to the ~/Dock/Utilities folder. I use an alias to a folder called _0_dummy_folder for reasons outlined above.
4) Drag the folder ~/Docks/Utilities to your actual Dock. I dragged mine to the left of the Downloads Stacks item.

You can repeat the above procedure to create more categories of frequently used programs or frequently accessed documents. The best part is I don't have to keep paying to update my program launcher. This also takes up less space than my old program launcher.

Recognizing the symptoms of a stroke

I found out tonight that a close friend of mine suffered a stroke last week. He recognized the symptoms and was able to describe them to the doctors before his speech was too affected. Knowing how bright he is and how much he reads, it doesn't surprise me that he'd taken the time to learn this valuable information.

The Stroke Association has a list of symptoms which everyone should commit to memory. It can make all the difference!

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.