Update on my shunt(s)

Well my attempt at chronicalling my recovery from the op kind of ground to a sudden halt. Once I’d initially got over the op I got dug into finishing off a long overdue website for my cousin’s BMX club which was a race against time to get it finished in time for the launch of the club’s brand new racing track. Got there in the end though, and barring a few minor tweaks and the usual maintenance stuff it’s pretty much okay and my cousin’s highly delighted with the end result. I aims to please!

The stitches in my abdominal wound after the op were slightly problematic, in that when the district nurse tried to take them out, she only got as far as one before deciding my stuffing was liable to come out if she took out any more, and left them in a bit longer. They were in for the full 14 days limit before the body decides they’re most definitely a foreign object and protests, but all was well, and it’s healed very well, infact you pretty much can’t see the scar now already unless you know where to look, and it’s only a couple of months since the op!

As usual after shunt revision surgery involving the distal catheter (the one that goes into the abdomen) I’ve had the usual variety of weird abdominal pains that move around and shift (very amusing game guessing where the next one’s going to pop up!) but they’re settling down, and I only get them occasionally now.  At one point a few weeks ago I was getting some very weird and painful pains in my chest/abdomen/shoulder and was worried that I might have another pulmonary embolism, especially as I’d been off warfarin for a week before the op and then my INR had been way lower than it should have been for weeks afterwards (it’s gone the other way now, and it’s now way too high!), but it turned out to be some weird virus that was doing the rounds which my doc said was causing pleuritic type pain with a lot of people.

I saw my surgeon a couple of weeks ago, and he was very happy with my progress. He’d been slightly concerned about the abdominal wound healing well because he’d had to trim it before stitching, presumably because of all the previous scar tissue, but was very pleased with the result. Unless I have any further problems (fingers crossed!) he doesn’t want to see me for another year – yay! Still waiting for the referral/appointment for a new neurologist, not only to monitor me from an IIH point of view, but to investigate the left side weakness I’ve developed, and he’s going to chase that up for me.

My INR’s still going haywire, as it always does after I’ve been off the warfarin for any reason, and takes ages to settle down again. I’m still needing INR checks every week or so, as it’s either going way too low or way too high, and doesn’t seem to want to stay in range for any length of time. *sigh* Still also waiting for a decision as well from the PCT as to whether they’re going to let my GP prescribe the testing strips for the self-testing machine. *sigh* That’s something I really need to chase up in the new year.

Meanwhile I’ve been having other health related problems (you wouldn’t think there was much else left for me to get, and that I’ve already used up all of the conditions known by TLA (three letter acronyms), but no!) and I’m hoping to get a referral to a specialist in the new year. More on that later though.

When I read the new Google comic book on the development of the new browser on the block though, Google Chrome, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the ideas behind it. The background to this by the way is that for weeks now I’ve had a very badly behaved Firefox install on my laptop, and I’ve switched backwards and forwards between Firefox 2.0.16 and 3.01 so many times that my poor computer’s dizzy just trying to keep up with it all. Constant crashes, locking up, and refusing to close, even when forcibly ending the process in Task Manager have refused to get rid of the damned thing! Mind you, IE’s been just as bad, but then that’s nothing new.

None of this has been helped by the fact that I’ve also been suffering from a very temperamental internet connection that’s been requiring me to re-boot sometimes upwards of ten times a day to get it running again.

On a web design forum I frequent at times someone had posted a thread about Chrome, and a link to the comic. I was hooked by Page 2 where they started talking about browsers needing to be more stable (yeah, so I probably really do need to get out more!) – after my recent experiences with Firefox etc. I’d heartily agree with that! Despite the apparent increased memory usage Chrome’s reported to have (which I have to say, having used it for about three weeks now I’ve not noticed, but then I am used to the memory hog that’s Firefox), the multi-threading makes sense – that’s how a web server OS operates and copes with thousands of requests being thrown at it all at once without crashing (see, I did remember something from the server management course I did last year!), so Google’s memory bloat argument makes a hell of a lot of sense from an architecture point of view. I have to say though, I’ve not particularly noticed a memory problem with Chrome at all though. With just Chrome running in additional to all the background processes, mostly I’m setting around 20% CPU usage and around 40% RAM usage on an AMD Turion X2 Dual-core Mobile RM-70 processor with 3 gig of RAM. More often than not, I’ve got multiple apps open, as I like to keep them handy on the Task Bar without faffing around waiting for them to open them up, especially if it’s something I’m using on and off all day. No problems with it running whatsoever though.

The second big selling point is that unlike the incredibly memory-leaky Firefox, a tab crashing isn’t going to crash the whole browser…and a task manager for each tab – now that’s really cool! (So, yeah, I know, I need to get out more!) In three weeks of using it, I’ve only had to kill one tab in that whole time, and the others went right on working. I just opened up another tab and the same site again, and continued where I left off. Compared to the multiple re-starts needed with Firefox, it’s been an absolute joy to use a browser that just works. Yes, people might be worried about Google taking over the world (like 90% of the world’s remotely bothered by Microsoft having a strangle-hold on almost the entire global PC software market anyway), but like they say, they’re a huge organisation with the infrastructure to do massive scale testing and catch bugs early.

The idea of having threads for different processes, all with their own memory, so they’re not hanging around waiting for some other process to finish so they can do their stuff makes a great amount of sense. Similarly, having the javascript engine generate machine code makes a lot of sense; why have a javascript engine that generates code that has to be interpreted when you can generate machine code that can be run directly on the CPU that’s running the browser? And when they started talking about designing the UI, again, by designing it from the user’s point of view (rather than saying, “this is how it’s always been done, so this is what we’ll do”), again, it makes sense (and Opera with it’s ’speed dial’, which I love, is a lot like their new tab page), and the sandbox too is a good idea.

I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for around three weeks now. I love the simplicity of the UI. Much like the LOTR with one box to rule them all, combining the search box and address bar into what Google call the “omnibox” just makes sense. For my mother, who has difficulty figuring out where to type the address and where to put what she wants to search for, I can see it will have an enormous benefit (and to me too, as I won’t have to re-do “How to use a search engine 101″ with her on a weekly basis!), but the minimalism of the whole interface just works. Devoid of all the buttons and menus and places to type things you find in a traditional browser, you get what you need, without all the distractions. Even being able to bookmark sites straight from the omnibox is just so intuitive, and I now find myself when at work and forced to use IE struggling to figure out where I need to press when in Chrome it’s just so there.

Last week I had a problem with my laptop which I suspected may be malware connected (my firewall, ZoneAlarm, kept asking me to grant server permissions (permission to listen for requests from other computers on the internet) to all sorts of programs which hadn’t ever before needed server permissions), and after following loads of leads/dead-ends after googling, found myself on some malware clearing advice forum where they were recommending a program called Malwarebytes. I downloaded and installed it, and sure enough I found I’d got three trojans, which neither Windows Defender or my anti-virus software, NOD32, had found. Spybot Search & Destroy and Spyware Blaster, hadn’t made it onto my new laptop yet as I had problems with it using a hell of a lot of memory on my old laptop and was in two minds whether to install it again. Jaybee, fellow webdev though was helping out a client in a similar situation last week, and said neither Spybot S&D or Spyware Blaster had managed to remove the problem, though they’d found it. I’m still not sure whether Spybot S&D’s gonna make it back onto mine.

I’ve also discovered Comodo’s free firewall as well, which is much more paranoid while training it than my old ZoneAlarm one ever was (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), and warns you about apps trying to create new directories, dlls trying to do stuff and such like, and actually gives you useful information about what they do rather than just a rather useless “Do you want to allow this?” message. Much more configurable.

What’s so great about the Comodo firewall? Well it’s made by Comodo, the people who are a certification authority for secure sites – the ones with a little padlock in the address bar of your browser when you’re shopping and banking online that shows the link to the website is secure and that the website is what it says it is, and not a scammer masquerading as your bank trying to get it’s hands on all your money. It’s free because it’s in Comodo’s best interests that people feel secure when they’re online, so the more people feel comfortable being online and shopping online, the more businesses that will be created that will their services. It’s not just a cut-down version of a commercial package though; it’s got features in it that some of the paid-for firewall software doesn’t have. It’s a free lifetime license, and updates, that are essential to keep it up to date with the latest threats out there on the internet, are free too, and automatically downloaded daily so you don’t have to worry about it. It also scans your computer for any nasties during the installation process, so not only does it watch out for stuff trying to download itself onto your computer and wreak havoc, but checks to see if there’s anything nasty lurking there so you can be sure you’re clean before it starts doing it’s stuff.

Over the years I’ve used various different security software, and various firewalls, and the last two I used got ditched because they used far too much of my computer’s memory and processor capacity and slowed things down, but Comodo is perfectly well behaved, and using very little of my computer’s resources, which keeps my computer happy, which also keeps me happy.

While I was at it, I also installed WinPatrol, that allows you to look at what processes are running on your computer and what they’re up to in much more detail than the Windows Task Manager program does. The really handy thing about it though I’ve discovered is that it’s got a nifty “delayed start” feature, where as it’s name suggests you change delay the start-up of apps when Windows starts. On my old laptop I had a load of stuff that all started up when Windows started, and it really slowed the start-up up. With WinPatrol though, not only can you easily take stuff out of the startup folder and stop other apps that aren’t in the startup folder all jostling to be opened up first, without using “msconfig”, but you can delay them starting to speed up your startup time.

I have some programs that run in the background, for example the backup program for my forums that downloads a copy of their databases to my hard drive at scheduled times, but I don’t necessarily need it the moment that Windows starts, so I can delay it until it’s actually needed. Similarly with programs such as Skype, where I’m not gonna be phoning someone up the minute I log on, now it starts up five minutes after Windows has started, so my laptop’s starting up much quicker than it was last week.

All in all they’re all playing nice together, and I have to say that so far I’m especially impressed with the Comodo firewall. A very nice piece of kit.

A clean and speedy computer! Now that’s what I like!