Mark's Toolkit for Life on the Dark Side

This page begins with a list of the Windows software I have found useful, especially in my work. Several items have helped me make the transition from UNIX to NT. At the end, I have also included a quick description of my home network.

First, a book that is excellent for UN*X users moving over to NT:

Windows NT in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference for System Administrators, by Eric Pearce, (O'Reilly, 1997), ISBN: 1-56592-251-4.

Favorite Tools Mark Uses on the Dark Side

SmartDraw: SmartDraw is a vector-based graphics program. At work, I use Visio to create network diagrams, floor layouts, etc. While being very powerful, expandable, and OLE-savvy, Visio is also very expensive and very-bloated. It runs slow on my 350MHz Pentium II system with 64MB of RAM. It crawls on a Pentium 200MMX with the same amount of RAM. By contrast, SmartDraw is quite snappy on my home system. I use it for layout and other cute graphics. The LAN diagram below was created in SmartDraw and then converted to GIF format.
ActivePerl: This is the standard build of Perl for Win32 systems from Active State. Currently, a major part of my job is creating scripts in Perl to automate batch jobs or for CGI scripts.
Lemmy: Lemmy, a vi clone for Windows, was invaluable in my transition from UNIX to NT. As a vi person, I often found myself typing lines of jjjjjjs or kkkkkks when using Notepad to edit text files. Lemmy came to the rescue. In Power User mode, Lemmy lets you edit as you normaly woul in Notepad, but also recognizes the standard vi movement commands as well. It also allows context color-coding for editing HTML and Perl files.
WinZip: WinZip is the standard windows tool for managing ZIP archives. Just get it!
Paint Shop Pro: PSP is the shareware graphics program for Windows, combining the power of Photoshop with the simplicity of Paintbrush. It is optimized for creating Web graphics. Mac users who are used to GraphicConverter will find Paint Shop Pro a very capable replacement.
SnagIt: SnagIt is a nifty little program that helps you take screen-shots. It allows you to take a snapshot of the entire screen, a single window, or a portion of a window. It allows you to direct the output to a printer, the clipboard, or a graphics file in a variety of standard formats. It is an indespensible tool for create software documentation.
Memo-Cho (in Japanese メモ帳): This is a multi-document text editor that runs only in Japanese. Of all the japanese text editiors I tried, this is the most stable and it is also freeware. Many of the Dark Side documents were created in Memo-Cho.
WinVNC: This is the version of Virtual Network Computer (VNC) that runs on Windows NT. It allows you to access the a computer via remote control like pcANYWHERE. At work, I use pcANYWHERE which has the advantage that it runs as a Service under NT, so I do not need to be logged into the remote computer. With WinVNC, you have to be logged into the VNC server and screen cannot be locked. However, the advantage of VNC is that it is available on many different plaforms, especially as a client. So I have an XVNC client on my NetBSD computer and even a PalmVNC client for my PalmPilot. Also, it is free!
Palm Desktop 3.0.1: At home, I connect my 3Com PalmPilot professional to my NetBSD computer for backups. At work, I use Palm desktop 3.0.1. While it is a healthy 5MB download, this version of Palm desktop provides a greater level of stability on windows NT over the version that originally came with my PalmPilot.

Networking on the Dark Side

For a complete discussion of my network, see my Networking HOW-TO.