Serious practitioners build a collection of tools and techniques that are indispensable in their work. This is a list of some of the tools we have found useful.We hope some of them will be of value to you as well.
It is always best to use a small amount of real data to test applications, but for the times where this is not possible, these tools can come in handy:
Anyone doing serious development work will spend a significant amount of time interacting with the shell or the database on the host computer. These applications are much better than the Telnet client built into Windows 95, 98, and NT.
NetTerm was the first non-bundled terminal emulator we used, and at the time it was highly recommended by the WinSock list. We were most excited about its 'Host Printing' support, which allows you to use the printer attached to your PC to print files from the UNIX host through the use of special pass-through control codes.
We liked it so much we wrote our own utility to print out our files with headers, footers, page numbers, and correct tabbing. Now, our file listings are very readable and we don't have to annotate them by hand to keep them organized.
We've recently rewritten this utility in Perl, and when we have put enough miles on it to feel confident about its stability, we'll publish it here.
CRT is our current favorite terminal emulator. We've had nothing but rock-solid performance from it, and we've been using various versions since 1996. The user interface is clean, and it has the same host printing support as NetTerm, although it is not as well documented, so use the Help file from NetTerm for information if you intend to write a utility of your own. We always make sure we have CRT at our disposal when we are out in the field.
Some other utilities that can be very handy.
WinZip has great performance and an excellent user interface. It is a comprehensive Zip utility, with all functions available from a graphical user interface. We consider it a vital addition to our toolbox, especially when we are away from the office on client site visits.
On the occasions we've needed to produce multiple sets of floppies, DiskDupe has been a real life-saver. Take a look if you find yourself in the same situation.
Acrobat is excellent at producing high-fidelity portable output of your writings and illustrations, regardless of the program you use to create them. We appreciate the ability to deliver high-quality electronic documents to our clients in a form that does not require them to have the programs we used to produce them. The availability of the reader on multiple platforms has come in handy on number of occasions, too.
This program started its life on Unix-like systems, but there is even a Win32 port now.
We use TeX to produce some of our more technical documentation, and usually we use our UNIX computer to do so, but its nice to have a good implementation for our Win32 platform as well, and MiKTeX serves us very well it that regard.
MiKTex can be obtained via the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network(CTAN) under the directory .../systems/win32/miktek/.
We use Visio nearly every day to produce high-quality diagrams. We find that we are able to produce professional results in less time than we could with other tools. Most of our diagrams are for system flows and structures, so we create many connected-box illustrations. We are particularly fond of the way Visio keeps the boxes linked while we move them around. This lets us try out many layout options to find the one with the best visual result.
If you need to set up a UNIX system quickly, try:
Of course, there are many Linux distributions out there, and probably most of them are great. We've been using RedHat for quite some time now, and the 7.0 version we're running now works great. For a while we were using Mandrake 7.0 and then 7.1 because they were the first distributions with support from some devices on an important laptop we use, but now we're back to RedHat.
Since our lab consists of a mixture of Win98, WinNT, and Linux computers, its great to have a solid SMB server for the Linux computer, which is the most stable computer in the lab. We can provide file and backup services to the entire lab from a single Linux server.
Copyright © 2008 Gregor N. Purdy. All rights reserved.