Windoze software

Here are some links to software that makes life a little easier for those of us that have to work with Windoze.

Tarballs and zip files

BSDTar is like GNU-tar except that a special Windoze version of it has been made available.

WINZIP is not freeware (whatever that means), it is shareware. Finding evaulation versions of it to download with no strings attached is becoming increasingly difficult. PKWare have made a reader freely available that can be used to unpack zipped files.

Printing

On Unix I like to print source files using a2ps. This can also be done under Windoze using cygwin but there are some extra steps that need to be taken. Install ghostscript and GSView for Win32, which may be downloaded from the GSView website. GSView requires ghostscript. GSView comes with a command called gsprint, which does the printing. I have written a little script, p, which can be invoked from the cygwin shell, that uses a2ps and gsprint. There is also a variant, pw, for wide printing (i.e. landscape with one frame per page). I put these in my /usr/local/bin directory for cygwin to pick up.

xmllint

xmllint is part of libXML2, which is usually available as standard on many development 1 machines. It can be downloaded for Windoze but not as a standalone application. The executable requires upteen DLLs and it is hard to figure out which versions of which DLLS are compatible with all the others. So, I have made available a tarball which when unpacked, creates a directory with the xmllint executable and all the required DLLs. Just add this directory to your PATH via the Control Panel.

Miscellaneous

  • My favourite Windoze wallpaper is a beautiful picture of a bald eagle.
  • My next favourite wallpaper is a couple of grizzly bears.
  • I use Tom Revell's Yellow Stickies program for frequently used phone numbers. I provide a download link to the setup program to help in situations where the corporate environment will not allow a direct download from Tom's site.
  • ISQLViewer is a great RDBMS tool. It is available via SourceForge but I make it available here as well to help in situations where the corporate environment will not allow a direct download.