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.
Running out of disk space
Corporate machines rarely have enough disk space.
Typically there may be less than 10GB left.
And remember, Windoze does not like to defrag a partition
once it is more than 80% full. So it seems that plugging in
a USB drive is the only solution.
However, corporate environments often make the USB drive read-only
and disable regedit so that the drive cannot be reset to read/write.
So you may find you need to re-enable regedit before setting the
USB drive switch back to read/write.
Doug Knox has written a
Visual Basic script to re-enable regedit.
Some corporate networks block access to this,
so this web site
reproduces the code.
Doug Knox has also written some
instructions.. Note that the script acts as a toggle. So you probably want to
toggle on to set the UDB drive to read/write, then toggle back afterwards.
The instructions are very brief so are also reproduced here, for readers
that find access is blocked by the corporate filters etc:-
Usage: Download regtools.vbs Save the file to the folder of your choice. Double click the VBS file. The VB Script file will check for the appropriate value and if not found will create it. If the value was found, it will be toggled to its opposite state and you will be informed that you need to log off/back on or restart your computer. One note. This change is made in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Disabling the tools takes effect immediately. Enabling requires a restart. This script can be viewed in Notepad or any text editor, as to the specific Registry key and value that are updated. Your antivirus software may report this script as potentially malicious, or a possible virus. This is because the script writes to the System Registry.
There are several instructions available on the web for
re-enabling write access.
Basically, you have to navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
and set WriteProtect to zero.
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. As of around September 2009 I discovered that
there is an X11 application called xpad that does a similar job.
- There is a great
TodoList program by AbstractSpoon.
- SQLDbx is
a great RDBMS tool. It is available via their web page
but I make it available here as well
to help in situations where
the corporate environment will not allow a direct download. I now prefer it over SQUirrel.
-
Sometimes one has to draw UML diagrams, maybe as part of a reverse engineering effort.
In cases like this the ones from Doxygen are too low level and you need a specialist tool.
I used to use ArgoUML until someone drew my attention to
StarUML.
It is dual-license and the free software version is quite usable.