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Tools of the Trade

Our core business is software development, and these are the tools we most often use, by development environment (the three major Operating Systems we support). Below are links to either the main support site for the tool, or where you can download the publicly available copy.

We should state up front that we unabashedly and enthusiastically support open source and publicly available software (ala GNU, Linux, Perl and a raft of others). If we can find a solid tool in the public domain (or with a liberal usage license) then we use it. There are a few commercial products below, which we could not live without (we consider them the "best of breed") and suggest their continued support.

Development Environments
We currently actively develop on the following platforms/operating systems: Sun Solaris, either 8 or 9, Linux (Specifically Red Hat (8.0, 9 and RHEL 3.0) and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) OpenServer 5.x. The Following list contains our favorite development tools. The Links at the end of the line are operating system specific (with PKG for Sun package format, RPM for Red Hat Package format, and SCO for SCO specific installation format).

GNU Revision Control System (RCS) - Better than SCCS and more flexible.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
GNU make - The best make available, bar none.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
GNU GCC - The most portable C/C++ Compiler around. We love it.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
GNU Indent - Very nice source code formatter.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
GNU diff - Portable Unix file differences utility.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
GNU gzip - The de-facto Unix archiver (shades of pkzip).	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
Expect - Automates interactive input.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
Perl - Larry Wall's very useful universal scripting tool.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
Python - A super Object Oriented (OO) Interpreter.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
MySQL - Poor man's Oracle. Very useful for web-based databases.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
Samba - Far superior to Microsoft's own SMB and available on Unix!	PKG |  RPM |  SCO
Apache - Simply the best web server on the planet.	PKG |  RPM |  SCO

Microsoft Windows 9X, NT 4.0 & 2000 ...
We don't really develop anything on Windows platforms (nothing against Microsoft, just not our bailiwick) but do support several heterogeneous networks with Windows boxes attached. The following has been found useful and has almost become a standard set to install:

Cygnus (Now Red Hat)'s GNU tools for the Win32 world (CygWin32) - The only way to migrate from the Unix world and just plain better than all other "scripting" and development tools (with all the unix and GNU beauties). Can't say enough about it. Warning: this baby is BIG (30MB+).
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) - The only way to encrypt files, e-mail and just about anything else.
WinZip - Supplanted PKZIP as the de-facto archive utility. Accept no substitutes.
Ws_FTP95 from Ipswitch, Inc - A very clever FTP client with an addictive GUI interface.
Adobe Acrobat Reader - The de-facto Internet Document (PDF) reader.
CRT from Van Dyke Technologies - A vastly superior telnet client compared to the native Microsoft version.
Norton Utilities - The required operating system utility for Windows environments.
Norton AntiVirus - The only antivirus software we recommend (and use in-house).
Norton Ghost - The only sane way to backup a Windows NT environment.
DiskKeeper from Executive Software - The only disk defragmenter we recommend for Windows NT (NTFS).
ActivePerl from ActiveState - The Windows 32bit Perl implementation of choice, now with ActivePython too!
Netscape Communicator - The Lymeware Windows browser of choice (no flames please).
VNC from AT&T Research - A FREE full PCAnywhere (tm) replacement for Win32, Unix, Linux and more. Saves traveling to remote win32 servers (TTU from the miners!).