Follow Up

You could guess that it would take technical post to bring the geeks out of the woodwork. Although, I'm not sure if geeks live in woodwork. Seems a bit too natural; they probably live in decomissioned 386s, or something.

Suggestions have included:

Using Firefox/Opera/Avant instead of IE. Firstly, Avant is not a real browser: it's more like a bunch of widgets wrapped around an instance of IE. The tabbing, blocking and mouse gestures do make it quite usable, but there's still the nagging doubt that its black, pulsing heart is microsoft. Also, since it's based on IE, you have to go through the whole bs of switching off the notifications that sending a form sends data over the internet, going to a https address is moderately more secure than http, etc. Somehow I can't bring myself to like Firefox: the last time I tried it, the rendering felt slow and somehow flaky. Opera is currently my browser of choice, but making the browsing experience too convenient distracts from work, and you get nothing done (I should make it clear: I'm configuring my machine for work).

Dropping Putty and sticking with ssh through cygwin. For some reason I found the connections I got through cygwin were more flaky than through putty, and would drop or break after a few hours. Maybe things are OK now, but there's something deeply reassuring about the gray on white of Putty. Plus, I once juggled with Simon Tatham (er, I mean... oh, work it out for yourself), and I feel a certain loyalty to the chap.

VideoLan Client: again, not really something I need for work. I need Winamp/Real so I have something to listen to while I'm working, but I don't think I can really justify watching movies. And, at least in my fairly wide range experience of codecs and the like, I still haven't found anything that MPC can't handle, and I love the way that it integrates .rm and .mov and everything else into one stripped down interface.

On the other hand, there were a couple of things I omitted to mention, most of which are more obscure and mostly to do with PDF/EPS formats.

PDF995 is rather intrustive with its advertising, but it gets the job done, and I'm too cheap to shell out for distiller.

Ghostview/Ghostscript is also a little annoying since you have to ack the licence every time it loads, but I seem to have got used to this so I don't notice it any more.

AdobeAcrobat -- the machine came with version 6 installed, but it's pretty slow to load up, so I'm thinking of downgrading to an older version, which should be a bit faster to start. Meantime, can anyone remember what the utility is that makes acrobat start faster? Yes, I know GV can open PDF now, but it doesn't render the text as nicely.

wmf2eps -- I haven't installed this yet, since it's always a pain to get this to install properly... you need to set up a ps printer driver, then redirect the output... but in my line of business being able to get decent .eps output from windows applications is a lifesaver, and opens up a lot more possibilities for producing figures. I suppose one way is to print the relevant figures to pdf, and then crop down to the desired size (requires distiller, though), or try to do something horrific involving gstools and pdftops and pstoeps, but the wmf2eps solution is somewhat nicer. I would go down the route of doing everything in pdf and using pdflatex exclusively, but my coauthors do seem to be rather stuck in the 1990s when it comes to latex usage.

There's probably more, but I suppose I'll remember these as time makes their necessity apparent. At the moment, I find it more pressing to find some way to connect to a printer.