Not having anything else to write about, let me talk about the software that I use to integrate with the rest of my company. This is more than just what I use for development, which I've written before. My company has standardized on Windows NT with NT Server for workgroup servers and Solaris for the big servers. Microsoft Office 95 is the standard and just about everywhere else we use our own products (and our Mac OS support is quite poor).

My first hurdle was how to get past our company firewall. About the only thing I can hit on the internet is web stuff. I'd like to have Eudora check my home e-mail, use ICQ to talk with my friends, use ftp to access my home server. All this is blocked. We have a PBX system so a modem is out. A wireless solution looked like a good idea, and on the plus side I'd be able to use it when I'm gaming on Saturdays. Luckily, Metricom's Ricochet network covers the San Francisco Bay Area (as well as Seattle, Washington DC, and some major airports). A basic modem plus one year of service cost me about $550.

So now I can access the outside world. But, I now have to TCP/IP networks to access at once, the company network and Ricochet. Now, the Mac OS Open Transport Networking supports multiple IP addresses over multiple interfaces, but there is no interface for accessing it right out of the box. To the rescue comes IPNetRouter, a shareware program by Sustainable Softworks. With this I can set up two IP address to access both networks, I can also set up the routing so that going to the internal or external network is transparent. This program can also handle being a regular router or an Internet gateway. All for $90.

Now I don't have to reboot to access one network or the other. I can have Eudora check my email constantly and ICQ running all the time while browsing the internal web sites. The next step was using our NT servers. NT server can function as an AppleShare server, but it's an optional install and the IS department does not like us fooling around too much with the servers.

There are two solutions for this. One was to set up Microsoft's Internet Information Server which is a WWW server and an FTP server. With this and an FTP client I can transfer files to and fro. This is not extremely transparent solution, as I can't just browse the server from the Finder and can't work with files directly from the server. I have to fetch the file, work on it, then transfer it back. But it is free. IIS is free and there is one free Mac OS ftp client, the one by Vicomsoft.

To work transparently by making my Mac look like a Windows Net- working client, I bought Dave, published by Thursby Software Systems. This is extension-type software that interfaces with my Mac's AppleTalk to make Windows machines look like AppleShare machines and make my Mac look like a Windows networking client/ server. I can connect to our NT server, go to my files, double click a document and have my text editor come up with the document. It's all transparent, relatively easy to set up, as fast as normal file sharing. It does have some incompatibi- lities, especially with Code Warrior. But otherwise it's quite good and it costs about $150.