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My Software Environment

The following is basically the list of softwares I install whenever I get a new machine. It's amazing how much serious computational and graphical statistics can be done with public domain (i.e. free) softwares on sub $1,000 PC nowdays. Use google to find details about each software.

R (from www.r-project.org)

cygwin : a unix for PC. It has bash (a born-again shell) and most gnu softwares. Especially c/c++/fortran compiler gcc!
NT-emacs (and LEIM too if you use international language)
ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics): OK. These three need to be set up to work together (specify home directory, modify .emacs, .bash, site-start.el etc.) Further tweaking may be required to make it work with MikTeX (see below) too.

Perl (ActivePerl) : great for data cleaning/pre-processing.
Miktex : for technical writing. LaTeX
Ghostscript and ghostview : viewing and manipulating postscript files

ImageMagick : batch resizing and USM'ing all those > 2MB photos from D70!
Irfanview : sensible replacement of the default image/fax viewer

TeXPoint: for using LaTeX equations in Powerpoint

ArcView: GIS viewer putty for SSHif you want a free substitute good enough for most purposes)

XFree86: an X server; mostly running Linux/SUN version of the above softwares in the remote server

Firefox : superfast replacement of IE 

Toad Free: Oracle client

SQLYog: MySQL client

(Non-free softwares)

Winzip : some free alternatives are out there...

Microsoft Office (Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, Excel):

Acrobat : for making PDF files

SAS : it's amazing there's a job title called "SAS programmer"
Minitab : many useful stat commands, all a few clicks away...
Matlab : matrix handling powerhouse... learn some and pass as an engineer!