Interesting tutorial!

With regards to the strings program, theres plenty of windows ports so theres no need to arse about with cygwin. If you grab the bloodshed c++ IDE (based on GCC) you'll find strings and the other bin utils in the directory c:\dev-c++\bin\

I use it all the time, you'll find the following -

addr2line.exe
ar.exe
as.exe
c++.exe
c++filt.exe
cpp.exe
dlltool.exe
dllwrap.exe
g++.exe
gcc.exe
gccbug
gcov.exe
gdb.exe
gprof.exe
ld.exe
make.exe
mingw32-c++.exe
mingw32-g++.exe
mingw32-gcc-3.3.1
mingw32-gcc.exe
mingw32-make.exe
mingwm10.dll
nm.exe
objcopy.exe
objdump.exe
ranlib.exe
readelf.exe
rm.exe
size.exe
strings.exe
strip.exe
windres.exe

Certainly helps when you see something cool done with linux tools and want to play on windows....

i2c