toolkit

What is in your toolkit?

Recently I got a portable USB drive and started carrying it with me anywhere. At first it was handy to transfer files here and there but then I noticed some utilities were just living on there all the time. I decided this was my "toolkit" of odds and ends I keep returning to in order to help me do my job. So what do you all have in YOUR toolkit. I'd love to know. Here is a quick peek at mine!

Robert's disgo usb drive toolkit, yesterday.

 

Firstly and most importantly we have WinRAR to help open all those archives holding the rest of it all. I've pretty much ditched winzip these days as winRAR is smaller (can you believe winzip no longer fits on a floppy?) and more flexible. If you have not done so already, take a look. You won't regret it.

Next up is cygwin - this is a command line shell for 32 bit Windows which works a lot like the Unix Bash Shell. Very powerful and flexible and can come in very handy at times by giving you another angle to attack a problem. Anyone who has moved up to Windows 200x from Unix will feel at home with this command line interface.

GFI Languard is a handy tool for scanning subnets to discover connected devices and probe them for details. If you have the right credentials you can even tell what a machine has installed and if it is up to date or not. Very useful for checking the state of your own network to make sure everything is updated and noone is using unauthorised devices on the network.

AdAware is a spyware detection and removal tool. The price is right... Free! And the tool itself has a very good reputation.

ws-ftp LE is a windows based FTP Program. I'm actually phasing this out in my own private use in favour of filezilla, but ws-ftp is still a damn good FTP Client none the less.

Trillian is a lightweight multi-network instant message client. It misses out some of the fancy features specific to some networks but it lets you talk to friends on most popular IM networks.

xnews is a popular and very highly configurable usenet news client for Windows machines. Not much else to say really about this; if you understand usenet then I've said all that I need to, and if you don't understand usenet we'll be here for another 3000 words if I try to explain now. So lets move on.

popcorn is a "lightweight" pop3 client which i often use for troubleshooting problems with pop3 email systems. Alongside this, I also use email remover, also in the list here, which allows you to connect to a pop3 message queue and inspect the messages on it without downloading them.

Keysafe isn't a general tool and isn't at all important for me on a "toolkit" USB drive but if you are using USB drives to transport confidential data it might be the most important program you ever use on it. Keysafe and its equivilants allow you to provide a securely encrypted area on a USB drive to hold documents that you need to keep secret if you lose your usb drive.

Editplus is a very sophisticated replacement for notepad as a text editor. It really is something special and despite being a text editor and nothing more, its still managed to become one of the "supported" development environments at my college for both programming and web site design.

NTFilemon is a simple program that allows you to watch all the changes made to files on a computer system. This can be used (for example) to monitor what happens during a program installation. Having a day off on the day the picture above was taken was its companion registry monitor which performs the same job for the registry.

Come back soon when I get my lazy butt in gear and I'll supply details and links to all the tools in that list and what they are doing there.

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