Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere

museumpeace writes "On his blog, Jeremy Wagstaff makes available a list of the apps now packaged for USB thumbdrives. He also wrote these up in WSJ but that will cost you. My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever I go."

spelunking cheque

[SuperBanana]

Apparently "spell checker" is not on the list...

i do this anyway...

[Lil-Bondy]

i just get portable firefox on my usb drive and take it wherever, its quite handy when your school only has IE *shudder*

Portable firefox?

[Nplugd]

Not sure I see the point here. Isn't putting your local profil on your usb key enough to have a portable version of the browser? Because if the only issue is to have as many bookmarks as you have computers, this certainly takes care of that.

Uh huh...

[Telastyn]

How about Putty.

Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.

How big are these apps?

[billstewart]

Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are. For some things, like Email, the big problem isn't really the code, it's the data (e.g. you might have a 4MB program install but 100MB of email.)

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[stratjakt]

You can rag on them all you want, but we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US.

I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.

Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language. After all, deriding someone for using slang isn't "PC".

I shouldn't have to recieve an email, only to play phone-tag all day to find out what the fuck they're talking about.

This one particular dork tries to make everything read more "official" by Capitalizing Every Word In Every Sentence.

Gah, beurocrats. All they do is have meetings and set up phone conferences all day.

Re:Thest are great... except - the only problem is

[NanoGator]

"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"

She did the right thing, good for her.

She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.

You should be happy she made that choice.

flash is cheap

[SuperBanana]

Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are.

With USB thumb drives costing about or less than $50 for 512MB, I'd have to say that space isn't much of an issue at all. I've seen 1GB flash drives for under $70 (though $90-100 is somewhat more common).

What is more of an issue to me is that the application not go bonkers with write cycles being somewhat precious with flash memory. It would be nice if the various linux filesystem drivers could have a mount option that spread out writes (since fragmentation isn't much of an issue on a media with essentially no seek time).

Shouldn't this be how all software is designed?

[Combuchan]

So I guess by "ultra-portable" they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn't touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o' crap left over behind?

Isn't this how all software should be released?

that's the way it used to work

[idlake]

That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.

With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.

Re:Security

[Lord Crc]

Firefox just ignores the local internet connection settings, which say, "Use this proxy", and as far as I know, even if it was installed on the computer's, there's no way to set that, and make it secure

So why haven't they simply made the gateway route all 80 and 443 traffic through the proxy? No need to configure any clients.

How long before viruses exploit this?

[cperciva]

Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.

I'm sure McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos will all love this idea, but I think I'll take a pass here...

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[mabinogi]

however, without a certain amount of due care in regards to spelling and grammar, meaning starts to become obscure at best.

The other thing is that whilst no one should be expected to spend half an hour carefully double checking every slashdot post for errors, they also shouldn't _need_ to.
Average spelling and grammar abilities should be high enough that someone can quickly spew something out, and be relatively certain that it makes sense, and is spelt right _without_ the use of spell checkers or anything more than a quick read through.

Re:This is EXACTLY what my site is all about...

[dudeman69]

not a bad little site leftyfb the layout is much better than some of the other ones i've seen out there (and look at this, u'r "search" button actually works!) i'd like to see you expand it more though, and find more items for your "Recovery Tools" section (you wouldn't believe how many times i find myself on the road in need of a good HD data recovery progie).

Re:How long before viruses exploit this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"read only"

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[InfiniteWisdom]

whiel instersntig, Id stlil pfrer msotly crroect spelnilg

Re:I know an Ultaportable App

[verus vorago]

What difference does it make how hard a word is to spell? There are several quick and simple ways to check the spelling of any word. In my opinion, the harder a word is for someone to spell, the more important it is that they should check it. The fact that it's in a spelling/grammar nazi post makes me wonder if the post was a troll but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

BTW the majority of words added to old English, to form modern English, come from French. Some have just been around longer.

And what is a "layperson" in this context? Do we have a special priest class that is expected to be able to write the language while the rest of us scratch down whatever we want?

Library updates are BS for 99% of Windows apps

[swb]

When was the last time you updated JUST a Windows DLL in a Windows application?

I can only think of two instances when you might update just the libraries for an application:

1) Windows OS. Libraries make sense here, but it's not like any service pack has ever been just DLLs or there's some expectation they'll be small. IMHO the OS libraries are the only place that sharing makes sense.

2) Large applications (think SQL server, Exchange, etc). Modularity makes sense here from a scale perspective, since updating a static Exchange install would be pretty painful. But again, it's not like E2k service packs have been small, either.

The "critical security fix" usually applies to OS-supplied libraries and moreso on the UNIX side when holes have been found in stuff like ssh or other crypto libraries linked all over the place.

But this is why I said "make it an option" -- if I want to install a statically linked/private library application, I should have the choice.