Portable Applications

Most of us work in places where we are not supposed to install software on the computers we use. While this makes sense from the viewpoint of an IT department, it limits us to whatever software has been deemed safe, and prevents us from using the smaller, faster, more configurable applications that are out there.

Personally, I’d go insane without autohotkey at work. Why it isn’t standard practice to automate as much as possible the things computers do, is beyond me, but it certainly isn’t the practice where I work. I work in the IS department, and whenever possible it seems we’re asked to do things in the least efficient way possible. For example, several times a day, we are supposed to check the disk usage levels on one of the servers. Now this is a unix server, and they could program a cron job to check the disk usage levels and send out an alert if they are high, but that isn’t done. We also have to send out faxes to test the fax server, but we don’t have a fax server we can use to send out these faxes from our machines, and we can’t set up a computer do do this automatically for us. Instead, we send them by hand.

Well, enough griping.

I’ve created my own personal collection of portable tools and applications that I take to work on a CD. I like using a cd over a thumbdrive because it’s far less noticable, cheaper in dollars per megabyte, and if lost, is easier to replace. And if discovered, a cd in your cdrom seems less suspicious to me than a thumbdrive.
So that’s what I call a WorkCD: a cd full of portable applications that you can take to work so you can run them without “installing” anything on your computer.