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[This project has been discontinued due to license compliance issues. Thanks everyone who assisted with your ideas and feedback.]

About

  • What is this? - this was a project dedicated to building an up-to-date collection of great, free portable software for easy installation and use.
  • What's in it? - list of included freeware
Releases
  • v. 1.3 beta - note that this release is over a year old and contains very out-of-date software. I haven't worked out how to solve licensing issues. Download

NEWS

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Christmas Updates

Some serious updates that I figured I'd mention just so everyone knows this whole thing is still moving.

About 12 programs updated, VLC, IE Password View, Rainlendar, Truecrypt, TaskCoach ... whew.

I also made the decision to break up my Office folder into two parts. I'm doing usability testing right now and it may go into the next version.

Virus false-positive problems

I've begun to consider going ahead and cutting out all files that show up as viruses even though they're false positives. Its not good policy to share files like that and I'm concerned one day these files could actually BE a virus but users will think its a false positive.

I mention it because one of my files "StartKitchenSink.exe" (the one that starts them all) shows up -- once in system memory -- as a virus. Comodo's antivirus is undoubtedly turned up a little high and therefore finds false positives but users shouldn't have to deal with this. The root file doesn't come up on any radars, nor does the tool that created the original EXE. Two other virus programs are much smarter about this, but I see the virus company's point: why not be extra paranoid?

I loathe Windows sometimes.

Whatever the case, I'd have to put them all in a separate archive of some kind and make that available elsewhere. This is so stupid because several of those files are extremely useful. AAST has no program like it that I can find. RockXP has some really essential system tools. This is terrible.

Any thoughts? Anyone?

Portablefreeware, Notepad ++, SysExporter

I've tried to be an active member of the portablefreeware.com community, but for some reason I can't quite sit down and do all that. Part of that is because I'm trying to manage employment stuff right now and it is *tedious*.

I do owe them big time for this whole project, which has been of HUGE benefit to me, not just in terms of this project but for my own uses. I've long felt that what I was giving out to everyone else should just be a mirror of what I use on a day-to-day basis.

I've been evaluating a few products some recent posts have said I should take another look at. One is Notepad++ and another is SysExporter.

I think my next release will be coming shortly. With the release of OpenOffice 3 (finally!), I think the archive needs a healthy update. The major project goals of getting DLL files to auto-link will have to wait a little longer. I'm just too overloaded and not very motivated.

As a side note, some other projects I have going on:

1. Get a WinXP VMware install working properly. I'm running into problems moving my data over just because VMware's networking is running slow for some reason.
2. Run Windows as clean as possible using Thinstall to avoid registry cruft
3. I have a new web site I'm hosting and I'm testing WebDAV to see what it will and won't do. Sadly, I can't get HTTPS going so I'm trying to do everything using TrueCrypt. We'll see how that goes.