Do you work in a highly restrictive IT environment? Does your IT department make some very irrational and outright unsafe computer decisions and force you to live with the consequences? (i.e. forcing everyone to use old versions of I.E., and or turning all the firewalls off on the computers) Does your IT department threaten you with the idea that they are watching everything you do on their network?

Well if any of the above are true, may I recommend Portable Apps! This platform allows you to carry your favorite Open Source applications with you on any usb drive! For example you can now have Firefox, GIMP, Open Office all at your figure tips on the go with you where ever you are! All settings and data go with you wherever you are.

One issue with portable apps is the lack of Java portable support. At this time it appears that it is not possible to get Firefox to link up with the portable java virtual machine.

With regards to the IT crew watching everything you do and possibly watching things they really have no business seeing, one awesome application to mitigate this is PUTTY. Using PUTTY and a remote SSH server (I would recommend Linux) possibly even installed on a home router, not necessarily a full blown computer, one can create a completely secure SOCKS type proxy connection, and using Firefox even the DNS look ups can be completely encrypted. The uses of this feature are many, most significantly it allows one to penetrate an overly zealous firewall or completely masque and data transferred between the browser and the SOCKS proxy server.