Sometimes when I'm working on a computer, I find that I need a little utility program or tool of some sort. These are just tiny, simple programs, but whenever I look on the internet to download one of these programs, the only options I can find involve downloading some sort of giant Linux tool library, some weird shareware thing, some half-baked open source thing that doesn't work on my OS, or some sort of freeware software infected with viruses and spyware.
WebStart is a neat piece of technology that comes with Java, which is great for these sorts of utility programs. It makes it possible to write programs that run on many different operating systems and run in a secure sandbox (so you don't have to be worried about viruses and spyware). Of course, as usual, Sun understaffs the Java team, so WebStart is not nearly as useful as it could be, but it's still good enough for simple utilities and the like.
So on this page, I'm offering various utilities in WebStart form that other people might find useful.
This is a little utility for calculating md5, sha1, and sha256 cryptographic hashes of files similar to md5sum, sha1sum, and sha256sum.
Hex Editor lets you view and edit the hex values of files.
Decompresses files that have been gzipped.
Counts the words and lines in files, similar to the wc utility