dev.

If you want to use the GNU Debugger on Windows, say for Code::Blocks or Eclipse CDT, you have two options: Cygwin and MinGW. Cygwin is pretty easy to install, but uses Unix paths internally. This makes it a pain to set up. MinGW uses Windows paths, but there is no fancy setup.exe. Okay, there is an installer, but I did not find a way to install gdb. You can install MinGW components package by package, but I ended up with gdb crashing due to “Missing libexpat-1.dll”.
Fortunately, there is another installer for MinGW, and this one brings everything you need, even gdb: TDM’s GCC/MinGW32 Builds. And this one is working fine for me.

Though git is not my primary source code management tool, I use it whenever I work on complex code that I don’t want to commit yet. Or just to keep track of my local scripts.
And using “git difftool”, it is pretty simple to use third party tools like WinMerge for graphical diffs:

1. Create a wrapper script (e.g. git-diff-wrapper.sh) and put it anywhere in your Windows path (%PATH%):
   #!/bin/sh
"C:/Program Files/WinMerge/WinMergeU.exe" -e -ub "$1" "$2" | cat
2. Update your .gitconfig to run this script whenever “git difftool” is invoked:
   # … more config …
[diff]
tool = winmerge
[difftool "winmerge"]
cmd = git-diff-wrapper.sh "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
# … more config …

That’s it, no restart required

There are many md5 utilities for Windows, but very few that  …

• are free/open source,
• create checksums for multiple files,
• export checksums to a file,
• and verify md5 sums from a list of files.

In short: if you need a very good tool, then use the Swiss File Knife (sfk).

For creating checksums for all your files in the current directory and storing the individual checksums in checksum.md5, execute this:

sfk md5gento checksum.md5 .

And for validating the checksums of all files in the current directory, execute this:

sfk md5check checksum.md5

That’s it

You are looking for a Python version to run from your USB drive? Then relax and head right over to python.org! They provide up-to-date versions of Portable Python. Even more, they bundle all the plugins you will need on Windows:
* Django-1.0.2-final
* IPython-0.9.1
* PIL-1.1.6
* Py2exe-0.6.9
* PyGame-1.8.1
* PyReadline-1.5
* PyScripter v1.9.9.6
* PyWin32-212
* Rpyc-2.60
* SPE-0.8.4.c
* wxPython-unicode-2.8.9.1

Ok, nearly all the plugins you will need

Have a look at pymssql.sf.net for a  Microsoft SQL Server module.