JDB is package of commands for manipulating flat ASCII databases from shell scripts. It is useful to process medium amounts of data (with very little data, you'd do it by hand; with megabytes, you might want a real database). It is very good at doing things like managing data for research experiments. By storing data in simple text files and processing it with pipelines, it is easy to experiment (in the shell) and look at the output.
LavaPS is an interactive process-tracking program like "top", but with a much different attitude. Rather than presenting lots of specific info in digital form, it tries to present certain important information in a graphical analog form. The idea is that you can run it in the background and get a rough idea of what's happening to your system without devoting much concentration to the task. Lavaps was inspired the idea of calm computing from "The Coming Age of Calm Technology" by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown.