There are plenty of humorous stories floating through email and on the web about how silly the mistakes and misunderstandings can be between the people who specialize in working with computers and those who are mostly ignorant of the black magic that makes computers work. People who have plugged the power cord into itself, the legend of someone trying to order a new cupholder because they had been using their CD ROM tray for one, the persistent rumor that someone took a picture of what was on their monitor by putting it on the copy machine... there is probably a grain of truth in all of them. All of us make mistakes that seem silly to the people who know a subject far better than we do.

With that in mind, I try to always be patient when trying to educate people and reassuring when they blunder in ways they are embarrassed to admit. I prefer to be the nice guy that makes your life better rather than that IT guy you put up with because you need him. Sometimes I worry that I am seen as that guy anyway, so I try hard to be nice.

But there is temptation. No, I'm not talking about spying on your internet usage or snooping on your emails. Stupid IT people do that, it can only end in suffering. Even if you get away with it, it makes you a worse person. I'm not talking about making people feel bad either, because really that's kind of childish.

What I'm considering is a murkier depth of cruelty. I'm considering being cruel for the betterment of the user. I already kind of do this. We work with sensitive information that we are absolutely obligated to keep secure. We work hard to do that. When somebody leaves their computer screen unlocked while they are away from it, then they are committing a minor security faux pas. The most common theft for my industry is insider theft. Leaving your screen unlocked could allow a co-worker who has decided to steal a way to do so and blame it on you. Or they could access information that you have access to and they should not.

The most politically correct is to report the offense to the manager of the employee making the mistake when it is witnessed. I don't like to do that and managers and even IT people know that we do it too, so enforcement always seems a little hypocritical. I will do that where the manager or employee is particularly sensitive to the other method... that other method being to take a moment to mess up their background or move their task bar around. I never do anything serious, but always mildly annoying. After a couple times people see me and think to try to remember that they locked their screen like they're supposed to. That's my goal really, I want them to think about it. It is a very mild cruelty, but done with humor and never malice and people usually take it in stride.

But I am considering taking up the practice of a greater cruelty to address a greater problem.

Passwords are the problem. They're a problem for everyone. It seems like every system that has anything you might remotely care about requires a password. Invariably if you try to commit them all to memory, you will use very insecure passwords or forget them. This means that the average human being requires some sort of method for managing their passwords. In my industry, this is compounded by systems that have complex rules for what make acceptable passwords and requiring them to be changed on an irregular but frequent basis.

To deal with this problem, we encourage the use of password management tools. I absolutely love Lastpass. It remembers my Internet passwords for me and does it securely. It goes with me wherever I go and all I have to really remember is one really good password. A good alternative is KeePass which does much the same thing and works even without the Internet (though it doesn't fill in passwords on web pages for you as well.) A less good but acceptable alternative is putting your passwords in a password protected spreadsheet. Excel will let you protect your spreadsheet with a pretty strong encryption system. Yet another method is to store your passwords in an encrypted zip file. If you must, you can store your passwords in something that you protect like your phone.

Nonetheless passwords are a problem.  People write them down on post-it notes. They write them in little books. I don't really think either is exactly bad in itself, but they leave the books or notes where someone could find them which actually makes it more unlikely that the person who uses them nefariously would get caught.

We get regular calls by people who refuse to learn to use a password tool. We find notes. We find books. This is where I begin to consider cruelty. For those people who leave notes, I am considering stealing them. For the books, I'm considering hiding them. But worst, for those people who just refuse to learn any way to keep their password safe, I'm considering setting their passwords to a string of insanely difficult to remember characters and not leaving it up to them to immediately change it. Imagine that your password was Yc4Q!9$8*g$3ZPB8!ERChgCxK6$MuTHX*c1Up#k#ArNIA . There is no way that you'd try to type it each time. You'd absolutely have to use a password. We already use a system that generates ugly passwords like that as temporary passwords, basically forcing people to cut and paste to get their password of preference set. I'm considering making it so that they cannot change to a password of their preference.

Think on that a minute. What if everytime you had to call to get  your password reset, you were stuck with a password like that for a month. You'd learn to use a password tool all right. You'd learn or quit using that system, but I'm the guy that controls access to the tools you have to use in order to keep your job. If I do that, it isn't a suggestion that you have to deal with, it is a forced adaptation.

I haven't done it. I probably won't. I don't know if I should be that cruel, even for a good cause. Should I?

I might.

Okay, so my system isn't exactly average. I have a Windows installation that is pretty close to the way it came in the box. I removed a couple things, added a very few, but mostly kept it as is for the purpose of having a reliable machine suitable for use with my work.

I did shrink the primary partition a good bit, no biggie since I had plenty of extra space and built a custom bootloader to kick over to a binary I later set up in that empty space.

I then loaded Linux in that space. I've tried many Linux distributions over the years. I think I started with RedHat back when they didn't have a home user suitable version. Then Fedora, their home user version. Mandriva, Suse, Debian, Gentoo and a handful of others. I tried the BSD stuff too, Free, Net and Open. These days I'm not so concerned with learning new ways that things can be done so switching around between distributions doesn't do me much good. I settled in with Ubuntu because they made it easy to use and have a good support and testing group. Then they switched over to Unity and that soured me on them, so I switched to Mint which was all the good stuff from Ubuntu and none of the ugliness that I got when I tried Unity.

Life has been good for a while. Today I noticed that there is a significant upgrade for Mint, so I made sure that important stuff was backed up (important!) and tried to do an online upgrade.

I think I missed a step or didn't think through the repercussions of upgrading the boot loader because after some errors and trying to force it... black screen.

So I booted into Windows, and got the new DVD version of the Mint installer. I put it on a USB stick with UNetBootin because that makes it fast and easy, if it works. It didn't. While that was downloading and loading, I tried to update Windows. This is a very common occurrence for me, but it failing isn't. A little research revealed that somehow the system tray failing to resize automatically was the culprit. So I switched the system tray settings to show everything and that allowed me to finish five of the six updates. The sixth installed fine after a reboot.

In between reboots I tried booting from my USB stick. UNetBootin works fine, but it doesn't successfully load my Mint DVD, so that was some wasted time. After booting back into Windows (and applying that missing update) I burned the DVD to a real DVD and rebooted to it. That's what I'm typing this from.

This screen is pretty much what I've come to expect from Mint. It handles multimedia fine. It recognizes and nicely handles my dual monitors. It has a friendly installer and can see and be customized to install in place of my previous installation without too much trouble... except it should have allowed me to import users and settings. I didn't think to expect it to, but it was kind enough to let me know that there were none there suitable for import. Thanks.

I'll try to remember to update this later and post the results of this little unplanned foray into system installation.

Update about 15 minutes later: It appears that I should have clicked on "Format" when selecting partitions. Apparently that meant that was what it planned to do, not an option I could consider. Good thing anything important is backed up. Now I have nothing of the previously installed Linux Mint system. Not only that, it overwrote the MBR like I explicitly intended to avoid. It still appears to boot Windows fortunately but now Windows is the secondary system, not the first. Windows allows you to switch to Linux at boot and Linux allows you to switch to Windows at boot, so it isn't really a problem. It is irritating though. Now I have to think "did I really back up everything I might have wanted?"

But the new install is beautiful. Not that I could log in as the user it made me set up at first, oh no, I had to log in as a guest, then switch to that user on the command line and then switch from that user to root from the command line and create my new home directory. Only then was I allowed to log in as my new user on my freshly installed system.

*Long sigh*

It is hard to recommend that others attempt to follow in my footsteps. It may be great for me in the end but there were so many pitfalls along the way that I can scarcely expect a novice user to avoid them. I'm not done even yet. There are updates being applied because of course the DVD doesn't come with the latest software, oh no, you have to wait another hour hours yet for all that to get loaded.

We use Microsoft Communicator at work and it integrates nicely with Microsoft Outlook. We've been using it for quite a while and people are used to it and it has been dependable. I really have nothing bad to say about it other than the cost, and whether it is worth it or not is really a business decision.

A support technician recently "solved" a problem on one of our workstations by disabling UAC. UAC is one of those things that doesn't solve everything, but it adds a little security. Turning it off because you don't know how to make your software work otherwise is not a solution. I'll grant you that if you need to turn it off to get it installed and leave it on, I can understand, but turning off our security does not belong on the fix list.

There should be a screensaver that has a chat system and a survey system built into it. Perhaps you could force a survey response before allowing logging in? Maybe people would be able to get log in help if they could chat without having to log in, but you could still identify the computer.

I've been using Mint Linux for some time now. Essentially it takes the things that made Ubuntu popular and makes them the focus so you get an easy to use and maintain desktop system. The only gripe I have had was that the default searches in Firefox go through a Mint custom page. It is still giving the same results that it gets out of Google but with an advertising bonus to the Mint people. I am not paying for Mint, so I have been very reluctant to change that, since I want them to get some sort of payment. Today it was too much for me though, so I finally tweaked it and here is how, from a root console or with sudo:

# cp /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml ./google.xml.original
# wget http://mxr.mozilla.org/firefox/source/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins/google.xml?raw=1 -O google.xml.fixed
# cat google.xml.fixed > /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml
# cat google.xml.fixed > /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml

Today I began the task of moving a lot of content from my old website (self-hosted) to my Google host. Google of course has server systems all around the world, tremendous numbers of connections to the internet and pretty much unlimited bandwidth. All these are things I've never had; plus they don't go down if my computer or my internet connection is having a problem.

Along with the move, I'm getting to know a bit about their web site building tools. In many ways it feels like I've come full circle. I started out many years ago building pages with the assistance of Geocities web site building tools on their free hosting service. I moved to building pages on paid hosting services for work and then to interactive pages both at work and on my personal site. Later I switched hosts and languages and again and again moved my site until I ended up hosting it myself on my own computer on my own internet connection. Finally... I'm back to using a free hosting service (though I pay for the domain service) with site tools provided by the hosting service, just like Geocities. (Well perhaps not just like Geocities.)

What you might want to know about hosting a site on Google:

• If you're a small business, you'll want Google Apps. It comes with a variety of services, including Google Sites
• You'll find it easiest if you purchase your DNS through Google, but they do offer hosting even if you don't, it is just more complex

AppEngine is a completely different thing. (I have one of those too.)

I set up https://phantomcode-org.appspot.com to be associated with my webmaster@phantomcode.org account so that http://app.phantomcode.org is the same thing.