2009-08-07 #1

Changes, they are a changing

Oh, many changes in the last year at home:

• I've discontinued my web hosting at Tera-Byte in favor of self-hosting at my employer. Email and blogging happens at Google now.
• I've retired the Linux system in the basement and installed Vista on the box, using that as my desktop at home now.
• After retiring the Linux server, I discovered that my SMC wireless wasn't up to acting as a DHCP server, a wireless endpoint, AND a firewall, so I now have a cheap-o Linksys WRTG-54 thing.

Most recently, I was reading this which asks why people still run as administrator. And I wondered how practical it would be to run a Vista desktop as a "limited" user.

So for the last two weeks I have been using a "limited" user on my desktop at home. And so far, it works.

I think one of the things that make it functional is that I don't really get bothered by the UAC that Vista keeps popping up. In a way it is a good reminder that "this operation might be dangerous", and it tells me interesting things about what applications are trying to do what.

And really the only functional difference is that instead of clicking yes, hurt me when the UAC pops up, now I have to type the admin password before proceeding. So not much different than running sudo on Linux.

It has been an interesting experiment so far, and I think I will keep going with it.