Virtual Computing
File under 'Practice what you preach'.
I got a laptop for work somewhat less than a year ago now, a Macintosh PowerBook G4 for those who care about such things. It's running OS X, of course, 10.4.whatever's current. I made a deal with the boss-of-computer-distribution that I would use my desktop machine as a test environment and the laptop would be a portal to that environment.
Best practices for using a laptop include living with it like it's going to be stolen by people who want to drain the data off of it, pawn it, and then use all of your information to destroy your life. Of course very few people do this, and it's very common for people to save passwords on laptops, keep original data and un-copied un-backed-up work on them, and be completely incapable of imagining that anyone would ever consider stealing or even touching their computer. Also of course, computers DO get stolen, all the time, and they fall out of bags, off of bicycles, out of car trunks, off of tables, down stairs, and might even get stomped on by elephants or banged on by two-year-old humans or run over by cars or buses.
So. Live with your computer as though it is going to be yanked from your hands at any minute and thrown down a well which will then be filled with cement and capped. If you use it to upload pictures from your camera, copy them immediately to your google account, or your livejournal account, or your desktop machine if it gets backed up regularly, or what-have-you. Write documents on google docs or a wiki or a blog instead of on your laptop. For sysadmin types, if you need to jot down a note or write a quick thing in a .txt file, ssh to your desktop or favourite server account and do it there. Don't leave original text on a laptop!
Obviously, I'm saying all of this for a reason. I do tend to follow these best practices, and while that might make me slightly more reckless with my laptop (software wise, I mean, I'm not out throwing it under dump truck tires!), it also means that when I thoroughly destroy the operating system on the laptop, like I did two or three days ago, it pains me not at all when the guy who fixes Macs says 'What did you DO? Your whole user directory is unrecoverable!!', and I get to say 'That's fine, don't worry about it.' In fact, I might even gloat about it in my journal a bit, which is what you're reading now.
(In case you're curious, a command designed to clean recalcitrant directories out of the .Trash got away from me and pretty much deleted everything. It was stupid, it was reckless, but it was completely painless to recover from, because I don't keep original data on it. I'd NEVER do something that reckless to my desktop machine.)
I got a laptop for work somewhat less than a year ago now, a Macintosh PowerBook G4 for those who care about such things. It's running OS X, of course, 10.4.whatever's current. I made a deal with the boss-of-computer-distribution that I would use my desktop machine as a test environment and the laptop would be a portal to that environment.
Best practices for using a laptop include living with it like it's going to be stolen by people who want to drain the data off of it, pawn it, and then use all of your information to destroy your life. Of course very few people do this, and it's very common for people to save passwords on laptops, keep original data and un-copied un-backed-up work on them, and be completely incapable of imagining that anyone would ever consider stealing or even touching their computer. Also of course, computers DO get stolen, all the time, and they fall out of bags, off of bicycles, out of car trunks, off of tables, down stairs, and might even get stomped on by elephants or banged on by two-year-old humans or run over by cars or buses.
So. Live with your computer as though it is going to be yanked from your hands at any minute and thrown down a well which will then be filled with cement and capped. If you use it to upload pictures from your camera, copy them immediately to your google account, or your livejournal account, or your desktop machine if it gets backed up regularly, or what-have-you. Write documents on google docs or a wiki or a blog instead of on your laptop. For sysadmin types, if you need to jot down a note or write a quick thing in a .txt file, ssh to your desktop or favourite server account and do it there. Don't leave original text on a laptop!
Obviously, I'm saying all of this for a reason. I do tend to follow these best practices, and while that might make me slightly more reckless with my laptop (software wise, I mean, I'm not out throwing it under dump truck tires!), it also means that when I thoroughly destroy the operating system on the laptop, like I did two or three days ago, it pains me not at all when the guy who fixes Macs says 'What did you DO? Your whole user directory is unrecoverable!!', and I get to say 'That's fine, don't worry about it.' In fact, I might even gloat about it in my journal a bit, which is what you're reading now.
(In case you're curious, a command designed to clean recalcitrant directories out of the .Trash got away from me and pretty much deleted everything. It was stupid, it was reckless, but it was completely painless to recover from, because I don't keep original data on it. I'd NEVER do something that reckless to my desktop machine.)