I am one of those crazy security paranoid former system administrator turned programmer. I am a windows user. I think I’m on the only one.
I do not run as Administrator. In Linux I use sudo or gksu or some variant. In Windows I get by with runas 99% of the time and the other 1% of the time I just “switch user”.
I’ve been struggling to use NUnitForms. Since I had been struggling I’d been leaving it and coming back to it. Today I made a break through and it had nothing to do with code or understanding how NUnitForms works. Unfortunately it had to do with my crazy security paranoia.
NUnitForms requires administrator privilege. Once I ran NUnit as administrator, the pesky tests started succeeding. But even this was a struggle.
Strangely, when I use the windows menu, search for “NUnit” and click the result, it works fine. When I perform the exact same action and right click and click “Run as administrator” from the context menu, I get a very strange result.
Fine. I can browse “c:\program files\NUnit 2.4.3\bin\” and right click launch NUnit.exe as administrator. Thankfully that works. But now comes my gripe!
All of my MRU information is different. In a program like NUnit this isn’t too big of a deal. It is more just annoying.
In Linux, using sudo, quite often it is possible to start a program as root, and yet have it still read its configuration from the normal place. sudo doesn’t change the HOME environment variable by default (this is like USERPROFILE and or HOMEPATH in windows). This means that if programs read their configuration information from a path relative to HOME, that you can start then with sudo and still get your local settings.
I am not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the flexibility of it is definitely welcome. If I want to set HOME, I can just start sudo with the -H option.
I miss you desktop Linux. Some days more than others, and especially today.