Robin's Core Dump

Technicalities, mostly

Moving the Windows task bar between displays

At work, i have a rather nice 24" Samsung display as my main viewer, to the left of which stands my laptop. Since i do some full screen remote desktop work from time to time, i decided that maybe it's better to have the task bar on the laptop screen even if it's father from my focus and my pointer (see Fitt's law).

There are three ways you could move the task bar to the Other display.

The way that does not work - Right click the task bar and choose Properties. Click and ogle foolishly. While you can choose where on the display the Task bar will reside, there is no way to instruct Windows on which display to put it.

The cumbersome way - The really nonintuitive way would be to right-click the desktop, choose Screen Resolution (no, not Personalize, though you can get to the Screen Resolution display by clicking the Display link on the Personalization page :). Then click the relevant display and tick Make this my main display. Click OK.

The direct interaction way - Right-click your task bar and uncheck Lock the taskbar (it probably is, and should be checked). Drag it to the other display. Right-click it again and Lock the task bar. Nifty, though as a side effect, this will make your display with the task bar your main display. Not that i know what that means, but that's how the cards roll.

More power to the right-click

Well ain't something. In Windows Explorer, hold down the Shift key and right-click a folder. The context menu now gets a few extra options: Open Command Window Here and Copy As Path.

The first one does what one of my favourite XP Power Toys did, which is to open a command prompt at that location. This will probably go joyfully astray if you try opening the command prompt on a network folder (Powershell can do that for you).

The second one is something Really Useful. When i want to send a mail to a colleague about a file on the server, i can copy the full UNC path name to said file. The previous alternative would have been to surf to the containing folder, copy the file name from the address bar, then select the file, press F2 to enter Rename File mode, select ^All of the file name (Windows 7 and Server 2008 will select all but the file extension, which usually is a Good Thing), ^Copy the file name, and paste that into the mail i was sending.

This is what is known as Good Laziness.

Thanks to Petri.

Not my network

I know there's a balance between security and usability and that balance is called Usable Security (or hcisec for the acronym geeks). If done wrong, a product can be usable or secure, if done right, it can be both.

One good way to make a product more secure is to offer the user only secure choices, or at least make the less secure ones hard to choose. A stupid way to execute this guideline is to "dumb down" the product enough so that the user can't go wrong. I found such a lack-of-features today, with Windows 7.

I work as a "sysadmin on wheels", which is to say i travel between customers -- either physically or over the wire -- and take care of their computing infrastructure. I often need to connect my computer to the customers' networks. Windows 7 (and Vista) has realized this with their Network Locations "Work", "Home" and "Public". When Windows connects to a hitherto unknown network, a dialog box pops up, prompting me to set the appropriate Location for that network, with some help text. This is, of course, an improvement from the "one rule set to rule them all" mindset, and a considerable improvement from the old days of XP when Windows came with no firewall at all.

But here i am on a customer network. It is a work network, but it is not my work's network. This means that i need to be able to discover "professional" windows infrastructure services and computers, but it doesn't mean that i trust the network enough that i'd want it to find me. Or put in a more mild scenario, i would not want my customers' network to believe they have an unknown computer on their net. I for one would be freaked out if it did, and in all effect, i am the netadmin of that network, who should get freaked out.

So thus, i am hoping to find an extension to Windows 7's firewall profiles, the Customer location. And it may be that Windows has thought of this already.

Windows has something called "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security" and i know it talks about the Profiles "domain", "private" and "public". According to an article on 4sysops, these do not map 1:1 to the network Locations work, home and public which you can set from the for-mortals interface i mentioned earlier. Whereas the public profile is equivalent to the public location, the private profile maps to the home and work profiles, and the domain profile is "when a domain-joined workstation detects a domain controller". Which is nice. Now the Work location really may mean a work network and Windows will automagically realize whether it's my work network. But shouldn't there be some difference between a customer network and a home network.

I guess i need to think about that.

Now back to work.