If you have a lot of accounts and passwords, you can get password-management software that will keep track of them for you. All you have to do is remember one password to view all the others. Some of this software is free, some is not, and you can get it for most operating systems, or even for your smartphone or PDA.

My problem is that I use multiple computers, running both Linux and Windows, and I want to be able to access my passwords from all of them. There are password managers that are “portable”, ie., you can put them on a USB drive and run the software from different computers, but most of these will only run on one operating system.

Password Gorilla is free software that you can use to create a secure password database, on a USB thumb-drive, that you can access from Windows, Mac, or Linux.

I’ve written instructions here.

(The instructions are specifically for Windows and Linux. If you use a Mac, you can probably figure out what you need to do from the Password Gorilla website.)

This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.

In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)

It’s going to be hard to trust the election results when electronic voting systems are so easy to hack.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Postscript, 11/19/2008: In the end, regardless of who won or lost, I’m glad that the outcome wasn’t ambiguous as compared to polling data. If there was any monkey-business going on in either direction, it seems unlikely that it affected the outcome.

I’m spinning off a new blog. For the past month, I’ve been trying to build a working Sun Cluster using VirtualBox on my laptop. If I just lost you, don’t worry about it. However, I know there are other people out there who might be interested in doing the same thing, or something similar, and so I’ve decided to start blogging about this and other technical endeavors at http://spoonfightergeeksout.blogspot.com/. Most of the progress I’ve made has been facilitated by the blog entries of other geeks, and I figure that what I’m learning might be helpful to someone else.

As an added bonus, you won’t have to read about it here.

I just noticed that I haven’t written anything in a month. Pretty much my normal behavior. Naughty Spoonfighter.

If you’re curious, and you’re probably not, I’ve been very focused on a technical project lately. I have been trying to create a working Solaris Cluster* at home, in order to do some personal training in the technology, and to prepare for a cluster build I have to do at work. Initially, I was going to purchase a bunch of old Sun equipment (I did actually buy a SunBlade 1000), but I realized that this was going to be too expensive, and all I’d end up with would be a bunch of old computers that don’t do anything fun and break a lot. (Kind of like me.)

Still with me? If not, skip down to the part where I mention that I’m not going back to law school.

So, instead, I set about trying to create a cluster using virtual machines.** At this point, I have my laptop installed with Ubuntu Linux. It uses Sun’s VirtualBox product to simulate three Solaris systems: one will serve up iSCSI storage for the shared disk, and the other two will be the cluster nodes. Is this interesting to you? If so, you probably have a lousy social life. (Kind of like me.)

In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m not going back to law school. There’s a lot more to it, but basically, one year in law school helped me clarify my goals, and showed me that those goals are better served by building on the IT career I have already developed, rather than starting from scratch in a completely new field.

That said, I am trying to embrace my inner geek. I spend as much time indoors as possible, in order to develop an unhealthy pallor. I am reading fantasy and science fiction. I am playing with cluster, iSCSI, and virtualization technologies in my spare time. And, I have an account on World of Warcraft. It’s probably a good thing that I’m already married.

Anyway, that’s the news from Spoonfighter’s corner of meatspace. Have a good day.

* A cluster consists of two or more computer systems which work together to keep an application running at all times, even if one of the two computers fails.
** A virtual machine is a simulation of a computer system which runs on a real computer system.