{"id":127,"date":"2006-02-07T20:05:14","date_gmt":"2006-02-08T01:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.elharo.com\/blog\/?p=127"},"modified":"2008-05-28T17:55:21","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T22:55:21","slug":"127","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2006\/02\/07\/127\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast User Switching Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I turned on fast user switching in today to try out some new software I didn’t trust with my normal administrator account. This proved surprisingly useful. I love being able to switch to a clean account while keeping other tasks running in the background. It’s also useful for problems like checking out a site with various different configurations of browsers. As a book author, it helps me set up a really clean default environment to take screen shots in. As a developer it enables me to test my software with various preferences and configurations. As a speaker, it will let me set up custom demo environments, and present to audiences without showing my embarassingly messy desktop to the world. I haven’t tried this yet, but it might let me do some simple load testing by hitting a server from multiple accounts at once.
\n
\nWhy didn’t I figure this out sooner? Perhaps because Apple marketed it as helping families with multiple people per computer<\/a> instead of its use for a techie with multiple computers per person. <\/p>\n

Fast user switching is not perfect. I would change a couple of things if I could. First I’d rather not have to type my password every time I switch users. Secondly I wish there were a simpler way to allow account A to access all the files of account B. If there is, I haven’t figured it out yet. I sometimes have to manually move files into the Shared or Public folders to allow different accounts to see them. I’d ratehr be able to be able to say “Give me access to home directory B” from account A, type in B’s user name and password, and then not be bothered about permissions again. But overall fast user switching is still, a huge improvement over constantly logging in and out, in the process shutting down, saving, and relaunching all the various applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I turned on fast user switching in today to try out some new software I didn’t trust with my normal administrator account. This proved surprisingly useful. I love being able to switch to a clean account while keeping other tasks running in the background. It’s also useful for problems like checking out a site with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}