Gareth Jones

The one thing that really frustrates me about most online tools is that I can’t use them for work - confidentiality and other boring reasons stand in the way of me using twitter to talk about confidential IBM things, Remember The Milk for managing TODO lists (I do anyway but keep any confidential stuff elsewhere), Google Reader for reading internal blogs etc etc. This means we end up creating copies of these tools internally, e.g. BlueTwit (like twitter), Beehive (like Facebook et al), Dogear (like del.icio.us), Spectacular! (like Google Reader)… the list goes on.

Now I understand we need these tools so we can keep certain information out of the public space but it’s frustrating that I have to use two different tools for the same job. A suggestion - why don’t we write the backend stuff to store information privately and a load of Greasemonkey scripts for each of the different apps to integrate both into the same user interface? Just a thought.

Having said all that, maybe it’s a good thing - maybe it keeps me in the right mindset for not disclosing things accidentally. When I’m using an internal tool I know what I can and should say and vice-versa for the external tools.

Since the big password changeover of 2008 I’ve noticed a couple of minor problems:

1. My passwords are completely unmemorable and stored in a specific location. This makes it difficult to use one of my accounts on another machine (e.g. phone, Wii, internet cafe) without planning in advance. It also means I have to backup the store somewhere (and preferably a couple of places).
2. To access my passwords on my machine I have to have a password to login to the operating system and then another to unlock the password store. These will have to be memorable so I don’t get locked out and hence will most likely be the same as my brain can’t cope with much. Either that or I write them down somewhere.

One option to solve this would be to use an online password store (a quick search seems to reveal quite a few). Firstly, I can’t use these for work and secondly how can I trust them myself? Thoughts? Suggestions? How does everyone else solve this problem? Or is it just me worrying too much…