Tag Archives: users

Don’t Assume All Web Users Have a Fiber-like Connection

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I have pointed out for more than a decade how poorly many web pages are coded. They often assume a very low latency connection and without it the user experience is poor.

Most of the web really sucks if you have a slow connection

The flaw in the “page weight doesn’t matter because average speed is fast” is that if you average the connection of someone in my apartment building (which is wired for 1Gb internet) and someone on 56k dialup, you get an average speed of 500 Mb/s. That doesn’t mean the person on dialup is actually going to be able to load a 5MB website.

This is so true. While living in Asia I had a perfectly good connection to watch high resolution video but just the latency would cause many websites to be unusable (or so frustrating you wouldn’t want to use it). The huge number of files that must be downloaded as well as the large size of that content is something that most sites don’t care about. I can only assume they just test the pages on their fiber connection and if it works they are ok. This is a very bad idea for nearly every website.

When I was at Google, someone told me a story about a time that “they” completed a big optimization push only to find that measured page load times increased. When they dug into the data, they found that the reason load times had increased was that they got a lot more traffic from Africa after doing the optimizations. The team’s product went from being unusable for people with slow connections to usable, which caused so many users with slow connections to start using the product that load times actually increased.

This illustrates some additional interesting tidbits: learning from data requires thought, potential customers are avoiding you for reasons you are likely unaware of. Learn to get a deep understanding of your customers and potential customers focus on the customer’s “Jobs to be Done.” Also learn to be thoughtful about the use of data: Understanding Data, Simpson’s Paradox, Managing to Test Result Instead of Customer Value, All Data is Wrong, Some is Useful, Data is only a Proxy – it isn’t reality.

The quoted post is good. But it doesn’t display a date 🙁 This is a very bad oversight for such an article (where the date of the article can greatly impact what you take from of it). By looking on the RSS feed I was able to see it was published in 2017.

Related: Functional Websites are Normally Far Superior to Apps – The Edge-case Excuse for Poor Software Coding Practices – Delighting Customers – Focus on End Users – Use Urls: Don’t Use Click x, Then Click y, Then Click z Instructions

Locking and Unlocking a User in Ubuntu

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To lock a user in Ubuntu sudo usermod –expiredate 1 [username] Substitute the user’s username where username is shown below.

[code]sudo usermod –expiredate 1 username[/code]

This also can be shortened to

[code]sudo usermod -e 1 username[/code]

To unlock a user

[code]sudo usermod -e -1 username[/code]

This will disable the user both from accessing via password and from accessing via a private key.

You can also expire a user at a future date using

[code]sudo usermod -e YYYY-MM-DD username[/code]

To expire a password and force a user to enter a new password

[code]sudo passwd -e YYYY-MM-DD username[/code]

Related: Managing Users in Ubuntu – Reset Root Password on MySQL Database – Don’t Copy-Paste Directly from Website to Terminal

Chrome Remote Desktop

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I am more often frustrated by Google the last few years that pleased with them. But they do still provide some pretty awesome tools. For example, Chrome Remote Desktop lets you access a computer over the internet (and lets you to allow another user to access your computer securely over the internet).

Chrome Remote Desktop allows users to remotely access another computer through Chrome browser or a Chromebook. Computers can be made available on an short-term basis for scenarios such as ad hoc remote support, or on a more long-term basis for remote access to your applications and files.

screen shot of chrome remote desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop is fully cross-platform. Provide remote assistance to Windows, Mac and Linux users, or access your Windows (XP and above) and Mac (OS X 10.6 and above) desktops at any time, all from the Chrome browser on virtually any device, including Chromebooks (including Android phones and iPhones). The iPhone app is new.

Some users worry about installing such an app given all the spying and hacking scandals. That is not a completely crazy worry. Google, and others, have been taking advantage of weak user control (and even bugs and work arounds to avoid stated user preferences) to track users and use that information to make money selling ads. With many cool and useful tools there are risk of them being misused. And practices of governments and huge corporations have been so egregious to give a sensible person pause. Still in the right situations this is a pretty cool looking tool (similar things exist but the combination of price [this being free] and simplicity make this interesting).

Related: Chrome Remote Desktop support forum – Using scp (secure copy) to Copy Files Between Computers – Using Rsync to copy Files Between Servers and Computers – Linux/Ubuntu File and Directory Permissions – Governments Shouldn’t Prevent Citizens from Having Secure Software Solutions

Managing Users in Ubuntu

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add a user: sudo adduser [newuser]
sudo adduser john
then give password, and setup home folder,when prompted

edit the list of super users
visudo

list users
cat /etc/passwd

change password of a user – sudo passwd [username]
sudo passwd john
to change your password you can just use sudo passwd.

delete user

sudo deluser username

This will not delete the home folder (and subfolder) those must be dealt with separately. A new user created with the old user name would have access to those files.

temporarily lock a user account – Simply locking a user account will not prevent a user from logging into your server remotely if they have previously set up RSA public key authentication.

sudo passwd -l username

To unlock the account

sudo passwd -u username

Groups

Groups are used in to control permissions (see file permissions)
add user to a group
usermod -G [group-name] [username]
usermod -G basketball john
using the -G switch ads the group as a supplemental group. Using -g would make the group that users primary group.

see what groups a user is in
id john

add a new group: groupadd [new_group_name]
groupadd ruby_developers