Every Friday here at the SuperUser Blog is WTF Friday and what better way to start this one out on April Fool’s.

Super users love a good practical joke. Ever since BOFH came on the scene there have been bids to out-do each other with practical jokes. A while back we were asked what a few of our favorites are, and here some of them are. Since it’s April Fool’s day we hope you find them useful! Just remember that some of these may cause significant problems for people, so use discretion when tricking your friends and colleagues. We don’t want something like this:

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Now that we’ve done some extensive testing to the Kingston SSD v100 it’s time to give the official review. Let’s start off with what Kingston claims their drives can do (note all specs are according to SSDNow v100 128GB):

• Sequential Read throughput of 250 MB/sec
• Sequential Write throughput of 230 MB/sec
• “Runs silent and cool with no moving mechanical parts”

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In this interview we’ll talk with Bobby. With a flag weight of over 600, he’s one of the main flaggers on our site, but Bobby has a specialty: fighting spammers! In fact, if one of your posts gets flagged by Bobby, chances are your account is on its way to merge with Deposit…

Q: So Bobby, tell us a little about yourself, who are you and what do you do in your daily life?

My name is Robert, I’m living in Vienna, Austria. I’m a learned electro mechanic and somehow I made it into a programming job, and I’ve been working for the last three years with the .NET framework. In my spare time I’m mostly strolling through the internet, trying to code in Java and other languages and playing Minecraft with my brother. I’m also training Ju Jutsu…but I fear that pretty much sums it up. more »

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since way back when it was called Phoenix and the install procedure consisted of “unzip this file somewhere and double click the .exe”. About a year ago, I decided to try using Google Chrome as my default browser for a few weeks, and ended up sticking with it. When Firefox 4.0 RC was released a couple weeks ago, I decided to repeat the experiment to see what changed since 3.6. This time though, I’m changing my mind. These are my reasons why. I can easily imagine someone reading this article and thinking to themselves (or writing in the comments) something like, “These are all trivial! You can fix them with extensions!” They would be half right. Most of these are minor complaints, and this just shows how far web browsers have come. Mozilla’s mission is to make the web better, and they’re doing a fine job. However, not all of these things are fixable with extensions

Sidebar: Firebug and Web Development

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: I spend a lot of time in Firebug and in Chrome’s Developer Tools. I think both equally capable, so which one you use pretty much comes down to which UI you prefer. My personal favorite here is Firebug, which means my Firefox install isn’t going anywhere — In fact, the only reason I didn’t give Firefox 4 a try sooner was because I was waiting for a version of Firebug that worked with it! However, keep in mind that this article is discussing the web browser I use for day-to-day surfing, not development or debugging. (Isn’t it nice that we even have such options these days?)

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A good question has a number of features such as clarity, direction, an overall goal of achieving an objective. “How do I get to there from here?” and “why does doing this break that?” are two simple examples and on Super User we have a great deal of good questions that show peoples desire to journey out into the world of knowledge and find out if someone can show them how to get to their destination.

One problem is that a lot of these questions are open-ended and may not tell us some important piece of information such as what can be used to get to the destination.  A journey by car might be very different to one by foot and any answer has to take that into consideration.

A good question gives those kinds of details but shouldn’t put too many or too few constraints on the situation, asking how to get to point E via points A, B, C, and D using only a car on the third Tuesday of the month while avoiding roadworks is placing too many requirements in the question and any potential people who might answer the question will be put off by the sheer amount of work they have to do in order to fulfil all the requirements.  Doing someone else’s homework for them is not fun.

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Not too recently, I answered two questions about Wi-Fi security. Although both about different subjects concerning Wi-Fi security, I thought it might be nice to sum up some Wi-Fi security techniques/tips, some known by “the general public” (read: non-superusers), some less known.

Is it a good idea to have Wi-Fi turned on all the time? How to see who is using my Wi-Fi?

So, what do I use to secure my network?

That’s an interesting question… It seems there’s no ultimate measure you can take to completely make your Wi-Fi network bullet proof. Like pretty much any other security method, there’s a way so hack and circumvent the measure taken. The ideal scenario seems to be to use different techniques to secure that oh-so-important wireless connection to the outside world.

In this blog post I’ll try to shed some light on which techniques are available, explain a little about how they work and share some tips that have always helped me.

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After testing the SSD, HDD and Hybrid drives together, we felt it was time to test the powers of the SSD a little more.

Overview:

We took two Kingston SSDnow v100 drives in a RAID-0 configuration and compared results of read/write benchmarks and file transfers from one drive to another.

Setup and Procedure:

Computer setup:

A custom built PC with EVGA p55 LE motherboard, with intel core i5 processor running at 2.67 GHz and 6 GB of OZC Ram @ 533MHz.  The RAID was setup using EVGA’s built-in RAID controller on the motherboard.  A fresh install of Windows 7 was installed on the RAID-0 array and fully updated. Software was also installed onto the system including but not limited to:

• Firefox
• Dropbox
• Photoshop Trial
• Office 2010
• Chrome
• IE9

Testing:

The RAID was benchmarked using ATTO’s Disk Benchmark.  Two “Total Length” sizes were selected (256 MB and 2 GB) and each drive underwent two tests each for both file sizes or “Total Length”.  Boot up times were measured using Microsoft’s SDK and using the “xbootmgr” command. Application start times were also measured using PassMark’s Application Startup Timer.

Finally, a 7 GB file was then ‘copied’ or replicated onto the same drive, thus employing simultaneous reads and writes.  Times were ‘rudimentary’ calculated using an iPod stopwatch.

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I recently posed the question:

Should I compress and then encrypt, or vice-versa?

to the Super User community. Well, this seemingly simple question sparked quite a discussion, so I have collated all the comments and answers and come up with what I hope is a definitive answer, along with the why and wherefore of it all.

In order to not only answer this question, but also to understand the answer, we first need to know how both compression and encryption work.

Let’s start with compression.

We’ve all come across compression in some form or other, but actually compression and how does it work?

Well, the actual meaning of compression in the English language is:

… the result of the subjection of a material to compressive stress, which results in reduction of volume as compared to an uncompressed but otherwise identical state.

In other words, squashing something to make it smaller. And this can be applied to data as well as physical objects. No, data compression doesn’t mean physically pushing the magnetic particles in your hard drive closer together (though that would be a neat trick), but to change the data so it takes up less space but can still be interpreted in the same way.

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Meet Matt Jenkins, a member for 2 weeks and already topped 2k rep!

Because we believe this is so awesome, we decided to have an interview with Matt to figure out where he’s been all that time and what his secret to getting so much rep is.

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This weeks question of the week is another meta one, this time from Jeff Atwood!

The Super User Blog – now officially blessed!

Great job on the blog! After a call today with Ivo, we decided that the Super User Blog is now sufficiently awesome to be highlighted in the footer! You’ll note that the blog link in the Super User footer now points to

http://blog.superuser.com/

And it will correctly update to flag [new] posts (or it should, anyway).

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