This week at Super User, MaxMackie asked “How far will you get with a ‘rm -rf /'” ?  Within minutes of the post, it had not only my attention, but others as well. It had 39 upvotes just eight short hours later, and answers and thoughts poured in.

I’ve often wondered how far the system will actually get if you run rm -rf /. I doubt the OS would be able to erase itself (?)

We’ve all heard the stories – and please, don’t try this at home! rm -rf has caused a LOT of problems with accidental usage in the past. It is a linux/unix command which erases all files recursively, and won’t stop to ask if you’re sure. Adding the extra / has it start at the root directory – meaning you’re erasing the whole system! But if we did run this on the entire system, how far would the trail of destruction go? I took it upon myself to find out. I fired up VirtualBox, and installed a new copy of Fedora 15 (XFCE). Within minutes I had a fresh install all set and ready to destroy.

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With more and more media turning digital, Home Theater PC’s (HTPC’s) are making a larger presence within the homes of PC enthusiasts. Whether your starting from scratch, or upgrading an older pc, this multi-part guide is meant to help you in building your new HTPC.

Determine What You Want:

HTPC’s can take care of ALL you media needs which can even ultimately either replace or add to your current media experiences:

• Dvd/Blu-Ray Player
• Central Audio Stations
  • Whether a PC, iPod, audio receiver, etc, you can replace all of these with a central HTPC (including streaming to those other devices)
• Internet on TV devices
• Internet Streaming Services (Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, etc,.)
• DVR
• Cable receivers
• Photo Viewers/Servers

A person buys a stolen prototype gadget that was found in a bar and takes pictures and video of it.  After publishing them on the Internet their house is raided and their computer equipment is confiscated.

Luckily for them, they erased all of the data regarding the gadget so they’re safe, right?

Right?

Not necessarily.

Today’s Question of the Week appeared on Superuser.com courtesy of Jerry when he asked how detectives in the Casey Anthony trial had recovered keyword searches for evidence that had been manually deleted from a computer.

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Every week, the Super User community nominated and votes on an interesting Question of the Week, which we write about on the blog. One nominee that interested me was:

What makes a laptop overheat?

Is there a correlation between CPU usage and heat? RAM usage? Other things? How can software affect overheating in a laptop?

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What does Superuser.com look like? Beyond the questions, the answers, the votes, the comments, the edits, are there clear patterns of community activity? Do trends emerge? Are social norms evident? Is visualising this sort of information useful? Can visualisation support existing community processes? These are the sorts of questions we pursued with Explore.SU – a visualisation environment developed on the Superuser.com public API. In this blog post, we will take a look at the development of Explore.SU, briefly explore how online communities have been visualised to date and examine the rationale for our design decisions. We also discuss findings from a small study and draw some initial conclusions based on our experiences.

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I’ve read it countless times: flashing your router to DD-WRT to get more control over it and unlock more power. Sounds great, but how often do regular users actually end up doing this? Probably not that often. I’ve always held it off, because the risk of bricking my router never seemed worth the trouble. Besides, my networking skills are mediocre at best, so I never felt the urge to unlock even more settings! However, when I tried to open up Calibre and use its internet sharing feature, it turned out that my generic router was virtually unable to be set up properly. So today, I’m biting the bullet and will actually try to flash my brand new Netgear WNDR3700 router to DD-WRT, because surely if I can do it, anyone can!

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It’s been a while since I wrote about my optical bay HDD caddy experiment, but the results are finally in. I’ve been running my laptop for over a month now with a Kingston V100 SSDnow in the primary storage bay and the original hard drive in a NewmodeUS optical bay caddy, and have been quite pleased with the results. My computer boots up quickly, applications launch instantly, and there’s plenty of space to store big files for when I need them. There are a few downsides though, which I’ll go into more detail about shortly. Is it worth your while to make this upgrade? Read on to find out!

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This Question of the Week raises some interesting security implications. With many high-profile sites compromised recently, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the security of your passwords. Michael McGowan asked:

If a password is compromised, is a “similar” password also compromised?

Suppose a user uses a secure password at site A and a different but similar secure password at site B. Maybe something like mySecure12#PasswordA on site A and mySecure12#PasswordB on site B (feel free to use a different definition of “similarity” if it makes sense). Suppose then that the password for site A is somehow compromised…maybe a malicious employee of site A or a security leak. Does this mean that site B’s password has effectively been compromised as well, or is there no such thing as “password similarity” in this context? Does it make any difference whether the compromise on site A was a plain-text leak or a hashed version?

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If there is one thing that almost anyone will need to do sometime in their life with any operating system is upload a file. Whether it be an funny picture they want to show a friend, or a draft of a report they want to have someone proofread. On Mac OS X, there are two small programs out there that make this task very simple. They are CloudApp and Droplr. Both are menubar apps, and both are for the same thing: uploading files to the web. Like any other piece of software, these programs have their strengths and weaknesses, all (or most) of which I will cover in this post.

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In the series of digging deeper within our files, we’ve had Spotlight and mdfind on Mac OS X. Now we’re back with a Windows counter-part article; where we will outline Windows Search and Search Everything for Windows…

Next in our series will be an article on digging deeper in Linux! 🙂

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