It’s been a busy weekend for the home server. After I installed a fourth drive, the motherboard failed to post anymore. The CPU fan would spin, network LEDs would light up, but not a damn thing coming out the video card. Take all the memory out and it’s still dead silent. Fried.

I’m still stumped on what I did to kill it, but life is short and I need to watch the last season of The IT Crowd right now! The board was an old Socket 754 with a single-core Sempron, so Micro Center damn well isn’t stocking any replacements. Fast forward to me burning my cash on a new board, CPU, and memory stick.

Having spent more of this weekend than I’d really like to admit installing the new dual-core mobo and CPU, rewiring all the drives (since I’m now short by one IDE connector), searching for how to get my RAID5 partition to eat up the fourth drive, wasting my time on out-of-date Internet howtos, desperately cursing the man page for not having step-by-step instructions, and finally settling on something that might work (but might also nuke my data if it’s feeling pernicious), it dawns on me I haven’t yet searched Google for “mdadm grow raid5“.

Well. There it is. I quit.

I got caught a while ago sending spam. A veritable flood of Cialis solicitations and Nigerian phone scams bursted from my domain. Thankfully, the registrar I used (GoDaddy) sprang into action and shut down my account. To ensure I would not return to my dastardly ways, they asked me to pay the $80 fee before they would reinstate my account. I declined. Another evil spammer shut out from the web by the Knights of Self-Governance.

Thing is, I wasn’t sending spam. Someone else was. From one of my domains.

As it turns out, the DNS service I was using (FreeDNS) has a very interesting business model. It’s a subscription platform, like many other things on the Internet. But how do you hook people to pay money? Well, you do that by giving away their domains.

The default behavior for FreeDNS is to allow anyone else who uses their system (free or otherwise) to register subdomains of your domain names. That means if you use them to manage DNS for, say, ying.li, I can create a subdomain called 0wned.ying.li. It’s so easy!

To their credit, FreeDNS lets you put your domains into “private” mode, which ostensibly means you have the ability to shut off any subdomains that other people register. To their discredit, Glyph never received an email that I’d registered a subdomain of his. Also, once he did put his own domain into public mode, we could not figure out where the hell to delete my spammer subdomain.

This is what happened to me a long time ago. Because the default behavior of FreeDNS is an open-door policy, like a bakery that uses the honor system, anybody can come take what they want. Glyph had 44 unauthorized subdomains (just off the one domain). When mine got shut down, there were hundreds.

As I post this, 0wned.ying.li is still cached in DNS (somewhere) to point to my server.

Are we having fun yet?

I didn’t think it would be this soon that Google would feature direct-to-cortex integration.

Last week, Karl told me about a site that could show housing prices on an interactive map, with some neat effects (like a heat map of a metro or regional area). But I couldn’t remember the name. Wasn’t it something like “zooloo“?

Nope. But Google still figured it out for me. “Related searches: zillow, home value”

That’s it, Zillow. Sort of like “zooloo”, except not at all.

The only logical conclusion is that, without telling me, Google has signed me up for its beta service that somehow uses WiFi antennas to directly infer search terms from my brain. I wouldn’t put it past them. Smart guys.

I joined Facebook when it was young and relatively immature (remember when it was TheFacebook.com?), so I’ve missed out on riding its usage peak. I just can’t compete with college undergraduates in terms of the number of free hours per week I’m willing to spend clicking through a web site.

But here, as far as I can tell, are a few ground rules for anyone who is just getting started with the Facebook phenomenon:

1. Add as many applications as you possibly can. The more people have to scroll to get to the bottom of your profile, the better. I think there are seven different “Zombie versus Vampire” applications available. Add them all.
2. Invite all of your friends to every app you find. Even if you don’t intend to use it. Because applications are fun. They do stuff! Even if you don’t want it. Like a zombie bite.
3. Post as many photos as you can of yourself drinking. Future employers will appreciate your willingness to share reflections of your social life with your extended network of friends.
4. Post as many photos as you can of other people drinking and “tag” them, so that it forces your pictures onto their profile. It might come in handy if you’re ever competing with them for your dream job.

I got an Aliph Jawbone today and I can’t get enough of the slick product packaging. It’s genius. It’s gorgeous. It makes me want to buy a second one for my other ear.

J.P. pointed out a cool link the other day: a graphic depiction of the potential asteroid impact on Mars. Let’s hope it doesn’t hit the Spirit probe, which has been operational for four years as of today. Awesome stuff.

So here’s my question: If a 90-day rover can survive four years in a giant dust bowl, why is my video card crapping out after six months?

I’ll keep it short, because I know I have nothing truly new to add to the ongoing “Vista sucks” conversation. But there is something about experiencing pain first-hand instead of just reading about it.

My grandmother, as luck would have it, actually did get a new Vista machine around the time of my last post. So this past weekend, during a visit home on the way back from Philadelphia, she asked me to help her “make it work”.

Even though my grandmother has done nothing but play Solitaire and glance at Google Finance since she unpacked the thing, the operating system had managed to render itself un-bootable. We had to nuke the entire disk and start over.

Just to configure her profile — which means adjusting the icon size and spacing, increasing the default application font size, and dropping a bunch of shortcuts onto the desktop — I had to “Confirm” security dialogs over 20 times. Even after a full Windows Update (and the obligatory reboot), it continued to pop up security confirmations at her while she played Hearts.

She’s learning, though. She told me this morning that she figured out how to “make it work”: just confirm every security warning you ever see. Problem solved.

I’ve never been an apologist for Microsoft’s heavy-handed business tactics, but I’ve also always acknowledged the incredible wealth of talent they have at their disposal. I think a lot of their success can be attributed to developing solid products, and that they would’ve still been successful if they hadn’t resorted to anti-competitive tactics.

So I just can’t wrap my head around what’s going on over there lately.

Mini-Microsoft continues to give us glimpses of a management structure gone amok, and Google continues to dance circles around them in terms of web presence and offerings. So I had to laugh at Joel Spolsky’s comments on the impossible-to-open packaging of Office 2007. Seems like they can’t even get plastic boxes right, let alone operating systems:

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

He’s right — I’ve played around with Vista, and it doesn’t take more than ten minutes to realize it’s junk. They haven’t added anything really useful in terms of new features; most of what’s new is just eye candy. They’ve made the security dialogs so ornery and useless that I couldn’t imagine my grandmother being able to use Vista. Performance has dropped, from what I’ve heard, beyond all the extra video power it takes to render Aero.

The only positive comments I’ve heard is that Vista is easier for system administrators. IT shops which deploy thousands of desktops (like universities) are eager to take advantage of new features like Windows Imaging Format. Is that the strategy? Annoy the piss out of your users, but give IT departments an offer they can’t refuse? Doesn’t sound like a winning approach to me.

For now, I’m telling my family to switch. Becca got a MacBook, and she loves it.