If you haven’t reinstalled Ubuntu in a while, the /boot partition will eventually fill up with all the updated kernels, and you’ll get an error when trying update.

At first I used to uninstall the old kernels manually but being lazy I think it’s too much work. When you get the error with update-manager or Synaptic try this:

sudo aptitude search linux -w 160 | egrep '(image|headers|restricted)' | egrep '^i' | grep -v 'KERNEL_VERSION' | grep -v -P '[^\d]-generic' | grep -v linux-restricted-modules-common | sed 's/i A/i  /' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo aptitude remove

Replace “KERNEL_VERSION” with your currently running kernel.

This might break your grub configuration but update-manager will fix that for you so no need to worry. Just make sure you run this BEFORE update-manager does the update.

To be honest I didn’t try this without “grep -v ‘KERNEL_VERSION’” so I’m not sure if removing it would break something. Just leave it there to be safe.

Where I live we have no proper DSL (512Kbps max), GSM signals are weak. Sometimes I have to stick my head out of the window just to be able to make a call. Even when I got my Wimax account the indoor CPE kept disconnecting every few minutes. I finally managed to get my hands on an Outdoor CPE which made things much better. Typical for someone living at the edge of the world (West Amman).

The Motorola CPEs act as network gateways, they connect to the Wimax network and do NATing for you. That’s nice for a home network, less stuff to configure and less clutter.

The indoor CPE worked well when it had coverage, but when I switched to the CPEo 400 I started running into all sorts of problems; DHCP and DNS stopped working, Connection drops, signal losses, and CPE restarts for no apparent reason.

Calling customer care for a week didn’t help, as you know it’s useless if your problem is a bit different. Oh believe me, Orange’s customer care is much worse, at least with Zain they tell you if they’re experiencing technical issues, with Orange it’s always your indoor wiring.

Turns out there are some bugs in the OS running on the CPE, I’m assuming it’s some sort of Linux distribution gone horribly wrong (Software version 02.01.90-02/11/2009). If you turn on UPnP all Hell breaks loose. I thought I should share this because of the lack of documentation and support for this particular unit.

You have 2 solutions, choose whichever fits your technical skills and/or your time.

Solution 1 (simple): This was the first one I went with, just connect the CPE to the WAN port of your aDSL router. Configure a static IP address and DNS on the router so it won’t use the CPE and use that IP as the DMZ. This will have the CPE forward all traffic to the router and have the router handle all the UPnP issues. This, however, you’d end up with double NATing, something not everybody likes.

Solution 2 (A bit technical): Install dd-wrt on your aDSL router and have it take of DHCP and DNS, then configure the default gateway as your CPE. You won’t have UPnP here but you can set up port forwarding on the CPE which should work fine.

A few days ago my friend, Bander, was disappointed because his Xbox 360 was freezing up. After a few Google searches we realized that this is the prequel to the famous RRoD (Red Ring of Death).

Since we didn’t want to see an RRoD on Bander’s precious Xbox, we decided to take it apart and fix the heat sink. Midway we decided to document the endeavor. Here you go

And the result, you ask? Drum rolls please.

badabadabadabadabadabish

Congrats man, hope you spend many hours enjoying it.

I finally got fed up with my Orange DSL line back in April. It’s 2009 and they still can’t offer me anything faster than 512Kbps which was very irritating. I wish I could say the service was stable. Sadly it was expensive, disconnected on regular basis, customer care loved telling me the problem was due to internal wiring, and had a 3GB download limit. I could have upgraded to the new DSL in one bill plan but that incurred a 23JD switch fee and a 1 year commitment, which I wasn’t ready to commit to. That being said, the download quota for the 512Kbps account was 7GB, which isn’t much better. What annoyed me the most was the fact the bill was different every month. All of that was very far from their ads saying “Internet = Life” and the ads with a big “8″, meaning 8Mpbs. It felt like Orange was taunting me, saying “We have high speed Internet, but not for the likes of you”.

I’m not a big fan of Wimax, actually I’m not really a fan of wireless; My PC and Xbox are both connected “wirefully” to my router. The wireless network I have at home is for the benefit of my father. For months I held on switching to Wimax in the hope for the Exchange my land line was connected to to be updated or fixed or whatever, but to no avail.

Anyways, I had heard Zain will be offering their own Wimax service. Being a fan of their GSM service and their customer support I thought I should wait for them. The minute a sales representative called me and said I could visit and get the device I went to their HQ and got a 2.4Mbps account.

I had a few issues with coverage at first, but after I saw how the Zain people dealt with the issue I loved the service even more. I’ve been loving the service ever since. Fast, stable, almost no issues after the initial coverage problem, everything consistent during the past 6 months. Now that I’m re-reading this I have to admit I had an issue with one of the employees I dealt with. She was very rude and disrespectful. She’s the exception in this case. Also, after reporting her to her superior I was switched to a different employee and had smooth sailing afterwards.

Today when I got home from work my father told me browsing was excruciatingly slow. After doing the usual troubleshooting steps I called customer care. After giving them my user information they told me that I had exceeded my download quota and if I wanted to get extra download I needed to send an SMS which would restore my speed in about 15 minutes. Fair enough, even though I think 10GB is a low limit for a 2.4Mbps connection it’s still much better than Orange’s 3, or 7 if you choose the go to the new plans. I was impressed to hear it took 15 minutes to restore the speed, because with Orange you have to wait about 24 hours.

During my phone conversation with tech support I was browsing and I got this:

Isn’t this just brilliant? I loved the fact they tell you about the speed reduction so you won’t have to call tech support. My father told me he had seen that page earlier today and forgot about it.

So I decided to buy the extra GB, thinking that in 15 minutes I’d have to restart my CPE. 30 seconds later I got a confirmation message that 1GB was added to my account. A few seconds later browsing felt faster. After checking I was surprised to find out my account has been restored to it’s original speed and I didn’t need to do anything from here. Now this is what I call good service.

Don’t get me wrong, Zain isn’t perfect, nobody is. Zain, If you are reading this please reconsider you download quota. In this day and age digitally distributed media is the way to go. Either increase the quota or at least allow for un-metered download during the night or something. Keep up the great work and hope you can provide us with something even better soon.

My brother, Ali, was on TV earlier today. MBC is one of the most popular TV channels in the Arab world.

Good luck man, keep up the good work.

Yesterday was one of my best friends’ wedding day. I wish you and Farah the best of luck and all the prosperity life can offer. Congratulations.

I saw the trailer for Dirt2 today

It reminded me of an old rally game I had on the SNES “Super Off Road Baja”




The resemblance is striking, isn’t it?

VMware remote console was working properly for me when I was using Ubuntu Hardy. After upgrading to Jaunty the arrow keys stopped working inside the remote console. Seems some people face this problem even under windows.

A search got me to this:

echo xkeymap.nokeycodeMap="TRUE" > ~/.vmware/config

Just close any open remote consoles and open up again and you’re in business.

So I’m working on a new web server but I don’t want to use Apache since it’s a virtual machine. Had some trouble with the rewirte rules but I think I got them

From this forum post

$HTTP["url"] !~ "\.(gif|png|css|jpg|jpeg|js)$" {
   server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"
}

But I thought of a different approach and it seems to work so far, and maybe causes less error messages in the logs:

url.rewrite-once = ("^/(.*\.html)$" => "/index.php?page=$1", "^/(.*\.html\?.*)" => "/index.php?page=$1", "^/(.*/\?.*)" => "/index.php?page=$1")

Have a good one

So I went to a community night hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Center here in Amman with my friend Bander which he told me was interesting. Even though I knew I was going to be the only non-Microsoft guy there I thought I should check it out.

The session was about using Silverlight with Sharepoint. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with Silverlight’s capabilities. I only thought it was a Flash competitor, but it turned out to be more than that.

At the end of the session the host had a Sharepoint 2007 best practices book to give away. The organizers decided to ask a question and give the book to the person who answers it.

The funny thing was that I was the only person who knew the answer, and I was given the book. That’s when Bander jumped saying “Don’t give him the book! Don’t give him the book! He’s a Linux guy, 2 weeks ago he didn’t even know what Sharepoint is”

Anyways, fun night, and I’d like to play with Sharepoint and Silverlight and see what they’re capable of.