Saudi Net Afaq DSL DNS redirects valid URLs to disreputable search sites

Saudi Net Afaq DSL Shamil DNS redirects URLs that cannot be opened to searchportal.information.com, searchnut.com, searchignited.com

This does not just happen for incorrect URLs, but also with valid ones that take too long to respond.

I've also been receiving the errors: "surl: domain name not allowed", and "Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact service provider for more details."

Yet another reason why STC stinks. Unfortunately, their godawful slow DSL connection is the fastest available in KSA. When will STC, Mobily and Zain finally get around to offering reliable and *fast* broadband like the rest of the world?

I've been having the same problem with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 + Safari, Windows XP SP3 + IE6, and Ubuntu with Firefox 3.5.

[Edit, 2 Oct:]  I have observed that any one site only redirects for a short period of time. A site may initially redirect to a search page, but upon trying 10 minutes later it will open correctly. The converse is also true: a site may be opening correctly, and after a few minutes of usage will start redirecting to one of these search sites. This means that potentially any time you sign in with a username and password to a banking website, email host, or other site, the login information being sent may get redirected to these alternative sites.


This also affects my mail reader: POP, SMTP and IMAP connections fail consistently, claiming incorrect usernames/passwords.


This may be unrelated, but my firewall, LittleSnitch, is configured to allow connections to the commonly used URLS for the relevant programs, e.g. Firefox, all URLs, port 80; Mail.app, smtp.googlemail.com, port xxx (whatever it is...). Frequently, however, LittleSnitch will pop up asking for example if Mail.app can connect to "smtp.googlemail.com.afaqe2e.com", or other programs will ask if they can connect to URLs that they are otherwise already allowed to connect to by default, except they append ".afaqe2e.com" to the end of the URL...


I'm, puzzled.


I'd use OpenDNS, but I don't think it works in Saudi Arabia. XX Correction: I just tried the OpenDNS IP Addresses:  208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and then entered a nonsense address, and received an OpenDNS-branded error page, so apparently OpenDNS does indeed work here. I'll try using it for a few days and see if the problem is resolved.


[Edit 2:] I've been experimenting with nonsense URLs. http://w/ http://e http://r/ http://t/ http://y/ all go to the expected OpenDNS "Did you mean...?" page. However, http://g/ http://a/ http://q/ consistently go to one of the below search pages.

Great, great, incredible, amazing, great, really easy, incredible Mac

Browser thumbnails: Safari vs IE8

I am a self-confessed, diehard, long-time *nix freak and for a few years now a healthily cynical Apple fanboy. Under Gnome/KDE I use Firefox, on OSX I use Safari and at work under Windows I use Firefox as much as possible. Some applications at work are IE-only so I continue to use IE8 on a daily basis. Generally I am blindly anti-Redmond, but there is one feature that I feel has been better envisioned in IE8 than in Safari: the IE8 Quick Tabs as compared to Safari 4’s Top Sites. Admittedly, their functionality is quite different, but the visual representation is similar, with the usual eye-candy polish on the Safari side.

Now I will admit that I do not actually use either of these features, but if I did use IE8 as frequently and heavily as I use Safari, then I would find the thumbnails of open tabs much more useful than thumbnails of my favorite sites. My favorite sites already live on my bookmarks bar. They are: Gmail, Google Reader, Transmission Web Interface, Apple.com, Demonoid, and The Pirate Bay; although I usually type them into the address bar anyway despite having them millimeters away on the bookmarks bar. As for my bookmarks menu, I don’t actually use it. In the past I have built up pages of nested bookmark menus, but never really went back to them to find a previously bookmarked site. If the site was a one-off interesting page that I wanted to remember for the future, I would either never visit it again, or I would reach it through Google Search. If the site was really a great favorite, I would remember the address and re-type it in the address bar. Now I have replaced the latter (and some of the former) with Google Reader. The only other type of page that I visit falls into the category of research, for which I have yet to find the ultimate solution. At the moment my system involves PDFing useful pages and saving them locally in a categorized folder hierarchy which I access using Spotlight.

Clearly I have no use for the fancy thumbnail wall of my top half-dozen favorite sites, especially as it takes longer for me to recognize a thumbnail picture of the site than it does for me to read the name on the bookmarks bar. When I have several dozen tabs open, however, I can see how it would be useful to get a scrollable list of tab thumbnails rather than scrolling through the text and favicons on the tabs bar (or even worse, an awful Cover Flow style list).

Redmond: 1, Cupertino: 0

[Grand total: Redmond: 1, Cupertino: 5,134,561]


Edit: But then again when using the IE8 thumbnails, I have noticed that I'm not primarily looking at the thumbnails, but rather at the text caption at the top.

How to send and receive other email accounts using Gmail

Although they aren't on the Top 10 list of Most Trusted Companies, Google's email service is excellent. One thing it allows you to do is to send email using a different email address through your Gmail account. This can be useful for sending email from a work address without having to deal with a substandard web interface, or getting around configuration limitations of you existing email system without changing your address.

Here is how to do it:


Get Gmail:

1. Create a Gmail account.
   
2. Read EULA; print; file...

Sending:

1. Log in; click on Settings and then select the “Accounts” tab
2. Click on “Add another email address you own”
3. In the popup window, enter your name and your work email address.
4. Click on “Specify a different ‘reply-to’ address." (the default seems to be to reply to the Gmail account regardless of which address you sent from)
5. Add your work email address in the reply-to field
6. Open you work email and find the confirmation code; either paste this into the pop-up window, or click the confirmation link.
7. Back on the “Accounts” tab in Gmail, make sure that under “When receiving a message:” you select “Reply from the same address to which the message was sent”.
8. Now when you click “Compose Mail” in Gmail, you should find a drop-down box in the “From” field allowing you to choose either the Gmail address or your work address to send from.

Receiving:
Now when someone receives an email from you sent in this way and hits “reply”, it will reply to your work address. There are two ways to get this reply -- and other messages sent to your work address -- into your Gmail account; one from the Gmail end, and the other from your original email end:

1. Use POP3/IMAP: You can configure Gmail to check your email in much the same way as an offline email program like Thunderbird or Apple Mail does. Simply click on Settings, then the "Accounts" tab, and click on "Add a mail account you own" under "Get mail from other accounts". Then enter your old email address, followed by your POP email settings. It gives you options to leave a copy of messages on the server and some other options.
2. Set up a rule in your old email account to forward all email automatically to the Gmail address. Obviously, the method varies according to provider.

The March of the Hackintosh

I have always been interested in different Operating Systems. I had many different computers growing up, usually hand-me-downs several years behind the current hardware. I enjoyed installing different OSes on them and trying to get them to do things that other people’s new expensive computers could do (playing a video with sound output through the internal speaker as I didn’t have a soundcard comes to mind). I also enjoyed the hand-me-down OSes such as GEM, early versions of RedHat and FreeBSD, and Windows of course.

At the turn of the century I became interested in emulating different architectures on my computer. One hardware/operating-system combination that I was interested in emulating was the Acorn Archimedes RISC OS; another was Apple's OSX.

For a while it was only possible to emulate System 7 up to OS 9 using programs such as Basilisk II. System 7 was even available as a free download from Apple.

Then in 2004 the 'impossible' was accomplished, when Sebastian Biallas released his PowerPC emulator called PearPC that was capable of running OSX Jaguar and Panther. I played with this for a while, but at the end of the day, it was not fast or stable enough to be used seriously.

In 2005 I began to hear about a method of running OSX Tiger natively on a generic Intel processor-based PC. The infamous "Deadmoo" image spread through file-sharing sites, communities such as The OSX86 Project were established and the term “Hackintosh” was coined.

As I did not have a reliable internet connection, I did not manage to get my hands on a copy of this until late 2006 when I found a copy of tiger-x86.tar.bz2 on a password protected Chinese FTP site and convinced my brother-in-law to download it for me. The first time booting into OSX running natively on your bog standard PC is thrilling. Ok so hardware support was terrible and hardly any programs would actually run, but the geek factor was undeniable.

I finally got myself a semi-reliable ADSL connection and tried a few different versions of Tiger, but at that time none of them were really useable for any serious purpose. Then came Leopard. I started with a standard copy of 10.5 which I patched using the Bofors method; then I moved on to Kalyway’s 10.5.2 release, with which I managed to get all my hardware working, including full Core Image and Quartz Extreme support. I ran this installation for more than a year, during which time I lost all interest in Windows or Linux and started saving for a real Mac.

Last year my wife bought me a second hand 17” PowerBook G4. Although we haggled for a lower price, we later found out that we paid about double what it was worth, especially as the battery and DVD drives were both lemons. My Hackintosh is now running iAtkos 10.5.5 upgraded to 10.5.6 but only as a headless file server, while my PowerBook is my main work machine. The only limitation I am finding with it is that I cannot run iMovie, which I am eager to use especially for home videos of my baby daughter.

With my help, my father also set up a Hackintosh, then a few months later bought a 15” PowerBook G4 and a 12” PowerBook G4, both of which turned out to be good reliable machines. He is now pricing up Mac Minis to replace his Hackintosh, and eyeing MacBooks to replace the G4 which he is beginning to find a bit slow. I am happy with my PowerBook, and my wife and my sister have also caught the Apple bug and now have a 15” PowerBook and 13.3” MacBook respectively.

A number of colleagues of mine have also bought MacBooks after being impressed with the ease of use, speed, and looks of my 6 year old PowerBook.

Now I have no patience for people asking for help with their Windows computers, and would not dream of running Windows or Linux again without having a real pressing reason.

None of us would have bought our Macs if it were not for the initial exposure that some of us gained from experimenting with Hackintoshes. I don’t question the illegality of downloading hacked versions of their operating system, nor do I question their right to forbid running of even original copies of Mac OS X on generic hardware; and I fully support their prosecution of people trying to gain financially from this (Pystar – this means you). However, I do believe that they can only gain customers by turning a blind eye to people running Hackintoshes. I feel guilty when I install a hacked copy of OSX on a test machine and it “Talks to Apple”, not because I am running illegal software, but because they don’t shut you down like WGA. I guess having a partial conscience is better than none at all.

I ran my hackintosh exclusively for a few years before buying a real Mac. My next machine will be a Mac, too. The same goes for my family and friends.

Two Finger Scrolling on Old Macs and on Windows

Two finger scrolling has been on my wishlist ever since I tried out a MacBook Pro. I've never been one for mouse gestures or other more complicated non-keyboard input device shortcuts; the three finger and four finger gestures hold no attraction for me, but two fingered scrolling - now THAT is something I would like to have.

There are conflicting reports floating around on the web about whether the two finger sensing is hardware-based or purely software-based, and whether or not it can be enabled on older MacBook Pros.

Then I came across some posts that suggested that all you needed was the Keyboard and Mouse Preference pane from a new MacBook to enable it on slightly older MacBooks.

But to enable it on a G4? Pipe dreams. Or so I thought.

I then found a program called Smart Scroll, which - although it does not support two-finger scrolling - does offer some nice extensions to normal mouse and touchpad functionality, such as Grab Scroll which gives you a hand tool to easily move (and "throw"!) any window's contents. Oh, and it costs money. Bleh.

Then I found the ultimate and unexpected dream: A simple third-party pref-pane that enables two-finger scrolling on old MacBook Pros all the way down to nearly the oldest G4. Mine sits squarely in the middle, so bingo!

iScroll2 is a modified trackpad driver that adds two-finger scrolling capabilities to supported pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks on OS X 10.3 and up.

It is a simple point-and-click install, followed by enabling it on the now updated Keyboard and Mouse preference pane. It enables support for both vertical and horizontal scrolling, reverse scrolling, and circular motion scrolling, as well as advanced configuration of Click, Tap and Two-Finger Click (clicking while two fingers are on the trackpad) functionality.

In hindsight, I don't know how I managed to spend days on end searching for this as it is the first hit on a Google search for "Two finger scrolling". I guess I must have been over-complicating my search terms. All's well that ends well.

Download your copy of the Two Finger Scrolling Driver for older Macs.

Windows users are also in luck - there is a driver on Google Code to enable two-finger scrolling on Synaptics Touchpads

Kill / force quit a program / process in OSX

Sometimes a program or process gets into an unresponsive or other undesirable state and you cannot quit it from the GUI.

What you can do is to force quit, or kill it, from the command line. You can either do this locally or by SSHing in.

First run 'top' and see if you can find the culprit. If the process is consuming too much CPU you can find it using 'top -o cpu'.

Make a note of the PID (process ID), so if the PID is 1292, then you do

kill -9 1292

and it'll be gone.

If you get a no permission error then it could be that the process is owned by root or another user, n which case you can do

sudo kill -9 1292

put in the root password, and its killed.

from: http://www.hutsby.net/2008/07/kill-force-quit-program-process-in-osx.html