Shami's Blog

A few days ago my friend, Bandar, 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

Read More - Fixing Bandar's Xbox 360

Update: This article is no longer valid, you’ll find my updated experience with Zain here

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”.

Read More - My Internet Experience

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

Read More - My Brother On TV

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

Read More - Nostalgia

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.

Read More - VMware Remote Console Firefox Plug-in And Arrow Keys

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

Read More - Lighttpd, Joomla, And Clean URLs

So I went to a community night hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Center here in Amman with my friend Bandar 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.

Read More - Microsoft Community Night

I’ve been busy setting up a PHPlist server for my employer. All tests went ok, but as soon as we sent our first newsletter Yahoo! blocked the server. After looking around for a solution people suggested we sign all outgoing emails with DomainKeys and not hammer Yahoo’s servers with consecutive connection.

Read More - Throttling Outgoing Emails To Certain Domains With Postfix

I’m currently experimenting with PHPlist to use for our corporate newsletters. During the tests I got the following error.

Read More - Fixing MySQL Error 1064 With PHPList When Selecting New Criteria