Beautify gitk font on Debian/Ubuntu

Install tk8.5, if not yet installed:

# apt-get install tk8.5
# update-alternatives --config wish

There are 3 alternatives which provide `wish'.

  Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
          1    /usr/bin/wish8.4
*+        2    /usr/bin/wish-default
          3    /usr/bin/wish8.5

Type in the number that corresponds to tk8.5 (in my case was 3) then hit enter.
Change fonts in ~/.gitk to DejaVu Sans Mono.

set mainfont {{DejaVu Sans Mono} 9}
set textfont {{DejaVu Sans Mono} 9}
set uifont {{DejaVu Sans Mono} 9 bold}

How to replace default fonts in MIUI rom

MIUI (1.7.22) uses Arial as the default font.  If you hate it as I do, here is how to change it.

I assume you have ‘adb’ working. We are going to replace only 2 fonts – Arial.ttf and Arial-Bold.ttf.

First, let’s back up the old fonts just in case thing didn’t go well as we want to. (I learned this the hard way, and keen to avoid it at all cost)

$ adb pull /system/fonts/Arial.ttf
$ adb pull /system/fonts/Arial-Bold.ttf

You should have a copy of the above 2 fonts on your local computer. Next is to connect to your phone and replace those fonts with DroidSans.ttf and DroidSans-Bold.ttf respectively.

$ adb shell
# cd /system/fonts
# cp DroidSans.ttf Arial.ttf
# cp DroidSans-Bold.ttf Arial-Bold.ttf

Restart your phone. Voila, your text doesn’t look as ugly as before; well at least that’s what I think.

[FIXED] bind9 is running bind9 status reports failed!

bind9 runs in a chroot environment on lenny. The service can be started as usual:


# /etc/init.d/bind9 start
Starting domain name service...: bind9.

Let’s check bind9 status:

# /etc/init.d/bind9 status
bind9 is not running failed!

Well, the first thing I did was to check the log file, in which I found no error related to named. So I tried another way to check the status:

# rndc status
version: 9.6-ESV-R3
CPUs found: 1
worker threads: 1
number of zones: 17
debug level: 0
xfers running: 0
xfers deferred: 0
soa queries in progress: 0
query logging is OFF
recursive clients: 0/0/1000
tcp clients: 0/100
server is up and running

I was convinced that dns service was running. So what went wrong? It must be something in the /etc/init.d/bind9 script that incorrectly reports bind9 status. Opened up this file, I found:

...
PIDFILE=/var/run/bind/run/named.pid
...

Ah ha, the default location of named.pid is in /var/run/bind/run. In my case, named.pid is located in /var/chroot/var/run/bind/run/named.pid. Therefore in order to fix this, we just need to point PIDFILE to the correct file.

PIDFILE=/var/chroot/var/run/bind/run/named.pid

Save bind9 script, and check bind9 status again:

# /etc/init.d/bind9 status
bind9 is running.

What the heck: three.net.au redirecting to www.policywording.com.au

3 is my mobile carrier. It offers an online service which allows its customers to check the current usage from their phones by accessing this URL: three.net.au/my3/gethome.do.

Usually it works quite well, but not today (and probably some more days to come), it gave me a HTTP ERROR 404.  I thought I should just visit http://three.net.au and find out w-t-h is wrong. Unexpectedly it took me to another site — “callenden group policy wording”. It’s very weird so with some spare time, I decided to do a little investigation.

First let’s check who owns three.net.au:


$ whois three.net.au
Domain Name: three.net.au
Last Modified: 30-Sep-2010 11:52:55 UTC
Registrar ID: Melbourne IT
Registrar Name: Melbourne IT
Status: ok

Registrant: Three Management Pty Ltd
Registrant ID: ABN 84096981529
Eligibility Type: Registered Business

Registrant Contact ID: MIT508840C
Registrant Contact Name: Peter Tay
Registrant Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

Tech Contact ID: MIT966930C
Tech Contact Name: Ben Doyle
Tech Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

Name Server: edns.wyith.net
Name Server: ns3.wyith.net
Name Server: ns4.wyith.net

Now let’s find out the IP address of three.net.au:

$ dig three.net.au
; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> three.net.au
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17680
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;three.net.au. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
three.net.au. 5393 IN A 202.139.248.52

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
three.net.au. 5393 IN NS ns4.wyith.net.
three.net.au. 5393 IN NS edns.wyith.net.
three.net.au. 5393 IN NS ns3.wyith.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns3.wyith.net. 84592 IN A 202.181.231.99
ns4.wyith.net. 84592 IN A 202.181.231.100
edns.wyith.net. 84592 IN A 202.181.240.44

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.132#53(192.168.1.132)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec 10 00:14:48 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 158

According to the query result, three.net.au points to this IP address: 202.139.248.52.
192.168.1.132 is my own DNS server, therefore it may have cached the results. Let’s try to dig against the domain’s DNS servers instead.


$ dig @202.181.231.99 three.net.au

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> @202.181.231.99 three.net.au
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 7925
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;three.net.au. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
three.net.au. 7200 IN A 202.139.248.52

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
three.net.au. 7200 IN NS ns3.wyith.net.
three.net.au. 7200 IN NS edns.wyith.net.
three.net.au. 7200 IN NS ns4.wyith.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
edns.wyith.net. 86400 IN A 202.181.240.44
ns3.wyith.net. 86400 IN A 202.181.231.99
ns4.wyith.net. 86400 IN A 202.181.231.100

;; Query time: 211 msec
;; SERVER: 202.181.231.99#53(202.181.231.99)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec 10 00:19:17 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 158

We still get the same result. I did also dig against 202.181.231.99 and 202.181.231.100 which yield the same results.

Now let’s do a reverse lookup of 202.139.248.52.

$ dig -x 202.139.248.52

; <<>> DiG 9.7.1-P2 <<>> -x 202.139.248.52
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54308
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;52.248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR

;; ANSWER SECTION:
52.248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. 116 IN PTR http://www.policywording.com.au.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. 116 IN NS bne001n.server-dns.com.
248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. 116 IN NS wic001n.server-dns.com.au.
248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. 116 IN NS sjc001n.server-dns-us.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
bne001n.server-dns.com. 116 IN A 203.147.241.3
sjc001n.server-dns-us.com. 116 IN A 203.27.226.35
wic001n.server-dns.com.au. 116 IN A 203.147.142.1

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.132#53(192.168.1.132)
;; WHEN: Fri Dec 10 00:26:17 2010
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 236

52.248.139.202.in-addr.arpa. 116 IN PTR http://www.policywording.com.au.

This explains why visiting three.net.au shows you the webpage of http://www.policywording.com.au.

My bet is that someone who looks after the DNS of three.net.au domain must have entered the wrong IP address for three.net.au. If I have a bit of free time, I’ll give ‘3’ customer service a call and get them fix this annoying error.