Friday, February 29, 2008

Internet Is Back

It's good to have the Internet connection back after one full day of disruption because of the broken under sea cable that affects all Speedy users. It's reported that the failure has been detected since last week (i experienced this, since my downloads often returned an error until i resumed it again), but it went down yesterday.

I missed lots of email that i had to replied yesterday and i couldn't do anything besides local work. Well, it's good to know it has came back alive (although i'm not sure it's 100% recovered).

Thursday, February 28, 2008

PR Goes Back to 6?

When i browsed my own blog, i noticed that my Google Page Rank extension showed 6 on the status bar, meaning that my page rank has increased and return to the original value (it was originally 6 before Google changed his algorithm and dropped my page rank to 5). Some blogger was quite lucky to get their page rank back in just a few days, but it took me more than a month to get it back to 6.

I'm not really sure if it's 6 or just a cache of the page rank, so if you have page rank extension, can you confirm it by giving comments on my blog. Curious, that's all...

Thanks big grin

Migration On Unique Day

In the next one hour (relative to the time i'm writing this post), we will come to a day that only existed on leap year. It's 29 of February 2008. It's a year when there's an addition of one day to keep the calendar year synchronised with the astronomical or seasonal year.

In this date, i'm going to migrate the Indonesian Linux Forum to the old domain, http://forum.linux.or.id and we're leaving the beta version of the usage of phpBB3 engine. It has been tested for several month and no major problem occurred (most of the problem are because the difference between phpBB2 and phpBB3 and i don't have time to study all of them).

Let's hope the migration works perfectly and no big problem arise in the next few hours big grin

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Laptop Comparison

Jessica Hupp has written an article about Laptop comparison. It's not an ordinary comparison, but only limited to top 5 sub US$300 laptops. The participants are Classmate PC, OLPC XO, Elonex ONE, Zonbu, and of course Asus EE. The results can be seen on the page

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Kernel 2.6.24.3 Released

A new stable kernel has been released by the -Stable team. This version has quite a lot of patches to fix several problem that need urgent attention. See the Changelog for more detailed changes. Along with this update, legacy kernel version also gets an update 2.6.22.19 and 2.6.23.17. Unfortunately, this also means that support for old kernel will also be dropped as the 2.6.25 is getting near to be released.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Happy Desktop

Below is Keith Packard's wishlist for the requirement of Happy Desktop for Linux users (this is only X related, not the complete wishlist):
  • Fully Composited Desktop
  • No Tearing
  • Integrated Video, 3D, 2D, APIs
  • Flicker-free Boot
  • Fast User Switching
  • Hot-plug Everywhere
  • Lower Power
  • Faster. Everywhere.
  • Reducing Root Code
Some of them are on progress (some are finished), and the rest is still far to come, but yes, we are going to reach that milestone someday big grin

Advertising Rates

Last year (or probably two years ago), i got an advertisement proposal from a person who was willing to pay US$ 50 just to put two text-based on my blog (i wonder why would they were willing to pay that much, but i accepted it anyway since i have nothing to lose).

Today, i got another one (from different people), but this time, they want a banner (they provide three kind of banner) or text-based advertisement and they asked me how am i going to charge for it. Honestly, i'm confused with it. I never charged anything for my blog's advertisements, as i'm doing it not for commercial purpose. Any ideas how am i going to charge for this advertisements? confused

Any comments is welcomed ....

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Apple Reseller in Jogja

Good news for Apple mania, there will be an official Apple reseller in Jogja. It will be located in Ambarukmo Plaza, besides theater 21, in the third floor. I just came back from there and i was quite surprised when i saw the board. I don't know when will they launched, but it's a big news for Apple community in Jogja, as i saw that there are a lot of people who uses Mac.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Knight Rider 2008


I just finished watching Knight Rider 2008 that are already on air on some countries, but not in Indonesia yet. Even so, i'm quite luck to find the downloadable files and watched them. It's so COOL!!

The new KITT car is based on 2008 Ford Mustang GT500KR and it has all the previous KITT technologies, plus some new cool one, like this one (Taken from Wikipedia):
  • 550 horsepower solar hybrid engine
  • Sports-tuned suspension
  • Xenon headlamps with infrared night-vision
  • Metallic paint with nanotech enhanced camouflage including morphing License Plate.
  • Military satellite access
  • FBI database access
  • Self-regeneration and damage repair
  • High-speed Internet
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Voice-activated GPS
  • Apple Wireless Keyboard in the glove box under an accessory drawer
  • Biometric Interface to access security features.
  • Wireless headset to communicate with passengers within a limited distance.
  • Biomedical Scanner.
  • More detailed feature can be seen here along with the comparison between the second and third generation of KITT
If you see the self-regeneration and also the camouflage effects, you will be quite stunned by it. It's very smooth and incredible (just like a chameleon changing its skin color)

One thing that amazes me (it's only taken from the plot of the film, not yet in reality)
Although largely solar powered, KITT does use gasoline; with 91% of the energy being recycled, he averages 167 miles per gallon.
If all cars are like this, we will require less dependency on gasoline and oil big grin

Friday, February 22, 2008

PHP Shell

I must say i'm impressed on this small utility (PHP Shell). It's a PHP scripts, but it a tool you can use to execute arbitrary shell-commands or browse the filesystem on your remote webserver. This replaces, to a degree, a normal telnet connection, and to a lesser degree a SSH connection.

It will shows a forms that can be used to login and execute several commands in your servers via your web server web interface.

Installation is very simple. All you need is unpack the package and place it on a directory where you can access it. Next thing is generate a randomize password using the password generator provided and put it on the configuration file and you are set to go.

It has some limitations though, for example not working when Safe Mode is ON, can't be used to run an application and it can't receive user input after it has been launched. So basically, you can do all administration stuff, but you can't run an application with this utility. Nevertheless, it's still a simple and useful scripts. Great job Martin big grin

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Wrong Translations

I visited Indonesian version of Singapore National Healthcare's website and when i reached the video download page, i noticed several wrong translations. Here they are:
- Singapore - Tempat Tujuan Baji Pelayanan Kesehatan Kelas Dunia --> it should be "bagi"
- Jangka Waktu Penggunaan Situs --> it refers to GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS ON THE USE OF THE SINGAPORE TOURISM BOARD'S ("STB") WEBSITES

One more thing that makes me laugh is this one:
Tampilan lebih baik jika menggunakan Internet Explore 5.0 atau Netscape Navigator 6.0 & keatas, dibawah resolusi 800 x 600
Who still uses resolutions under 800x600?

Document Freedom Day

Next month is declared as Document Freedom Day. What is that? Here's what i got from their official site:
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is the global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.
They are holding an event that seek to have local teams from all over the world organise events on the last Wednesday in March. The first 100 teams that sign up will get "DFD Starter Pack" containing a flag, t-shirt, leaflets and stickers.

Few years ago, i got a t-shirt from RedHat Magazine which has an ODF logo in front and back, but i guess this one is as cool as the previous one. It will have an ODF logo on it (as usual) and some text on it. You can see the DFD Starter Pack on their page

Any Indonesian volunteers?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

IT Girls Web Comics

My friend David Sentanu has just started to run his weekly Web Comics. It's called I.T. Girls Web Comic and it's hosted in Blogger (it's in Indonesian). He has a good sense of humor and also arts. It seems that it deserves to be added on my Feed list. Unfortunately, it's weekly, not daily like Dilbert. Well, it's a good start for him big grin

Congratulations David and keep blogging and drawing daydreaming

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Two Big Events In China in 2008

This year, China is planning to held two big (unrelated) events. One of them is the 2008 Olympics game. Some people predicts that this will be one of the biggest Olympics game that ever held, but that must wait until the event is over.

Regarding to this event, i read that the tickets given to other countries only 25% from total tickets sold in this year's Olympics. Indonesia is only given 1898 tickets for all games and most of them are for badminton, since the distribution is based on how many athletes sent on the sport category. Regarding this policy, it's not strange, since China's population is over 1 billion people, so 75% of the tickets were prioritized for their local people first.

The second event that are planned to be held on China is OOo Conference 2008. Right now, China is competing with other countries (Amsterdam, Bratislava, Budapest, and Dundalk) to held the event. You can see the proposal on OOo's marketing project (it's very detailed and interesting). Usually, OOo Conference always held in Europe, but this time, Redflag 2000 dare to make a proposal to held the first OOo conference outside Europe. I wish for their success, since it's a good opportunity to show the world that Asian countries can contribute to the Open Source projects as well as western countries big grin

Monday, February 18, 2008

How to Tie A Tie

I found this nice article from LifeHacker. It's a good reference if you need to know how to tie a tie. It has a video or images demonstrating how to get the tie works on your suite. It also gives a tip to pick a tie to match your style.

Btw, this article was posted on Kinowear's blog where it talks about artist fashion and styles.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Wedding Party @ JEC

I must say that i'm impressed by the wedding party that was held today on JEC (Jogja Expo Center). The couples were TT and Yenni. TT's father is Mr. Fanthoni, a popular MC on many wedding party. In total, he invited almost 4000 people (yes, he is very famous) and people who came at this party might be more than doubles of the invitation. He prepared about 100 food stations to serve their foods and drinks to their guests until 10 PM and there's been a rule that the stations must not stop serving until time is up (well, some of them couldn't accomplish this one, since it's very hard to re-stock the materials when you are busy doing things and people keep coming and you never know when will they stop).

I met a lot of friends there and it's nice to see them on the party. It's more like a big reunion since i met some friends whom i didn't met for a couple of years and we just met back then big grin. I also received a good news that one of my classmates back in elementary school will get married next June. Congratulations applause

Mid Test Finished

Today i have finished my mid test (finally) after two days of mid test. I would say this time it's a good one and i hope the grade will be as good as i expected. Hey, the work is not over yet, as i have my final test on April and also a thesis proposal that should be made ASAP. Not forgetting my daily work at campus. Oh my.... time out

I think i will enjoy today for refreshing before i prepare material for tomorrow's class

Saturday, February 16, 2008

2.6.25-RC2

Linus said 2.6.25 will not be as hard as 2.6.24, as he already pushed second RC for the next 2.6.25 release. It's stabilizing phase right now and most of the broken/unstable code has been fixed by the developers and it will be several RCs before the final version shipped (around April is the most suitable schedule for 2.6.25). The full Changelog will list all of the changes, meanwhile, the announcements can be seen on LWN or LKML.

Meanwhile, 2.4.36.1 gets it's way to the public with several updates from Willy and Dann. The full Changelog contains fewer updates than the 2.6.x kernel, but worths reading it. Although many ordinary people already switched to 2.6.x kernel, there are still people who used 2.4.x kernels, including Slackware users prior to Slackware 12.0 who still uses 2.4.x as the default kernel.

Friday, February 15, 2008

OOo 2.4.0 RC1

Ok folks, OOo 2.4.0 is now on RC1 and you can help the project by downloading it and testing it (please note that this version is NOT recommended for daily use. It's only for TESTING purposes). Changes compared to previous build (M6) have been published on the Release Notes.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Chinese New Year + Valentine Day on UKDW

As i stated before, starting today and for the next three days, UKDW will hold an event to celebrate Chinese New Year and Valentine together. Here's the schedule for today (in Indonesian):

Jam 09.00-12.00 Seminar Revitalisasi Komunitas Konghucu di Yogyakarta
(di Auditorium Koinonia)
Jam 14.30-17.00 Valentine Day (di Auditorium Koinonia)
Jam 18.00-21.00 Pagelaran Imlek (di Auditorium Koinonia): Barongsai,
Golden Dragon dan Duta Dance (Sampek Eng Tay - Chinese Valentine Day)

I haven't had a chance to take a picture on it, but i hope i can do it today, since i have busy schedule for today worried

Coffee Treat A Friend Week From Starbucks

I got a SMS message from BCA about Starbucks' offering. It's called Starbucks Coffee Treat A Friend Week. You pay 1 for 2 all Frappuccino drinks by using BCA credit card. It's a good news for coffee lovers, but unfortunately, i don't like drinking coffee so this offering is not applicable for me crying

I guess you have an alternative options to celebrate valentine on Starbucks if you like coffee and have BCA credit card big grin

Indonesian Linux Forum Migration Plan

I have sent a mass email to all Indonesian Linux Forum member about the total backup progress that is being conducted before the full migration to the old domain http://forum.linux.or.id. During this preparation, i have disabled the attachment feature on all boards, meaning that you can't send an attachment on private messages or post. This is required to make sure the consistency between the old and new domain, since i'm migrating the files right now.

When the migration is going to be done, i will announce it again few days before the actuall process and send another mass email to notify you that the forum will be disabled temporarily. After the migration, you can access the forum again at the old domain and any request to the new domain will be redirected back to the old one. The migration should take less than one hour (actually it's only less than 5 minute, but i'm not taking any risk by saying it will be 5 minutes, just in case something fatal happened). When the forum is up and running, i will enable the forum and (again) send a notification to all members (please don't mark the email as SPAM big grin)

On behalf of Indonesian Linux Forum administrators and moderators, i would like to apologize for any inconvenience during the migration, but everything is being done to ensure all data are consistent during the migration process. If you find any problem after the migration, you can always submit a bug report on the Forum (we don't expect any bug, but nothing is perfect, so we prepare the topic for that)

Blog Unlocked

It seems that Blogger team has reviewed my blog and removed my blog on their spammers blacklist account, thus remove my word verification on the posting section. Now i can post my blog without writing the word verification again. Thanks to Blogger team who have done a wonderful job on the Blogger applause

Happy Valentine Day


Today is valentine day, so share your love to everybody and be loved by everybody big hug

Image : courtesy of FileBuzz

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Firefox 3 Beta 3

The next Beta version of the upcoming Firefox 3 has been released to public. According to release notes, it's stated that this beta has introduced 1300 changes from the previous beta including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.

You can get the latest beta version on their beta site.

Spam Detection on Blogger

Blogger requires me to write word verification every time i wanted to publish my post. It only happened on this blog and not in my SlackBlogs. After the updates from Blogger team has been pushed today, a new link comes up under the word verification textbox, which said "Why do I have this?". By clicking this link, i was redirected to a new page saying that my blog was detected as a spam by Blogger's spam-prevention robots.

In that page, i can request for unlocking my blog and if they have verified that my blog is not a spam, i will not need any word verification again every time i post something. It's very annoying, since the word verification is always wrong if i go idle too long after writing some of the post (and the saving text has comes up). I guess it's a bug in Blogger session.

Let's hope they will verify my blog ASAP so i could save some time without the word verification on my own blog big grin

US Border Laptop Searches

If you are going to US in short time and you wish to bring your electronic equipment with you, you MUST read this article first. It's called Five Things to Know About U.S. Border Laptop Searches.

Basically, all travelers, U.S. citizens and others, need to be aware of certain issues when entering the U.S. with electronic equipment. WHY? Because a lawsuit has been filed last week over warrantless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at U.S. borders, meaning that the officer at the borders could take your laptop without any evidence needed.

Here are some of the highlights:
  1. No evidence needed to take your laptop
  2. Anything can be searched
  3. Your PC might not be returned right away
  4. Don't take anything you don't want to share
  5. Be cooperative
I know it's STUPID, but they WILL start using this procedure when someone enters US territory (but no information on specific date when will this procedure will be started)

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Joining MyCityBlogging

Few days ago i signed up with MyCityBlogging for Yogyakarta area and today i just received the username and (random) password for it. Since the password is not so friendly, i clicked on the URL where i can modify my profile, but guess what? The site said that i don't have permission on the page, so i accessed the main page, but it signed me in thinking

Well, it wasn't a big problem for me, as i can update my profile at last and i can wrote my first post on that blog in Indonesian language (yes, it's my first blog post in Indonesian language as i usually use English for it). I will use this media to post updates about Yogyakarta, my home town along with other members big grin

Monday, February 11, 2008

Kernel 2.6.25-RC1

Yes, it's out there now and it's as big as 2.6.24-RC1 (The full diff is something like 11MB and 1.4M lines of diffs). I guess it will be a hard release (ohh, not again please) for Linus and other team member. The announcement was published on LKML and it already contains a bug that makes the build process failed until Sam Ravnborg puts a patch on it.

Meanwhile, 2.6.24.2 has just released few hours ago to fix the splice problem appeared before 2.6.24.x series. It's a good nature of Open Source paradigm. You find the bug, the team will push it upstream and the new release which squashed the bug is released in less than a day love struck

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Firefox Suffers Directory Traversal Problem

Even though Mozilla team has done a good job to find and fix security vulnerabilities on Firefox and squashed them by releasing 2.0.0.12, it's seems that they have missed some things and it suffered from directory traversal. For more detail on the bugs, please see it here. The writer claimed it was vulnerable, even on default configuration, so we should see 2.0.0.13 soon enough big grin

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Where and When to Use AJAX

AJAX is now dominating on how to make a nice website. Most big sites uses AJAX, but does AJAX should be used also on your website? Here's an article from IBM about Where and when to use AJAX. It should give you some brief explanation when to use and when NOT to use AJAX.

Computer Love Day 2008


I got this from Mandriva's newsletter:

Valentine's Day is nearly here... February 14th, 2008. But think about it, who do you hang out with, who shares the good times and the bad ones, who drives you crazy but keeps your life together?...........Your computer, and it's time to say it out loud: I love my computer!

Mandriva and Bloggino are getting together to launch the first Computer Love Day on February 14th. So what do you do? It's fun & easy. Let that special computer in your life know how you feel, by posting a message, text, picture, video and by voting for the message you prefer.

Where to post your message? Just go to www.computerloveday.com and it will redirect you to a dedicated space on Bloggino where you can view all the contributions, add comments and post your message after a quick sign-up. Do not hesitate to stick the Computer Love Day logo on your blog or site, too.

Computer Love Day will close on February 14th midnight, of course. Voting will be allowed for another three days after the 14th. Contributions with the most votes will win. Prizes will be awarded by Mandriva for the best 3 contributions.

First prize: Mandriva Flash 2008 + Tux Droid!

Second prize: Mandriva Flash 2008

Third prize: One year Powerpack subscription (allowing you to get two Mandriva Linux distributions per year).

Now it's over to you. Start from here: www.computerloveday.com

Enjoy!
The Mandriva & Bloggino online teams

Friday, February 08, 2008

Seamonkey and Firefox Updates

Mozilla team has released an update for Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey to public. It's dubbed Firefox 2.0.0.12 and SeaMonkey 1.1.18. Both are stable version, meaning that they targeted for stabilizing the product and fixing critical problem, including security vulnerabilities, not adding new features to the products.

Meanwhile, Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 has been prepared before they release the first RC to public. I have been testing Beta 2 on Linux and it does works on general usage, but they could do better than that, since according to their announcements, there are still 61 P1 blocker for 3.0, meaning they need to work harder to squash all those bugs to 0.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Chinese New Year Celebration

I just came back from annual events, "Pekan Budaya Tionghoa" that was celebrated on Ketandan, sometimes called Jogja's Chinatown. Today was the opening and it will be held for five days starting today until next Monday. I have taken some pictures and movie (very nice fireworks), but unfortunately, i couldn't upload the movie, as it's too big to upload (approximately 40 MB), so i just upload the photos on my PicasaWeb account. I'll try to upload this to local web hoster, but i can't guarantee that it will be uploaded in short time. You can also see the schedule for the remaining four days if you haven't visit this place (or if you are planning to go to Jogja, please visit this event, as it's only held once a year).

It's a mixture of two different culture in one event. As you can see from the schedule, some of them were conducted by local people, for example Didik Ninik Towok and many others (i didn't know most of them)

Update (8 Feb 2008 5:54 AM): I have uploaded the movie. You can download it from here. It will only available for 90 days, so go grab them big grin

Happy Chinese New Year


Another year has passed and we now starts a new year again. Let's hope new year brings good changes to ourselves, our family, and our nation. For those who celebrates, i would like to congrats you all: Happy Chinese New Year 2559

May this year brings something better than last year praying

Adobe Reader 8.1.2

Adobe has released Adobe Reader 8.1.2 for Windows, an incremental release for their 8.x series. It can be downloaded from their FTP Server. As usual, Adobe delivers it in two formats, EXE (22 MB) and MSI (33 MB).

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Be Prepared for OOo 2.4

Yes, OOo 2.4 is being developed right now and the latest update up to now is M6 snapshots (it's being planned to be released next month). It contains quite a lot of changes compared to OOo 2.3.1. You can check the detail on this Release Notes (please note that this version is prone to changes when new release has been published). Some noticeable changes are:
- More print option in Calc : The Print dialog in Calc gets extended by a new possibility to define what part of the spreadsheet has to be printed. In the current version the print setting "print only selected sheets" is located in the Options dialog of the Print dialog and got defaulted for OOo 2.3. This raised several new issues around print output is empty when the corresponding table was not selected in the spreadsheet and the setting itself was overseen/unknown in the Options dialog.
- Support of background image on Impress : Lots of people are starting to use a huge amount of large-scale images in their presentations. But there wasn't any approach how to simply add a picture on a slide background. This feature should use a simple right-click way instead of a complex page format dialog.
- Separate zoom per sheet : This specification documents changes made to the Calc options dialog.
- Support for backward references in Find and Replace : The usage of backward references in regular expressions allows powerful find and replace algorithmns. E.g. It is possible to find and replace dates in differents formats like DD.MM.YY into MM/DD/YY.

Check the OOo 2.4 schedule release for more information about the publication date

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Yahoo! OpenID Not Usable (For Now)

I read Maseko's post about Yahoo! OpenID and i realized i haven't activate my Yahoo! ID for OpenID, so i opened Yahoo's OpenID and activate my account. I tried to test it by giving comments to my friend's blog on Blogger and it seems that as Maseko stated, it's not working at all with the message : OpenID url is missing. It seems that both vendor uses different version of OpenID, but actually it supposed to be backward compatible, so why forcing to support the bleeding-edge technology when most site still uses the old version?

I guess Yahoo! OpenID is not usable for now until people or sites have moved to support OpenID 2.0. I still use my OpenID which i got from GetOpenID. It's working on Blogger and many other services.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Linux is Ready to go Green

Linus Torvalds has admitted that Linux is lacking behind on power management and energy diagnosis tools compared to other operating system (check my post on Slackblogs about this. Even if it's KDE application, they got the information from /proc which is a representation of values in the kernel itself). But that doesn't mean that he and other kernel developers stayed relaxed and do nothing. They prepare the infrastructure and they think it's quite ready for further development into stable environment.

In an interview during Linux Conference 2008 in Melbourne, Linux also stated that the kernel project will survive even when he retired sometime in the future. Here's his answer:
"The question comes up but it is not something I really worry about. There are other people who could take over what I do. I would like to think that they would be worse at it but it is not like [Linux] would go away or be in trouble"

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Last day in UAJY

I just came back from the last day of Chinese New Year celebration in Atma Jaya University. In the last day, lot of people came to this place, because there was a Barongsai and also Liang Liong, representing a local Chinese traditional cultures that always present at Chinese new year event. There was a nice fireworks also at the end of the show. Also there was a performance from Duta Dance big grin

Actually, i thought the last day will be very quiet, since no students goes to their campus, but since there was a barongsai event, many small kids came here along with their parents to see the event.

It was a nice event and i really hope that UKDW will do better than this. I know you can do it

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Hearing Season

The clausal to buy Yahoo! is considered an important thing so that it will need further discussion. There will be a hearing season from Microsoft about this giant steps. Even though Yahoo! and Microsoft is going to be both happy with this deal (Yahoo's index raised 44% after the news), it means that there will be a change for monopoly in the future between Microsoft/Yahoo against Google. PCWorld has made several articles about this and you may find more on the web, since it's a hot topic for this week.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Microsoft to Buy Yahoo?

It has been reported in some news that Microsoft had offered to acquire Yahoo in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion. If this happens, then i guess it will overlap Sun's acquisition to MySQL and i guess it will be the biggest (yet) buy out this year.

Reference:
InformationWeek
InformationWeek
ComputerWorldUK
EWeek

No Water Problem :)

Thank God i have moved back to Jogja last May. When i came back from UAJY today, i got an email from my friend at Jakarta saying that Jakarta is flooded again. The prediction that Jakarta will be drowned again at February become reality (last year, it's also in February). Some bloggers have posted this news on their blog, such as Nurul (more will come tomorrow as they told their experience fighting to get home).

Jogja also rained tonight and it was quite a long rain, but as you may aware, Jogja never had flood problems. Even if it rained for one whole day, the water will drop at most in 20-40 minutes (it depends on the severity of the rain). I rarely got water problem in Jogja big grin

Chinese New Year On The Way

Chinese new year will come next week (on 7th of February) and one week later, it's Valentine day big grin.

There's a lot of preparations have been done for this two events. For example, Atma Jaya university held a bazaar on their campus since few days ago. I just came back from their campus and today's event was karaoke. The singer had a nice voice, since they practice very often and some of them are the winner on some singing contest.

My campus will also have this kind of event which will be held in 14-17 February. It will be two events at the time, Chinese new year and Valentine day. I don't know much about this event, as i just knew it from one of my students which i met at the bazaar, but they will give me more information and i will publish it on my blog when i got the detailed information. Stay tune....

Security Vulnerability on MPlayer

Two days ago, MPlayer team has released a security vulnerability announcements that affects MPlayer 1.0rc2 and SVN before r25824. Here's the small description about the bug:
A buffer overflow was found and reported by Adam Bozanich of Musecurity in the code used to extract album titles from cbbd server answers.

When parsing answers from the cddb server, the album title is copied into a fixed-size buffer with insufficient checks on its size, and may cause a buffer overflow. A malicious database entry could trigger a buffer overflow in the program, that can lead to arbitrary code execution with the UID of the user running MPlayer.
As usual, they response quickly by providing a patch and it has been commited to the SVN Server.

Packagers... go grab the patch and build the package big grin

TPB Celebration

Torrent is definitely the most popular P2P networks nowadays. Lots of files can be found on torrent while it's not available for direct download. The nature of P2P which involves file sharing is the main reason why this type of networks grew so fast. One of the biggest Torrent tracker site, TPB has celebrate a milestone by tracking over 1 million torrents. They also had over 10 million simultaneous peers on the trackers, 2.5 million registered users, and also 100 blog post.

They add a nice picture on their home page: