Monday, December 30, 2013

Alysia is 1 Year Old :)

Alysia was celebrating her first birthday party last night with a simple dinner with my family and my wife's family. Time does tick so fast. I remembered, last year, she was just born, weighted around 7 lbs (3.55 Kg), 49 cm in height and now she has turned around 22 lbs (11 Kg). She is now able to walk, even though i had to hold her hand since she's not ready yet to stand firmly and steadily.

Thank you for all your good wishes in Facebook and Twitter for her birthday. I hoped they all came true and wishes the best for her future :)

Monday, December 23, 2013

Progress on 2013

Time flies so fast. It's already December and in less than one week, my daughter Alysia will celebrate her first birthday. I just remembered how small she was last year and now she has grown up so fast while still preserving her cuteness :)

As for myself, lots have happened during this year. On my work, i have passed the national certification for lecturers which was announced yesterday after battling with it few months ago. It was really a perfect gift by the government even though i believed that i would make it long before they announced it.

As for side jobs, i have been pretty busy with Kencana project that completely finished around April, but there was still some maintenance until July. It was one of the complex project that i ever handled, but we (me and my team) managed to finish it succesfully.

I also joined the MSB project along with Chess Griffin to provide MATE packages for Slackware and we released two releases this year: MATE 1.6 for Slackware 14.0 and also 14.1. We are now planning to include MATE 1.8 for Slackware 14.1 for next year.

On November, the SBo admins has asked me to become one of them and i really thanked them for this honor. I also learned lots of things after joining this small team of highly talented people. I also joined the IRC once again, after leaving it few years ago since many discussion happened in IRC.

A new 2 TB of hard disk was installed and i got plenty of space to play with, so i built a new build virtual machine in my local computer for SBo-related work on top of qemu/kvm and libvirt, thanks to Robby and Matteo. I might even use this to my operating system class next semester as i have compiled and installed it on my laptop last night as well.

Oh well, i may not be able to remember all things in 2013, but here's what i'm proud of. Sorry for not being to active updating this blog in 2013, but higher priorities takes place over blog posting quantities :)


Monday, December 16, 2013

New Space Capacity

My computer is already quite old and since it only had 320 GB of space which should be divided for Windows and Linux, i didn't allocate much for Linux during partitioning the hard drive. I only gave 55 GB for Linux, 80 GB for Windows (C), 100 GB for Master (D), and 70 GB for Data (E). Both D and E were shared with Linux since reading/writing NTFS partition is no longer a problem with Linux. At that time, i didn't think of using virtualizations and building so many packages like nowadays.

Things changed when i joined Chess Griffin to work on MSB project, providing MATE packages for Slackware 14.0 and 14.1. The packages must be built on a clean environment, so i had to use virtualization technology to build them. Since it should be built on two arch (x86 and x86_64), i had to make 2 VMs for that. I'm still able to manage things at that point as i only need like 17 GB for 2 Slackware VMs built using a full clean installation of Slackware 14.0 (now 14.1), but i had to clean up some packages which i rarely used.

On November 2013, i joined the SlackBuilds project as the team member after Robby Workman invited me and at that time, i was thinking of buying a new disk for saving the sources and also the files created during build process. Testing a package sometimes really takes a lot of space since sometimes it requires so many dependencies and it takes a lot of space and time to build a single package.

Today, i made up my mind to buy a new hard drive for my desktop at home and i bought 2 TB of hard drive which should be more than enough. I already formatted the disk and prepare all the partitions. Suppose my old hard drive is dead, i can just install the OS onto this new partition and all of my data has been transfered there as backup. I have allocated 500 GB for build partition and another 500 GB for VM partition, which should be more than enough for MSB and SBo project (and probably other future project).

I'm still using my old disk together with the new one and it's already synchronized in most of the data contained, but i still have plenty of room in the new disk.

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Shell Commands Explained in Detail

If you happened to came to Linux world, then you must know that shell is considered one of the biggest assets, especially for those who loves automation and also scripting for their daily tasks.

But for some people, learning all those commands (including their parameter/options) will take some time and patience that not everyone has.

There's an easy way to solve that issue. Just visit explainshell.com and place your command there and they will try to explain it to you in detail. Well, basically they just grab the relevant part from the manual page, but it's easier for us to see instead of digging the whole manual pages. They already prepared some examples for you to try out.

Sunday, December 01, 2013

Linux Mint 16 and EFL 1.8 is Out

Two interesting projects has released their latest product this weekend and they are Linux Mint 16 (codename Petra) and EFL 1.8, which is a major release since EFL 1.7.

Linux Mint 16 is a results of 5 months of development based on Ubuntu Saucy Salamander and it's available on two flavours, MATE and Cinnamon. More will come in the future (XFCE and KDE).

EFL 1.8 is another interesting project which now tries to combine all elements (Ecore, Edje, Eet, Eeze, Efreet, Eina, Eio, Embryo, Emotion, Ethumb, Evas and Evil) into a single EFL package. They even added another new elements inside: Eldbus, EPhysics, and Escape.
Eldbus a replacement for E_dbus, which is still able to be built in it's 1.7 form but will no longer be updated or maintained, but still functions against EFL 1.8 if you depend on it.

EPhysics is a new library that glues in the Bullet physics engine into EFL to allow you to make use of an entire physics engine easily and simply in your creations. Edje also makes use of this allowing your themes to use it too.
EFL 1.8 features Wayland support, audio support, Async rendering (in Evas), and Office document loading for Generic Loaders.