Jogja Linux User Group

After a few months the webserver that handles Jogja Linux User Group has been down because there were a clash in the hosting provider between managed.com and angelnetworkz, finally the website has been up again and you can view it from http://jogja.linux.or.id. It's not a great website, but rather a Wiki-based system, build with Word Press. It was built using WP since we don't have time to build a new system. Maybe in the future, we will add the real homepage for the website.

If you want to find out about KPLI's activity, please visit this site and you will found a lot of information about our activity. You can also sign in to give a comments on our posting. You can't post a message until we grant you the privileges, but you can mail me or Jaya to promote yourself. We can't guarantee that we will give you those privileges, but we will try to convince ourself to give those to them who asked for it.

3rd OpenSource Project From Microsoft

After releasing the first two program into Open Source, which was Windows Installer XML (WiX) and Windows Template Model (WTL), these days Microsoft launched their third OpenSource project, called FlexWiki in SourceForge. FlexWiki is one of the most used software to build Wiki. Wiki is web pages that was desaigned to include many topics, where its users can create or edit the contents. Wiki comes from Hawaian languange, that has similar meaning with fast.

It is uncommon to look at Microsoft's behaviour, since they keep saying that OpenSource is a bad idea (at least that was said by it's CEO, Bill Gates in his tour). Eventhough the code that was released is not their major application, such as Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, this is a big step from Microsoft to try learning how OpenSource community gain powerfull application and support from their users around the world.

The first two application was recorded as big five in Sourceforge most favorite projects and has been downloaded for more than 20000 times (WTL) and 100000 times (WiX). For the third apps, it will soon appears in Sourceforge's website. Just wait and see for yourself in the next 1-2 weeks.

GIMP is closing to Adobe Photoshop

As you can see, Adobe Photoshop has become the standard application being used in Windows and Mac Platform to create or edit sophisticated images with an extraordinary filters and tools that was built to help users get what they intended to. Yes.. it was a great applications. I have used it since it was 5.5 and right now, it has released CS (stands for Creative Suite, a replacement for 8, i presume).

One thing that Adobe Photoshop users have to face is the price. It will cost you more than US$500 to get only 1 copy of the Adobe Photoshop and it doesn't include cost which have to be paid if you want to download third party filter or plugin to enhance your Photoshop apps.

Although they give you a great features in every release, i think that Photoshop has reached it's maximum capabilities, since it already has included all tool and facility on their latest CS version. I doubt if there will be an upgraded version in short time, since Adobe Photoshop always release new version with some new tool and filter. I'm just hoping that in the newer version, it will include a better PNG filter.

This fenomena is contrary with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which has just released their latest stable version 2.0.5. GIMP is full of updates and bug fix in their release version and always include more filter or plugin in their release. You can also make your own filter if you want to, but it requires you to read some manuals and scripting languange.

One thing that i hate about GIMP is the floating toolbar. It doesn't stick at one playce, just like the Adobe Photoshop, but in the other hand, GIMP has included some script to create an instant banner or button images with a single or double click and there you go... your instant products :)

GIMP is also available in two version, Windows and GNU/Linux, so you can try it before you migrate to GNU/Linux. It is an extraordinady application build by the OpenSource Project.

Go Go GIMP.....

new blogger

I have two new friends that is starting to write their own blog. They are Deddy and Afnindar. Welcome aboard and have fun with the Blogger :)
it's a good habit to have your own blog, since it helps you to express your feeling and you writing ability so that you can write much better in the future. Keep writing your blog and please customize your site :)

Jogja Linux User Group

After a few weaks i can't join the Jogja Linux User Group meeting, finally i can meet my friends in the last meeting that was held this morning. It was a quick meeting (maybe about one and half hour, but our usuall meeting was more than two until three hour). Today's meeting discussed about our events that will be held in 9th of October. It's a demo and a seminar about Wireless Technology (2,4 GHz) that will present Dr. Onno W. Purbo, an IT expert that really support Wireless regulation should be freed and released to public, rather than controlled by the government.

We split task to deliver and put the announcement in our college so other people will notice the events and hopefully they will join in the events, because it's a great events. This events will use Windows and GNU/Linux as the main platform. I hope that this events will be successfull and there should be an advanced progress about Wireless Technology implementation around Jogja :)

I'm looking forward to see you guys in the next meeting :)

World Viewer From NASA

If you are using GNU/Linux, you probably noticed that the most sophisticated world viewer is Xrmap. It is a great application, since it was made by a single person i think and included a detailed information. You can update the database, by downloading from FBI's website and it's legal, don't worry :)

NASA has released some great tool as world viewer in their website. It has 11 applications, which is 3D engine, Blue Marble, Land Sat 7, SRTM, Animated Earth, MODIS, GLOBE, Country & State Borders, Place Names, Visual Tools, and Landmark set. You might have to download them all to see what features are in it, but here is the summary of each application:

3D Engine
World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there.

Particular focus was put into the ease of usability so people of all ages can enjoy World Wind. All one needs to control World Wind is a two button mouse. Additional guides and features can be accessed though a simplified menu. Navigation is automated with single clicks of a mouse as well as the ability to type in any location and automatically zoom into it.

World Wind was designed to run on recent PC hardware with 3D accleration. Please refer to the download section for more information on system requirements.

Sample of Blue Marble (mostly Asia)Blue Marble
World Wind has a full copy of the Blue Marble, a spetacular true-color image of the entire Earth as seen on NASA's Earth Observatory: the Blue Marble.

Put together from data of a variety of satellites such as MODIS and Terra, the Blue Marble can be seen in all it's glory at 1 km per pixel resolution.

Land Sat 7
Using World Wind, you can continue to zoom past Blue Marble and reveal the extremely detailed seamless mosaic of LandSat 7 data.

LandSat 7 is a collection of images from 1999-2003 at an impressive 15 m per pixel resolution. It includes other color bands such as the infrared spectrum. Users will be able browse these different sets as they become available. Any changes and updates are automatically inherited by World Wind.

LandSat 7's resolution makes it possible to see your own city, neighborhood, or landmarks in your vicinity. Seeing the whole globe like this puts the world in context with scientifically accurate data.

The complete LandSat 7 data set is too large to fit on a single machine so World Wind only downloads what you see and stores a compressed copy on your computer for later viewing.

SRTM
Combining LandSat 7 imagry with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Data, World Wind can display a dramatic view of the Earth at eye level. Users will litterally be able to fly across the world in any direction.

In addition, World Wind can exaggerate these views so a user can easily pick out the details.

Animated Earth
Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has produced a set of visually intense animations that demonstrate a variety of subjects such as hurricane dynamics and seasonal changes across the globe.

World Wind can take these animations and play them directly on the world. Anyone can immediately grasp where the event is taking place as World Wind rotates automatically into view.

MODIS
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS produces a set of time relevant data that's updated every day. MODIS catalogs fires, floods, dust, smoke, storms and even volcanic activity.

World Wind produces an easily customized view of this information and marks them directly on the globe. When one of these color coded markers are clicked, it downloads the full image and displays them.

MODIS images can download publication quality material at a resolution of 250 m per pixel. Anew fresh set of images can be downloaded every day.

World Wind also has a "tour mode" to automatically skim through any number of samples.

GLOBE

World Wind is capable of browsing through and displaying GLOBE data based on any time the user wants. For example, a user can download today's (or any previous day's) temperature across the world.

You can view rainfall, barometric pressure, cloud cover, or even the student GLOBE samples themselves. Each sample comes with a temperature scale

Country & State Borders
World Wind has a complete set of borders that traces every country and state. As you zoom into the world, the boundaries become more precise

You can observe where mountain ridges and rivers have formed the political boundaries of today.

World Wind has a full catalog of countries, capitals, counties, cities, towns, and even historical references. The names update dynamically, by increasing in number as the user zooms in. This prevents too many names from cluttering up the screen.

It's likely that you'll find your own town no matter how big or small it is in World Wind.

Visual Tools
World Wind comes with a variety of visual guides that help the user's experience such as latitude and longitude lines, as well as extremely precise coordinate data.

These helpers can be toggled on or off any time and are viewable with any of World Wind's other features turned on.

Landmark Set
World Wind has the capability to display actual 3d models of landmarks on the earth. This helps to see the world in context to places a user may have been to. Those landmarks that do not have 3D models for it yet have place markers similar to how MODIS displays places of interest.

Windows is Better Than GNU/Linux?

One of the popular monthly computer magazine reviews about the security between three operating system on his articles with a result that Microsoft XP has the best security after the installation Service Pack 2 and a bunch of patch for approximately 50 MB. The three operating system that was compared were Windows XP, SuSe 9.1 Professional, and Mac OS.

They conducted two test. The first test was done after the installation out-of-the-box, so it means that they never applied a single patch or updates. In this test, Windows XP was the worst operating system, leaving a lot of critical and dangerous security vulnerability far behind the SuSE and Mac OS. The best operating system out-of-the-box was Mac OS with only 6 low-impact security problems.

The second test was held after they applied all patch and updates from the vendor. They said that Microsoft has fixed all of their security problems while the other still missed some undangerous security problems. Do you think this comparison is true for all user? In order to get a full secure system using Windows XP, you have to download all the patch dan updates from Microsoft via WindowsUpdate or by downloading the patch manually and install them in your computer. Is it easy to be done when you don't have a good Internet connection? Don't try it or you will suffer :)

If you subscribe to BugTraq mailing list and security-related mailing list, you will see that there are some glitch just after SP2 released and still the problem is not fixed until today. For example, IE, themost dominant web browser around the world is not perfectly free from security problems since many developers have discovered a lot of vulnerability in IE, even though SP 2 is installed.

So... do you still believe that Windows is better than GNU/Linux in security measurement? Think again :)

Multimedia on GNU/Linux?

You probably know about Winamp, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Swish, Macromedia Flash, and other multimedia application for Windows. They are great products, but they weren't free. You have to buy a licence for each product (except for Winamp if you don't want to switch to professional edition) and it will cost you so much money. Each license only valid for 1 PC or 1 user, so if you're planning to install it on 5 different PCs, you should buy 5 license. That's the deal.

Suppose you want to install all of above products. It may cost you more than the cost you will spend for buying your computer. Is there another way to use multimedia application without having to pay for license? Yes... you can use Freeware application which can be found in the Download.com for Windows platform and Sourceforge if you're using GNU/Linux.

GNU/Linux was originally designed to be a server operating system, but in fact... they evolves so that it can be used as a desktop operating system, just like Windows. The consequencies that comes with this fenomena is it lacks of applications for desktop user, mostly multimedia. Luckily, right now, there are a lot of multimedia packages for GNU/Linux user which can be used to produce high quality project. If you have seen Shrek 2, than you have see GNU/Linux's power to make a great products.

You can use XMMS as replacement for Winamp, Audacity or Ardour for Audio section, Kino, MJPEG Tool, VirtualDub, and Cinelerra for Video section. And lot of multimedia is coming around the Internet from developers that can be found in the Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Just find it and install it. You may need some adjustment before you can use it smootly, but it's only a matter of time :)

Robotical Experimental

I'm taking a new subject, robotical experimental and it is a great class, since i learn a lot about robot and it's component, such as actuator, transistor, and a lot of things related to robotics. In the next semester, there will be a new subject that continues this subjects. I don't know what will the name be, but for one thing, is will be related to embedded system and also assembly language. Geezz... it is a cool subjects.

The lecturer has gave us a task to find an article about robot application and all of us has to give a short presentation about the article was talking about. I presented UVIS (Under-Vehicle Investigation System) which can be used to detect dangerous items, such as bomb from below the car. It is a commercial product made by AutonomousSolution Inc. You can also see the UVIS page.

GNU/Linux can be used to build embedded system, just like the one created by Eko Bono and was published in InfoLinux, a monthly GNU/Linux magazine. It is interesting, because up to now, people always think that GNU/Linux just can be operated in the PC (Personal Computer), but the reality shows us that GNU/Linux has more ability than just a stable, secure, robush server or desktop operating system. It can planted as an embedded system as well.

Will it be GBrowser?

Just as i thought before, Google will try to develop more and more sophisticated technologies, and will not stop. After releasing GMail, that eventually became a new era of webmail services, according to New York Post, Google will launch a new browser to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Bot it will not browser alone, but with some other products.

This moment is worth to wait, since IE has been dominating browser's market, but ironically, they are the most vulnerable browser around the world. People already know that. This fenomena that makes Mozilla's product, such as Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox became safer alternative rather than sticking with IE to be our default browser in our computers.

They have hired four people who worked on Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, and later founded their own company. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, but Microsoft's database-management program, Access. Most recently, Google grabbed Joe Beda, the lead developer on Avalon, Microsoft's code name for the user interface that will part of the next version of Windows, called Longhorn.

What will it be? I can't wait to see the final result. Will it be GBrowser? or any other names? Let's find out in the next 1 year :)

Microsoft going OpenSource?

As you can see up to this point, Microsoft is dominating the software market with it's proprietary technology and products, such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. We also know that Microsoft is annoyed by the existence of OpenSource project, especially GNU/Linux that in the future they will overlap Microsoft dominance on the operating system and applications market.

Microsoft Office is one of the software that became main goal of Microsoft to dominate in the software market. It is used by many people around the world because of it is easy to learn and to use, a good looking style, and also comes with many new features on every updates. No wonder why Microsoft is trying to make this product is one of their main income. It is sell in more than US$500 each (for single licence i think).

But, do you believe that Microsoft is going to share Microsoft Office Software Code? Is that true? Yes.. It's true, but not for public, but rather to government as part of its efforts to make governments more confident in the security and compatibility of the world's largest software maker's products. The new initiative is an extension of Microsoft's Government Security Program, which allows the governments of more than 30 countries to examine most of Microsoft's underlying source code, or software blueprint for its flagship Windows operating system.

Microsoft launched an initiative a few years ago (January 2003) to share more of its software code (access to Windows and Windows CE source code) with other technology companies, and later expanded that to include governments. The license will cover the Office 2003 code for PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, Excel and the shared application code that creates a consistent user experience across the products and similar functionality—features such as draw, search, print and save. The source code for Office 2003 will be made available so that governments can conduct in-depth testing and examination to make sure that the document, spreadsheet, presentation and scheduling program works with other information technology systems.

These latest moves will now give governments and international organizations access to Office source code, the opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft experts, and access to any technical information they need for greater data interoperability, interchange, portability, ease of communication and archiving. They will also be able to visit the Redmond campus and talk directly with the office engineers, who would also do on-site visits in their home country.

Britain has already agreed to participate in the source-sharing program for Office, Microsoft said. The Government Shared Source License for Office will be available to more than 60 global governments and international organizations currently eligible to participate in the GSP.

National Election

Today one of the most important events in Indonesia is held, which is National Election for the next president (2004-2009). The election is held today (Monday, 20th of September 2004) and the result can be seen in the Internet at KPU's Website. While the counting process will be done manually, but we can still see the result online from that site.

The use of IT technology was debatted because there were some errors and also vulnerable to SQL Injections when it was used to display the first election. Luckily, the IT team has changed it's infrasctructure and it's more secure than before (even though i had a little bit unsure about the real conditions). I hope that the budget that was used to make the IT system available will not be wasted, but it can be a valuable lesson for all of us.

Let's wait for the election result to find out who will be the next president for Indonesia. Will it be Megawati Soekarnoputri or will it be Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono? Lets find out in the KPU's website

Gaim 1.0 : Stable Enough

Gaim has fulfill it's promise once again. Three weaks of development time and new releases will be born at Gaim's official site. If you are true Gaim's users, you should notice that this time, Gaim developers do not use 0.8.3 as their latest version, but they picked up 1.0 version, which in some OpenSource common term, it represent first stable version ever released.

Yet until now, Gaim always use X.YY naming conventions, where X is the major version (0) and YY is the minor version (using two digits, like 82) for exception for version 82.1 that need some quick response without having user to wait for another three week cycle to get the updates.

Well... in my opinion, Gaim has reached it's stable version long before 1.0 comes out (maybe in 0.79 for exception when Yahoo! changed their protocols so Gaim users can't connect to YM users), so i think that 1.0 in Gaim doesn't represent stable version anymore, but actually a major updates. You might want to see it's Changelog.

For those who don't know what Gaim is, you could read the full answer on their site but for the lazy: 'Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.' Gaim is also the 2nd (sometimes 1st) most active project on Sourceforge and the 4th most popular on Freshmeat and seemingly all round #1 Free IM client!"

Bravoo for GAIM Developers......
I salutee to all of you :)

Virus Author on War

You may notice that there are more than 60000 viruses around the world, but the most active virus right now is Netsky and MyDOOM which affected most Windows version. If you visit Symantec's securityresponse site, you will see that there are a lot of varians of this dangerous virus> Usually Symantec gives name like Netsky.A, Netsky.B,... but there has been an exception for MyDOOM. The latest varians of MyDOOM virus was named MyDoom.AA (using 2 digit to represent variants). These means this virus is having a lot of 'fans' which modify the original source code and release them as new variants.

A new variant of the MyDoom Internet worm contains some puzzling add-ins: a photo that bears a likeness of Sven Jaschan, whom police in Berlin last week charged with computer sabotage after he admitted to authoring the Sasser worm, and a high-level description of how it does what it does. The variant, which is being called MyDoom.AA by Computer Associates International Inc. and MyDoom.Y by F-Secure Corp. and McAfee Inc., among other names, packs in its payload a description from the author on how the virus was programmed, what it's supposed to do and how it retrieves e-mail addresses from, for example, Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook address book.

That's nothing new, though, since that's a typical characteristic of MyDoom variants. The one thing that's unique in the how-to file is the fact that it's a "high-level summary. MyDoom.AA contains a remote-controlled payload it installs along with the photo of Jaschan on infected systems. Anybody who knows the worm is there can remotely connect to the infected computer, thus allowing an intruder to effectively take control of the system as if he or she were logged in and sitting at the keyboard.

Jaschan in May told authorities he had created the Netsky virus in order to automatically remove two other viruses from infected systems: MyDoom and Bagle. After creating several Netsky variations, he went on to create Sasser.

So... war is not just happening between users and virus creator, but also among the virus creator itself ..

Lot of Updates From Mandrakesoft

After few weaks without any updates at all from the RSS news, finally Mandrakesoft have release some minor updates for their vulnerable application, such as XFree86, libxpm4, cups, apache2, gdk-pixbuf, printer-drivers, and squid. And also, the RSS works once again. Thank goodness :)

This release was quite a bit late, since many other distro have released their updates before Mandrakesoft did, but it's ok, as long as they released their updated packages to prevent some glitch happened in their user's computer, such as buffer overflow, rooting, or unstable conditions.

If you are interested with Mandrake's updates, please visit Mandrakesoft Security Advisories. This pages also contain link to kernel update instruction, End of Life Product Support, and also Advisory RSS Feed for those who don't have much time to visit their website often, but rather sit down and watch from the Liferea or any other RSS Feed Agregator like i do.

I'm still hoping that Mandrakesoft will release a new critical packages, such as kernel without waiting for a new release, because newer kernel usually contains an updates to some problems on the old kernel. Until now, usually Mandrakesoft only release packages when they release another version and stick with it until they publish another version.

Firefox 1.0 Preview Release

The best browser right now (in my opinion), Mozilla Firefox has released it's Preview Release (PR). The press release said "While this software works well enough to be relied upon as your primary browser in most cases, we make no guarantees of its performance or stability. It is a pre-release product and should not be relied upon for mission-critical tasks.", but in my case, it runs smoothly without any serious problems on my Windows and Linux box.

As any other release, this release will focus on enhanching the Firefox capability. Here's what's new in this release of Firefox:

* Live Bookmarks
You can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds in your Bookmarks. When you visit a page that advertises a RSS feed by using a <link> tag, a RSS icon will appear in the status bar. Click it to view a list of feeds the page is offering. Click one to subscribe - this adds a Bookmark Folder that contains all the recent posts from the feed.

* Improved Find
Find is easier and more powerful now with our new Find toolbar. The Find toolbar (which shows at the bottom of the browser window) automatically highlights text in the page as you type and has a useful highlight feature.

* Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security
You can now open blocked popups, and the Extension install system now blocks all attempts to install software from sites other than update.mozilla.org. Users can add other sites to a list that allows them to offer software, but software is never automatically installed. In addition to these steps, several other measures have been taken to prevent phishing attacks and to highlight when a page is being viewed over a secure connection.

* Better Bookmarks
Numerous improvements to bookmarks including more reliable presentation of Site icons, and a split pane view in the Bookmarks window.

* Strong Encryption For Passwords Available
Passwords saved with the Password Manager can now be more easily encrypted with strong encryption by creating a "Master Password". If you create a Master Password, you are prompted once per session to enter the Master Password so that Password Manager can automatically fill in site logins. A useful feature for people who share computers with others and want improved security.

* Improved Compatibility for IE users
Undetectable document.all support for site compatibility and improved compatibility for keyboard accelerators further smooth the transition for IE users

* Better System Integration for GNOME users
You can now configure Firefox as your Default Browser on GNOME, and Firefox will adhere to your GNOME settings for edit field key bindings, etc.

* And a horde of other bug fixes...

Just as the press release said, there were some glitch that should be pointed by the new users as they migrate. Here are their list :

# If Firefox PR is placed in a location with limited access privileges, it should be run by a user with access to that location first, so that all initial startup files are generated. There may be issues still where if a restricted-access user is the first to run the app, these files may not be generated properly and Firefox may enter an infinite restart loop. This will be fixed in a future release. MacOSX users: Do NOT run Firefox from the Disk Image! - doing this may cause an infinite restart loop. To break Firefox out of this loop, open a Terminal and type "killall firefox-bin" and press enter.

# If Firefox will not display a browser window on MacOS X, quit Firefox using Cmd+Q and open ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/default.abc/ and remove localstore.rdf. Restart Firefox. Any toolbar customizations you have made or window placement will be lost

# Firefox utilizes large chunks of Mozilla Application Suite code. Many of the problems you may experience in Firefox are actually problems in this Mozilla core code. If you find a problem with page content or connectivity then it is probably a Mozilla problem and should be reported to the Browser product in Bugzilla, not to the Firefox product.

# We are still easing ourselves into this new world of automated Extension Updates, and are trying to work out any kinks that remain as quickly as possible. Extension and Theme authors need to update their listings in update.mozilla.org (or their own custom update services) every time a new version of Firefox comes out so that we know they're compatible. If you find your favorite Extension or Theme is disabled by upgrading to PR, please write the author and encourage them to either update their listing or their custom update service file. If they are not listed in update.mozilla.org, encourage them to do so, doing so will make handling version changes a lot easier.

Besides launching the Firefor PR, Mozilla project also launched new updates to Mozilal, which is Mozilla 1.7.3 for Windows and other platforms, including GNU/Linux and Mac OS.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Finished)

Finally, i have finished Zelda: Ocarina of Time today. It was a great game of Nintendo 64. Not like another Zelda games, which was Zelda: Majora's Mask, this game has much more fun and exciting treasure hunting and items. Well.. i have collected them all but 1 empty bootle, but that's not neccesary because i could beat Ganon (a transformated aliens from Ganondorf) without using the fourth bottle. Another side quest that i couldn't finish was collecting golden tarantulla. It has total of 100 tarantullas, but i only managed about 50 of them. Also i couldn't find all of heart pieces (even though i can find more, but i was interested to find the ending of the game).

Zelda series always give a tremendous puzzle and labyrin that confusing. It's harder to play FF (Final Fantasy) series rather than Zelda series. Unfortunately, Zelda series has a monoton story. I have played Zelda since it was released in the SNES console and also Zelda: Majora's Mask which i didn't continue, since it didn't amaze me at all. The graphical was amazing (but still uncomparable to Final Fantasy X, X-2, and the next XII series by the end of this year), the sound looks good enough. It's a must played game ever for N64 console.

I don't know what type of game should i play right now, but i'm interested to play Diddy Kong Racing, which is fun and funny. You have to race several tracks in order to get baloons to pass the next level. There are three vehicles, car, hover, and plane. It's quite fun and wait for my next reviews. Until then.... keep visiting my blog :)

Simon Tatham : The great man

For Windows user who need some connections to their UNIX or GNU/Linux's server, they will notice that Putty was the right tool to help them (just as i do in my university, where the server was using BSD-family). I need Putty just as many people do and it worked well. It was small in size and provide many facility such as SSH support so your identity and password won't be sent in plain text format, but in the encrypted format. Putty is a small tool to provide connection to UNIX or GNU/Linux server. It was made by Simon Tatham.

He is a great man. If you see his website, you will notice that he has done so much work on many development project, such as Putty, Halibut, DoIt, WinURL, Enigma, and patch utility. He also writes down some algorithms, mathematical applications, articles, and essays. You should visit his websites and check it out. It was a great materials. He also provide the real source code in it so you can try it at home and expanding it to fulfill your need.

People rarely knows him, but people recognize Putty. This is ironic. This is what happen in many places. People are simbolized in his/her products not as he/she is. Another good example is Linus Torvalds who invented Linux kernel in 1991. Many people who started using GNU/Linux don't know Linus, but they know about GNU/Linux as one full package with applications, instead of the Linux kernel itself.

Great job!!
Keep it up

California Goes to Open Source

After Munich and China, right now California, governed by Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to use OpenSource software in California in order to reduce operational costs. But there were some debates on some decision made about a different section of the cost-reducing white pape that was considered dangerous and stands against the ideology of open source enthusiasts. Shlomi Fish originally wrote this letter to California's governor :

Dear Mr. Schwarzenegger,

The purpose of this letter is two-fold:

1. To congratulate you for your choice to utilize open source software in California in order to reduce operational costs.
2. To warn you that the path you take in a different section of the cost-reducing white paper is dangerous and stands against the ideology of open source enthusiasts.

I am not a U.S. citizen and do not live in California. Nevertheless, as a user, developer, and advocate of open source software, I feel I have the right to express this opinion.

First of all, the compliment: Using open source software within California will not only reduce cost but also increase productivity and give a better user experience. While a few studies seem to have shown that open source software has a lower total cost of ownership than the commercial equivalents, I refer you to the Check the Facts campaign, by Hamakor, the Israeli NPO for free and open source software. This study (in Hebrew only, unfortunately) debunks these claims.

(Some non-open source software may be superior to its open source counterparts and may provide a better TCO. It's not necessary to prohibit using it, just to make sure open source software is used whenever it is possible and appropriate.)

I sincerely hope that the State of California will not give in to lobbyists of proprietary software vendors and will maintain the benevolent stance it has chosen.

Now to the other issue: I noticed in a different section of the document some disturbing plans and ideological errors that are not compatible with the free and open source software ideology:

1. "Intellectual Property" -- There is no such thing as intellectual property. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets are all valid, but serve different purposes and are different things. They should not be placed under the same umbrella.

Another harmful aspect of the label is associating them with property. Copyrights, patents, and the such are not property, neither legally nor morally. Infringing on them does not harm the original invention or copy, which is the case for theft and other violations of one's tangible property. While it isn't ethical to violate copyrights, trademarks, or patents, it is still much less harmful than violations of one's physical property. Therefore, please avoid using this term in the state's publications from now on.

2. Using patents to garner money -- This is probably a violation of federal law, but one still has to respond to it, because even if this is the case, its presence in the document is disturbing. Many patents and especially the vast majority of software patents are harmful and damaging. Most of them have prior art, and a lot of the others are quite trivial and meaningless. Issuing software patents and trying to enforce them is perceived by the open source community as a clear sign of being a software parasite. It is my hope that the State of California will reverse this decision and stress that it won't follow this path.

A final note regarding this issue is that it is that you probably won't garner much revenue this way anyway. It is very hard to make money out of software patents. Most software patents are issued by companies to protect themselves from future patent violation suits, and most of them are not truly enforcable. There is a very small number of patents that are valid and hold.

3. Copyright violations -- I think you misunderstood what copyright means there. The only time copyright can be enforced in regards to software is when the violator misuses a copy of the copyrighted code. Using different software that is similar in functionality (or even identical) which is not derived from the original code does not constitute violation.

Or did you meant that you wish to sell this software? Again, there may be issues with the federal law here. Still, selling software that was developed for in-house use of the State of California is OK, as long as it does not concern the interaction of the public with the state. If it does, then it must be released under a suitable open source license, as otherwise California citizens and residents are at the mercy of the state.

Once again, congratulations on taking this bold move of switching the State of California to using open source software. Just please correct the harmful elements.

Sincerely yours,

Shlomi Fish

I hope that the governor had time to read this letter and made some changes before there will more critics about the plan.

When will this fenomena happen to Indonesia? Even though IGOS (Indonesia Goes Open Source) programs has been running, but still i haven't seen the boom effect from it :(

I'm addicted to CSS

I met with the CSS about a year ago, but i never used it, since HTML and PHP was enough for me to design some web pages, but then as time flows, i realize that my opinion were wrong. HTML was not intended to build layout, but to perform structural document. I got frustated by using <table> tag as it made the pages became heavy and i have to wait until it finished loading all the pages. It also made pages became harder to maintain, because i have to look at the right table row or table data to fix a glitch in it.

The best tool to produce layout is by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), a way to separate a document's structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML; CSS saves time—you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly.

Few months ago i started the Indonesian OpenOffice.org Documentation Project. It was the first time i started to use CSS to build the web pages and the result can be viewed at OOo project page, but it was so simple as i started to learn position and float to build table based design. The page is build without any <table> tag at all and i hope that this will increase loading time, since the CSS file will be downloaded once and the browser (or server) will cache them in some period of time.

Right now, i have redesign my personal website using CSS and the result can be viewed on my personal site. It's still a bit messy when viewed in 800x600 and there is some wide gap when viewed in 1024x768 (because i want to build a liquid layout which can follow the resolution used by the visitors, but it wasn't a perfect pages), but i will redesign them in my spare time (just wait for my next updates).

The conclusion is i'm addicted to CSS now and i will learn about CSS much more than any other subjects. It has one advantage. Right now, i'm taking one subjects which require a knowledge of web-design knowledge since i have to build a web pages, so CSS would come in benefit for me. In order to fulfill my thirst of CSS, i have download all CSS specification from W3C and also bookmarked some CSS sites to learn their techniques. I have also bought Eric Meyer's book (Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS) and i'm planning to buy another book (Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide), but i hope that the book will arrive when my uncle came back to Indonesia in October this year. Can't wait till that day comes :)

SpamAssassion 3.0 : The new seed

As i already said on my previous post, SPAM is cosidered as one of the most bandwidth consuming activity around the Internet world, because many junk emails sent from an unknown persons and came to many people's inbox without being asked first. People get annoyed with this and system administrator became very busy to tackle this junk email while sepparating them with the original email that should arrive in the user's inbox.

The old way to prevent spam was to delete and ignore spam emails, but these methods doesn't work anymore, since spammers is enhancing their method to proof that your email address is valid and they will try to sent you more junk mails. Sometimes they give a URL to confirming that you do not want to subscribe again, but this is just a trick. This URL will confirm that your email is a valid one and.... boom.. your email will soon became spammer's target.

Some people invented mail filtering to prevent junk or spam email gets into user's inbox by filtering the words or subjects in the email's body. One of the best email filtering is SpamAssassin, an OpenSource project that is widely used in many email servers around the world. SpamAssasin works by giving a point on each email. The higher the points, it will soon considered as spam. SpamAssassin has a learning method which will improve their filtering capability by adaptively learn the characteristics of spam. This will help system administrator to maintain spammers list on the SpamAssassin track records.

In the next one or two years, SpamAssassin Project will release their newest version, 3.0. Some of the next feature are (taken from ONLamp.com):

New Rules
Naturally, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 includes many new static rules, and changes the definitions and scores of several old ones to reflect the changing nature of spam. For example, many rules focused on pharmaceutical spam are now included--drugs seem to have caught up with mortgages and pornography in the distribution of spam.

Updated API
The SpamAssassin Perl API has been extensively rewritten; software that invokes SA from Perl, such as proxies or mail server filters, will require recoding. The two popular filter applications discussed in the SpamAssassin book, MIMEDefang and amavisd-new, have already been updated to support SA 3. Mailers that integrate with SpamAssassin by invoking the spamc program or communicating directly with the spamd daemon don't need to be rewritten.

Plugins
More significantly, SA 3 now supports plugins--new modules of code that extend SA's capabilities. SA 3 is distributed with four working plugins:
* RelayCountry:
* Hashcash
* URIDNSBL
* Sender Policy Framework

SQL and LDAP Support
With earlier versions of SpamAssassin, maintaining per-user configuration was difficult in virtual hosting environments when users did not have shell accounts on the mail server. SA 3 greatly eases this difficulty by allowing per-user preferences, Bayesian data, and auto-whitelists to be stored in an SQL database, rather than in files in users' home directories. Example SQL tables are included for both MySQL and PostgreSQL servers. Alternatively, per-user preferences can be stored in an LDAP database, which is a boon to sites that have LDAP-driven mail setups. Available preferences are more extensive, as well; for example, new directives allow email from or to given addresses to opt out of the Bayesian classifier. A pharmacist whose mail is on a host that uses a site-wide Bayesian database can now avoid having their legitimate email classified as spam because SA has learned from other users' mail that "sildenafil" is a spam token.

Internal Networks
SpamAssassin has always distinguished trusted networks from untrusted networks, and does not perform DNS-based blacklist testing on relays on trusted networks. SA 3 introduces the new concept of internal networks, which are not only trusted, but assumed to be under your direct control. By separating trusted and internal networks, SA 3 can do a better job at detecting spam originating directly from dialup hosts but still exempt trusted sites from blacklists.

Licensing
SpamAssassin 3.0.0 is now an Apache Software Foundation project, and is released under the Apache Software License instead of the GNU General Public License or Perl Artistic License. As these licenses all fit the open source and free software definitions, most end users won't notice the difference. If you plan to redistribute SA 3 as part of a larger system, however, you should be aware that the Free Software Foundation does not consider the Apache Software License to be GPL-compatible, so you may run into difficulty if you wish to combine SA 3 with GPL code.

The Upgrade Experience
Although the upgrade process is fairly straightforward, you can expect a few gotchas with a new major release. Some command-line options have been deprecated or renamed. The extremely common required_hits and rewrite_subject configuration directives have been renamed to required_score and require_header (the latter capable of rewriting more than just the Subject header). Integration with Mail::Audit is no longer supported, and older Bayes database files may require special care to update to the new version.

Let's hope that this release will reduce more spam emails into our inbox :)

phpMyAdmin : New Release

After releasing their first RC release few weaks ago (with more then 45000 downloads from all over the world), finally phpMyAdmin project releases their second RC yesterday. In their first RC release, there were some debates from the users about the new look of phpMyAdmin. Some of them gave bad marks on the UI (User Interface) that was developed and integrated in the RC1, but some of them were satisfied with it (including me). It was good enough and we need some changes here (since it never changes for the last 10 releases or maybe more). You can view the comments on the forum.

Right now, they have launched their second RC. I have downloaded the file and i'm trying to look at it when i got home tonight. I hope that there are some new updates about the UI and also the facility that was bundled into the second RC. Can't wait to try it later.

phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields, manage privileges,export data into various formats and is available in 47 languages

CSS is blooming

In the old days, we picked up HTML as our primary language to design web pages and we use some programming language to make it more interactive. HTML was designed to be structural language, but it was misused to be layout language because there weren't any technology to be used at that time. One of the most used HTML tag was <table> since it could make some posisitonal layout and split pages into some different parts to be designable using images or any other techniques.

Few years later, W3C releases a new standards that was used to design layout of web pages and it was called CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and now, it has reach version 2.1 (and version 3.0 is being developed). CSS provides more elegant way to produce more creative pages rather than depending on the <table> tag. For an example of great (i mean GREAT) CSS-based websites, you can peek inside csszengarden, Mezzoblue, and BrightCreative.

These pages was built on CSS and no tables at all. Yess... it was created using CSS only and no table at all. They combine creativity and arts together to built a wonderfull pages that you won't seen them before. Would you imagine what can be done best with HTML without CSS? You would depend on images to build a sophisticated pages, but with CSS, you could use a simple mix of colour and positioning elements and there you have your great pages.

The standards has been published by W3C, but ironically, not every browser implement the same standards of CSS (and also HTML and XHTML), so sometimes people are having trouble to get their pages constantly on every browser using CSS, but with the development of CSS and XHTML, this problems seems to be reduced in the future, where incompatible browser will be left behind and people will use the most compatible browser. For now, the best browser in my opinion is Mozilla, including Firefox. It is updated quickly and they adopt new standards and technology in every releases. Unfortunately, there is an exception, which at CSS. CSS2 still not fully implemented, but i hope in their next release, there will be a big updates on this compatibility.

People are recommended to change their table-based design into CSS-based design because it would give them an improved performance and also reducing complexity while maintaining the pages, mostly if you maintain a lot of web pages. Don't forget to check your CSS for validity at W3C's CSS validator.

Blogger is extraordinary

Blogger is one of many weblog sites that provides a free blog facility. It has so many featured technology from Google. It has RSS Feed, posting via mail, and many customizeable features that you can use.

In the last 2 days, blogger was having some trouble with it's system and it affected many accounts, including my accounts, so i couldn't publish my posts. I opened up their help pages and write some comments about the system failure, and today, they already fixed it. That was quick (only 1 day). They responded many customers quickly, so many people doesn't have to wait for a long time to get their problem fixed.

There are some known issues which has to be handled, but i think they will get quick progress on it. For a list of known issues, you can view them in the Blogger help : Known Issues section. If you are searching for howto about blogging, you shoud visit Help section

Well done Blogger!!!! and keep it up :)

Liferea Again

Maybe you are bored with another liferea entry, but i'm not. Today, i'll publish good news rather than bad news since i've managed to start Liferea again with help from my friends Jaya. He wrote some hack to start up liferea in his box and he managed. I tried that method also and this works. Finally i can read RSS Feed again with Liferea capability.

By the way, here is what Jaya wrote in his blog (In Indonesian Language):

Di Debian, versi liferea saat tulisan ini dibuat baru 0.53b. Versi terbaru adalah 0.53c. Jadi aku coba install dari tarball. Mozilla aku uninstall, aku hanya menggunakan gtkhtml untuk html renderingnya. Untuk dapat meng-install dari tarball, maka aku butuh library development gtkhtml2, yang di Debian bernama libgtkhtml-2-dev.

Ketika proses ./configure aku mendapatkan pesan sebagai berikut:

checking for GtkHTML2 support... yes
liferea 0.5.3c

Build Mozilla Plugin............ : no
Build GtkHTML Plugin............ : yes

Use X Session Management........ : yes

Jadi library development buat gtkhtml2 sudah dikenali. maka tinggal make dan make install. Namun ketika coba dijalankan:

jaya@jarkom04:/usr/local/bin/liferea
Mozilla is not available...
Available browser modules (/usr/local/liferea/lib/liferea):
No browser module configured!

** ERROR **: Sorry, I was not able to load any installed browser modules! Try the --debug-all option to get debug information!
aborting...
Aborted

lho, kok kaga dikenali? Isi dari /usr/local/lib/liferea adalah:

liblihtmlg
liblihtmlg.la

Dari situsnya liferea, jika menggunakan Mozilla, maka akan ada library *m.so. Jika menggunakan library gtkhtml2, maka ada library *g.so. Dari direktori diatas, adanya libhtmlg, yang tentu saja untuk gtkhtml2. Hmm, jadi kurang .so nya. Aku coba dengan menggunakan symbolic link:

link -s liblihtmlg libhtmlg.so

Aku coba jalankan:

jaya@jarkom04:/usr/local/bin/liferea
Mozilla is not available...
Available browser modules (/usr/local/lib/liferea):
-> GtkHTML2 (liblihtmlg.so)
No browser module configured!
trying to load browser module GtkHTML2 (liblihtmlg.so)
Use of deprecated SAXv1 function endElement

Voila! Sukses

After reading this, i tried his method to make a symbolic link to create liblihtmlg.so and it worked. Thanks Jay :)

After starting up Liferea, i found that this has been posted in the Liferea Forums which was posted by Lars, the original writer of Liferea. It says "if you have problems with the 0.53c source tarball please run autoreconf --force or autogen.sh before building the source. i've build the tarball with automake 1.4 and the install scripts seems to install the html rendering module libraries without the .so extension. When the program is run it cannot find them without suffix." In his email (i asked this question to him), he said that it was his fault of using the old automake to build the scripts.

So the problem solved and everybody is happy :)

btw, Lars has posted the latest Liferea version which is liferea-0.60test1. which includes bugfix and vfolder supports. You can download them at http://liferea.sourceforge.net/liferea-0.6.0-test1.tar.gz

Blogger.com broken?

Today (8th September 2004) i tried to post my blog, but blogger.com keep reloading in the publishing page. I don't know what's going on. First i thought that my entries was to big so it couldn't be handled, but after i reduced it, it was still refuse to post up.

Hope this can be fixed as soon as possible.

Any other member received this bugs?

CPanel

After a clash between Managed.com and AngelNetworkz, some sites have been down for about three weeks, including KPLI site, which hosts http://jogja.linux.or.id. I can't access CPanel and it says
The following error was encountered:
* Access Denied.
Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

My personal site is also affected since i can't access my CPanel and i think that the cron is not working right now, so the news from linuxtoday will not be updated.

I hope that there should be a fix on this and i can update my website as soon as possible.


UPDATE :
My personal site has been fixed to update their news feed. It should works again :)
i don't know where the problem came from, since i'm still unable to login into CPanel using browser but it's ok with links (text-based browser under Unix).
does CPanel only supports links? nehhhhhhh....

Liferea

I have just reinstalled my Mandrake yesterday and everything goes well (with some bugs but i have fixed them, even though it was a serious bugs that often happen in KDE applications, mostly in KNotify which somehow always crashed everytime i reboot my computer for the first time after the installations). There were some minnor bugs that i think that should never appear (such as computer freezing when logging out from XWindow or after lilo screen finished displaying all the messages), but you know, this was human made and humans made mistakes, so it was forgiven. Besides, nobody pays you for your patches for Linux kernel and applications. They did it as volunteer to OpenSource projects.

Every applications has been restored as it was (not quite good to say restore, i mean reinstall) and every data has been restored (now this is correct). But still there are one big problems that i haven't solve it yet, which was Liferea installations. It was compiled smoothly, but after installation, it won't started and saying that there were no browser modules. I asked Lars, the author of Liferea, and gave me one solutions, but after i tried that, Liferea still won't showed up :(
I have installed all the requirement, such as GtkHTML2, GConf2, libXML2, and Mozilla, but still haven't find the right solutions for now.

Liferea is a Linux Feed Reader which its main function is to fetch RSS feed and display them in the applications. It was a great applications and i recommend it as your primary RSS Reader applications. I personally enjoyed using Liferea, but i suggest that there should be an improvement on the installations instructions, since it was quite confusing (especially if you have never installed Liferea before). I also hopes that Liferea would be included as the default packages that comes with other packages in a big distro, such as Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, or Gentoo.

Any help with Liferea installations would be appreciated :)

Order SP2 to receive bugs?

Microsoft Inc is making a great progress on delivering an update for Windows XP called Service Pack 2. Few weeks ago, they were only downloadable from their website, but right now, you can get your SP2 in many ways. I think that Microsoft is trying to reducing the bandwidth usage since SP2 is approximately 200 MB and maybe larger. It has not count any other downloads, such as patches, Windows Media Player 10, DirectX 9.0c, and Office's updates.

In this weeks, Microsoft has tried to deliver more SP2 to their customers in Japan by using Japan's post office. They are ready to deliver more than 1 million copies of SP 2 around Japan. Meanwhile, another approach is done by providing an online form that you can use to request Windows SP 2 in the form of CD and Microsoft will deliver them free of charge within 4-6 weeks. For Indonesian user, you can order them via Microsoft Indonesia.

While Microsoft announced that this updates will fix numerous bugs, many vendor are suggesting their clients to delay the deployment of SP 2, since it can cause more trouble than getting a happy, stable, safer Windows version. Some people said that this updates still contains some bugs which should never appear after installing SP 2.

I have ordered the CD and in 4-6 weeks, i will receive the updates, but i won't install it before i'm sure that this update will not force me to reinstall my Windows. I didn't order SP2 to receive more bugs!! Maybe we should wait for another updates from Microsoft regarding glitches on SP 2.

Caller ID : What's Next?

SPAMMING is considered one of the main activity that consumes a lot of bandwidth and also privacy issues, since people send mass emails to another person and it's filled with unwanted information, such as MLM (Multi Level Marketting), product promotion, etc. Many companies have tried several ways to reduce spam, but unfortunately, the spammer is getting smarter and they always create another way to reach their target.

Microsoft, represented by Bill Gates (Chairman and Chief Software Architect) announced a detailed vision and proposals on how technology can be used to help put an end to spam, including outlining the company's Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative (CSRI) and technical specifications for the establishment of Caller ID for E-Mail.

He thinks that this technology will change the economic model for sending spam and put spammers out of business. Microsoft believes some relatively simple but systemwide changes to the e-mail infrastructure are needed to provide greater certainty about the origin of an e-mail message and to enable legitimate senders to more clearly distinguish themselves from spammers.

Meanwhile, The Apache Project has rejected the Sender ID proposal for e-mail user authentication, saying the terms of Microsoft's license for the underlying technology makes it incompatible with open source software. The decision illustrates how anti-spam efforts have become the latest battleground between the open source community and Microsoft. Microsoft's patents were an immediate problem for open source community.

In the contrary, many vendors have agreed to support this technology, such as Go Daddy, Symantec, VeriSign and America Online. Some people thinks that Called ID will eventually be history in short time.

If only Microsoft would change their license available under a license that is compatible with the GPL [GNU General Public License] or other open-source licenses, maybe the OpenSource projects will gladly accept this technology and work together to prevent SPAMMING became larger activity that can't be stopped. Many OpenSource projects have great skills about this technology. For example, Sendmail has released the first implementation of its Sender ID authentication specification for testing under the Sendmail Open Source License, a variation of the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license. This module has been released as an open-source plug-in to the Sendmail MTA (Mail Transfer Agent). The Sendmail open-source mail filter, or "milter," is available from Sendmail.

What will Microsoft do with this situation? Will they change their license or will they agreed to work with OpenSource projects that have great community around the world to make this projects heads into goals? We will see in the next three months.

Gnome 2.8 RC1

After a long wait, GNOME finally released 2.8 RC1 for public consumption. Note that this is still considered beta release, so don't use it as your production release. This release is a good news for GNOME fans which sometimes jealous with the quick release and good user interface polishing that KDE did on their projects. Both are the well known window manager that runs smoothly on every distro and available on major GNU/Linux's distro. The main difference between both of them are the library that being used. GNOME is using GTK+ while KDE is using library from QT, which i think is better than GTK+ library from the point of view of user interface, while it has the same functions.

The schedule notes that the release of GNOME 2.8 will be 15th of September, but there are no guarantees that they will release in that day, since GNOME, just as KDE is a big project and bugs always there to be fixed. We just hope that there will be more bug fixed and improved performance before the official release.

There will be some changes in core components of GNOME 2.8. Changes to core GNOME modules include things like GNOME VFS (the virtual file layer) and Nautilus (the file manager), ie. things that affect the whole desktop. There will be a new GNOME theme called Indubstrial. It is a modified version of Industrial proprosed as the new default theme for GNOME 2.8. The other theme proposed as the new default theme is a theme called SmoothGNOME or "Simply Smooth", based off the Smooth engine. There are also some proposed modules that people want to be integrated into GNOME 2.8, like Evolution ( groupware client for GNOME), GNOME System Tools (set of tools for configuring the operating system underlying the desktop), VINO (VNC server for the GNOME desktop), GNOME Volume Manager (a daemon designed to handle volume mounting and management under GNOME), GNOME Keyring Manager (a tool for managing secrets stored in the GNOME Keyring daemon that appeared in GNOME 2.6), and GNOME Nettool (an application for giving network information such as IP addresses, traceroutes, whois lookups and almost everything else associated with networks). You can view their screenshots at Davyd Madeley's website.

GNOME runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (commonly called Linux), Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin. GNOME includes powerful features such as high-quality smooth text rendering and first class internationalization and accessibility support, including support for bi-directional text.

If you are GNOME's fans, your wish will soon come true and in the next two weeks, you will be able to upgrade your GNOME desktop into the latest GNOME version 2.8.

Compiler

I'm confused with another task. This time the task is coming from Compiler subject. I have to parse some number and classify those numbers is it legal or illegal from Pascal point of view of real constans. I'm using regular expression with PHP since i feel that web-based application is more simple to develop and debug instead of standalone application, such as Visual Basic or Delphi. These applications are not multiplatform, so i picked up web-based application which is multiplatform as long as you have your browsers ready (i'm wondering, what computer who doesn't have any browser available?)

I've found some of the regular expressions using PHP manuals and Stevens's book (Regex). Thanks once again. I'm trying to modify this regex pattern to suit my task's requirement.

Well, anyway i missed my first class because i forgot that there were a class, since in the last two weeks, there were no class due to my lecturer hasn't came back from his homeland, Deutch. I remembered that i had a class at 1 PM and the class started at 10.30 PM. In that time, i was playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Well, that's my first idiot thing in this semester. I hope there will never be any stupid things again.