Slackware Rocks

I have finished installing Slackware 10.1 on my laptop and it rocks. Although it used a text based installation, but it was easy and fast, you don't need to have a big RAM. The installation was fine and everything is working (i have tested the Internet connection in my campus), although i haven't tested the WLAN, since i haven't download the driver for it (i just download it yesterday).

Right now, i'm planning to upgrade to KDE 3.4, which has been released. The Slackware packages have been ready and it's being downloaded right now. In short time, it will be installed on the laptop. I was wondering if i should try to install GNOME 2.10.1 Dropline or not, since i never uses GNOME for my daily activity.

Trying Slackware 10.1

I'm trying to install Slackware 10.1 on my laptop after Mandriva and Ubuntu 4.10 failed yesterday. It's on the process right now. If it fails again, i will try to install Mandriva again and this time, i will use another partition, /boot to hold up the kernel images, since the / partition is in /dev/hdc9. Let's hope it can be done today.

Firefox 1.1 Alpha

I read an article about Firefox 1.1 Alpha that soon will be available from EWeek:

"The Mozilla Foundation is preparing to release the first alpha version of its next Firefox Web browser within the next few days. The release, called Deer Park Alpha 1, is targeted to Firefox's base of testers and will include developer-focused features such as support for additional Web standards, extensions improvements and a way to report incompatible Web pages, Mozilla officials said.

Deer Park also serves as a sneak peek into Mozilla's plans for the full Firefox upgrade, due for a broad public beta later this summer. Firefox 1.1 is slated to give users additional pop-up blocking tools and a more visible process for installing Firefox updates, including security fixes. The alpha release is built on the newest version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine that will provide a performance boost to Firefox as well as add support for such standards as CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets Level 3) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). For SVG, which is a next-generation method of rendering graphics on the Web, Firefox 1.1 is supporting a subset of the SVG Full 1.1 specification."

Finally, the long wait for a browser that implement and support CSS3 will be over (even though it's still on development and it will be partial support). At least, more website can be viewed with Firefox without having to install IEView extension.

Testing New Hotspot

Yesterday i went to my campus and tested our new hotspot which was in development testing. At first i was quite dissapointed, since it took a lot of time to connect and got a good signal. Even when i got an excellent signal, it took a lot of time to connect to internal site. After few hours, it was getting stable and at 12 PM, it was quite fast and i could open some heavy sites in few seconds. I'll try testing it tomorrow and hoping that tomorrow will be better than today.

Ubuntu 5.04

I have just received my Ubuntulinux CD which i ordered last month from Ubuntu's website. I ordered 20 CDs and i only have to pay Rp. 7000 for the packaging fee. It's great. I tested on my girlfriend's computer and it worked fast with 256 MB RAM. Nice work. Bravo for Ubuntu.

Bad Stomachache

Yesterday i got a terrible stomachache and i couldn't got online at night. I couldn't even sleep until 1 AM (ohh i missed the Champion League, but i have just read the news at LiveScore and Liverpool won the game by penalty shootout).

Right now, i'm configuring my new laptop and transferring all of my data to the new laptop. For now, i'm still using CDRW and USB Flash Drive. Let's hope i can finish itu this week and start installing Mandriva 2005 LE on next week.

Watching Star Wars

On Tuesday, i went to Solo along with Yahya Kurniawan to watch the last episode of the Star Wars movie, since there wasn't any good movie theatre in my city. We left at 9 AM and it took about one and a half hour to reach Solo. We got into the SGM (Solo Grand Mall) and took for a walk for a while, since we got the wrong information about the time. We expected that the movie will be started at 12.15, but it was played at 12.45.

The movie was great and i have no regret that i had to go to other town just to see this movie. Before watching this movie, i'm not too interested in Star Wars, but perhaps i should see from the beginning until the last edition. Can't wait to see another great movies.

Multi Level su Access.

I just found an interesting articles about Multi Level su Access which can improve GNU/Linux's security, unfortunately, you have to modify your own configuration file, since it's not implemented by default by any distro yet. The articles uses Slackware for the distro, but i think it can be used for any other distro as well. If you are interested, please visit CoreHackers

OOo 2.0 Beta Build 1.9.104

OOo has released another development release, OOo 2.0 beta (build 1.9.104). There aren't many fixed or enhanced features on this release just like the previous release (build 1.9.100). You can view all the enhancement on the Release Note.

One of them that was quite interesting is "Mandrakelinux becomes Mandriva Linux now. 'Mandrake' word is prohibited from now by Mandrakesoft, SA.." that was revised in build 1.9.101 but wasn't released as public release. It's now included in the 1.9.104. Please have a look on it and give your comments on the Issue Tracker at OOo's official website

GPRS Connection

My cousin bough a new mobile phone and also a Matrix card which can be used as GPRS modem and Internet connection at home. The mobile phoce was first can't be used since there isn't any suited driver and it has been changed with another phone. Right now, it's online and it's downloading GunBound, one of Online Games. It's quite slow, so i can't used it to often, since it will make the download process slower.

Careless Comments

Recently, i received a new comment from anonymous in SuSE 9.3 Linux fails home-use test. Here is his/her comments :

"You are clearly a complete and utter idiot. Obviously you have not even tried to look at this os in any serious way, nor it seems that you are able to follow simple prompts.True the icons you mentioned during installation are not there - that is because it is an underlined link like a web page. Any fool can see that. Also installing software after installation on suse in a breeze. Simply click on YAST, enter password and then install software. A list of what is available comes up and you simply go through the package groups or search by a keyword. Tick the box and suse does the rest for you. Simple, but perhaps not simple enough for a halfwit like your inbred self..

I use it every day for home use and it is far more stable than Windows, virus impervious and totally reliable. Not to mention that 3D games run much quicker.

On that note, NVidia cards work out of the box, but for accelarated graphics you do have to download the driver. That is because Nvidia choose it to be that way. After all, you have to download the driver for windows also if you want decent performance?

Finally, open your eyes a little and you will find a icon for Beagle under Apps->System->file system->Beagle.

If you are going to write a review, how about doing it properly and actually giving it a go. That way you will be able to give an accurate portrial instead of a ballsed-up ignorant and false abortion of an attempt.

Go back to Windows, the computer community does not need fools of your nature attempting to review anything more technical than a computer chair."

Well.. the fact is that (s)he didn't read my blog carefully. I took the article from TheInquirer.net and post it on my blog, not my own words. I used Mandriva on my daily use, not SuSE Linux.

New Hotspot

Next month, my campuss will launch a hotspot for being used by all students. Right now, it is on testing phase. I will try my new laptop on the campuss as well. For first phase, the bandwidth will be limited and security will also be applied, since wireless has no security per default, so security policy must be defined with carefully. I can't wait for next month.

Saxon, Tomcat, NetBeans, and Java

For several days, i've been getting headache on Tomcat, Java, and Saxon, both in Windows and Linux platform. First, i couldn't transform a XML file into HTML file using saxon 6.x. Then, when i started NetBeans 4.1, XML Parser Exception occured (even though it can be skipped by pressing the OK button). Next, i couldn't access my MySQL database using JConnector along with JSP. In Linux platform, it's getting worse. Tomcat installation was done, but it couldn't be started and XML Parser Exception was raised again.

On Wednesday, i just found the solutions. First, for the Saxon problem. The solution is to upgrade it into Saxon 8.4. The second problem was instantly disappear when i upgraded to Saxon 8.4, so i fixed two problems with only 1 upgrades. Nice :)

In the previous day, i tried to put the MySQL-connector in the WEB-INF/lib directory, and it worked. I can access my database again. Good work. It's all working on Windows platform. Let's see if it works too on Linux platform (it should be).

Faster Updates

In my opinion, Mandriva's update process is faster than Mandrake's. Perhaps this process is connected with the Connectiva's main focus that maintain the stability of their products. That's a good point, since users also need security, while Mandriva can focus on their nice graphical interface. In this week, there are 2 update on the Drakxtools. Even though i haven't installed Mandriva yet, but i'm downloading it for being used in my notebook in the next few days.

Memorial CD

Finally our memorial CD has been finished. It was a long wait before this project is finished. It is intended for generation 2001 of Informatics faculty of UKDW. It is made with Flash and also contains personal information about 2001 members. There are 2 stickers on it also, with "22" text, it's our campuss code for informatics faculty. Nice job guys :)

Final Project Finished

Finally i got my grade on my final project. I asked my grade last saturday and the result was A. It was great and i was very happy. Right now, i'm finishing my administation for Yudisium, which is a lecture's meeting to decide whether a students officially passed the study or not. It's quite complicated, because many documents have to retrieved and filled along with signatures. Let's hope i can finish it this week.

Inside the Xbox 360

Here are the articles about the latest Xbox 360 From PCWorld:

Consoles are setting the pace for video- and computer-game development, and the Xbox 360 is the first in a new series of next-generation video game systems that we'll be hearing more about in the next week.

The public unveiling of the new Xbox 360 last night trumps announcements expected next week from Microsoft rivals Sony and Nintendo--both companies are expected to provide information about their new systems at next week's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

The Xbox 360 is clad in a sleek white and chrome design that can rest horizontally or vertically. Equipped with wireless game pads, the new Xbox is a far cry from the clunky plastic hell and tangled mess of wires that was the original Xbox. It's about one quarter to a third smaller than the existing unit, so it takes up less space in your home entertainment rack and your carrying bag (if you haul your Xbox to gaming parties).

Nuts and Bolts

Microsoft's Xbox 360The Xbox 360 features 512MB GDDR3 RAM, eight times as much as its predecessor. More RAM equals sharper visuals, cleaner textures, and more detailed game environments. The Xbox 360 will be able to render massive environments loaded with an eye-popping level of detail. This is good news especially for gamers who prefer to do their gaming on high-definition TVs--Microsoft notes the new console will be able to support all standard and HDTV modes, with multiple levels of anti-aliasing--a technique which softens the sharp edges of polygons to create a more natural look. (Here's what else Microsoft has to say about the Xbox 360.)

Looking further into the guts of the box, the Xbox 360 features a 500-MHz graphics chip developed by ATI, the same company that makes graphics hardware for leading PC manufacturers, including Apple. The chip features 48 pixel shader pipelines--enough to produce dazzling special effects that we haven't yet seen on consoles or PCs.

At the core of the Xbox 360 is a set of three symmetrical IBM PowerPC processor cores, each running at 3.2 GHz. That's a faster clock speed than the fastest Mac, and it significantly outpaces the single 733-MHz Intel processor that graces the original Xbox. That brute-force CPU power will come in handy as Xbox game developers boost polygon counts in characters and create even more realistic looking environments for their games.

Good news for home-entertainment buffs who double up their video-game system as their home DVD player, too: Xbox 360 works out of the box as a DVD player; you don't have to buy any extra hardware to get it to work like you do with the current model. Progressive scan is now supported for smoother and sharper DVD playback. And the console touts a 20GB integrated hard disk drive that's detachable and upgradable if necessary.

As far as we know, Xbox 360 games will ship on standard and dual-layer DVDs, unlike Sony's PS3, which will use high-density Blu-ray DVDs. Recent speculation suggests that Xbox 360 may be outfitted with HD-DVD instead, but Microsoft won't comment.

Online gameplay is central to the new Xbox, and there's an Xbox Live-enabled toggle button placed dead-center on the controller. The new console also features built-in Ethernet and support for the 802.11a, b, and g variants of Wi-Fi wireless networking (802.11g is what Apple uses in its AirPort Extreme cards).

Microsoft hasn't made many changes from the Controller S that's standard issue on the Xbox now; the wireless controllers are about the same size. Players will also have the option of using the Xbox 360's USB port. And as an added bonus, PC players will be able to use the Xbox 360 controllers, too.

Future Is Soon

There are still some unanswered questions, the biggest being, does the Xbox 360 support backward compatibility? Microsoft has been quiet on the subject, and that's not a good sign. We'll hopefully know for sure at E3.

So why wouldn't the Xbox 360 be able to play original Xbox games? Legal squabbles or time shortages could be the issue, but the biggest barrier may end up being purely technical: the differences in the proprietary rendering technology used on NVidia's Xbox graphical techniques and rival ATI's Xbox 360 graphics techniques are different enough to potentially cause problems.

From a technological standpoint, the Xbox 360 is best described as absurdly powerful. Sony and Nintendo have a bitterly long row to hoe if they plan on one-upping this technological titan. But in the end, all the technology in the world won't save you if you don't have great games to back you up; Microsoft's biggest challenge will be roping in top-tier publishers (such as Rockstar and BioWare) and providing amazing Xbox 360-only games. It's already at a good start, considering Microsoft's recent deals to work with Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and Tetsuya Mizuguchi.

CSS Formatter and Optimizer

Sometimes, making optimized CSS codes are quite difficult, especially for people who never used CSS before. If you have trouble about CSS and need some optimizer, you can try to use CSS Formatter and Optimizer. In this page, you can input your CSS code and define some options and after submitting your code, it will optimize your CSS code. There are several layout options that can be used to reflect the output result.

Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet

After finding the CSS Cheat Sheet, i found another cheat sheet, which is Mod_Rewrite Cheat Sheet from the same website as the previous CSS Cheat Sheet. You can view the detailed picture or read the explanation. Here is the introduction :

The mod_rewrite cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing useful information about mod_rewrite. It includes a list of flags for the RewriteRule and RewriteCond directives, list of server variables, a regular expression guide and several examples of common rules. A description of what is on the cheat sheet follows, or if you are impatient, you can go straight to the full size mod_rewrite cheat sheet.

Monthly Updates

Microsoft has announced the updates for this months in their website and amazingly, there were no updates for Microsoft Windows XP SP 2. Was it a good or bad news? I don't know for now, but if Windows XP SP2 doesn't have critical vulnerability for this month, it is a good news, but if the vulnerabilities exists and it hasn't been fixed or patched, it is truly a bad news.

Final Revision

Finally, i have finished my revision on my final project. The only things left is to print the pages and ask for some signatures from my lectures. I hope i can finish it this week and next week will be a freedom for me :)

Addon For BSOD

The next version of Microsoft Operating System Products, Microsoft Windows Longhorn will use fewer BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) that was feared by many users, since it was a screen that was displayed if your system had a problem and the system was terminated to prevent more trouble damaging your other system or data. As the addon, Microsoft will add a new screen, called RSOD (Red Screen of Death) for really .. really fatal errors. Here is the screenshot from Joi Ito's web:

New Certification

I just finished another online test on BrainBench, which was HTML 3.2 and Linux Administration (General). I got 4.31 out of 5.00 for HTML 3.2 and passed the master level for the test and 3.19 out of 5.00 for Linux Administration (General). You can view my public transcript.

Week of Vulnerabilities

Last week was full of vulnerabilities news. For example, Noel Davis Security Alerts discussed about CVS, PostgreSQL, Squid, Gaim, Debian's lsh, Xine-lib, Caroline, Convert-UUlib, Rootkit Hunter, snmppd, Kommander, kimgio, RealPlayer and Helix Player, xli, and Debian's samba.

Benjamin D. Thomas, wrote Linux Advisory Watch on the Linux.com :
"This week, perhaps the most interesting articles include ethereal, prozilla, smartlist, kdewebdev, wireless-tools, gimp, bootparamd, tcpdump, kdelibs, vte, php, words, util-linux, lapack, gnuutils, and glibc."

If you joined the BugTraq mailing list, perhaps you'll get more updates than list posted here, because it was updated daily.

OOo 1.9.100

As the development cycles continues, OpenOffice.org has released another developer version, OOo 2.0beta build 1.9.100, which resolves many bug fix and also some enhancement as usuall. You can download them from Download Center and find the right mirrors. For more information about the new build, visit the OOo 1.9.100 Release Note.

One of the most voted bug was bug #47833 : missing quickstart functionality for linux. In the latest version, 1.9.100, OOo has integrated Quickstarter in Windows platform and they are enabled by default. I haven't tried the Linux version and will do so tomorrow.

Yahoo Announces DomainKeys

Yahoo! has announced a new technology called DomainKeys to reduce spams which is getting wilder from time to time. Here is the definition from their official website :

DomainKeys is a technology proposal that can bring black and white back to this decision process by giving email providers a mechanism for verifying both the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent (i.e,. that they were not altered during transit). And, once the domain can be verified, it can be compared to the domain used by the sender in the From: field of the message to detect forgeries. If it's a forgery, then it's spam or fraud, and it can be dropped without impact to the user. If it's not a forgery, then the domain is known, and a persistent reputation profile can be established for that sending domain that can be tied into anti-spam policy systems, shared between service providers, and even exposed to the user.

If you want to see how it works, visit their official website for more technical explanations and also some FAQs.

Two Exams to Go

There are still two exams that i should finish this semester, which are Distributed System and Embedded System, which will be held on 9 May and 13 May, next week. After finishing this, i shall finished my revision on my final project. I missed one important section and i have to correct it in one month. Let's finish this and start to install the new Mandriva 2005 Limited Edition :)

Database Comparison

Are you looking for some good comparison between database products? If you do, perhaps you can use this wiki. It compares MySQL 4.1 dan PostgreSQL 8.0. Here is the summary of the comparison :

MySQL is simplier than PostgreSQL but much faster. MySQL doesn't support many advanced features that may be important in huge relational and complicated databases. But for JRA1 measurement architecture MySQL should be adequate (we probably wouldn't use the most advanced features).

See the full comparison

Mandrivaonline

I'm very eager to try the Mandriva Online services, which can be used to easily download new packages or security updates directly from the Internet. Here are some benefits from Mandriva Online Services:

Perfect system security
Mandrivaonline provides automated software updates including security patches, bug fixes and errata notices. All updates are based on your machine's specific hardware configuration and installed software

Notification of updates
Mandrivaonline can inform you when new updates are available:
By e-mail
By an applet on the desktop

Automatic updates
With automatic software updates you no longer need to worry about keeping your Mandriva Linux systems up-to-date. Manage all networked Mandriva Linux systems with one Mandrivaprofile: Understand at a glance the status of all machines

Flexible scheduled updates
Access to logs : Quickly view the history of all updates
A personalized page at www.mandrivaonline.com

CSS Cheat Sheet

I found one good reference for those who loves to play with CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). It's a CSS Cheat Sheet which can help people who has just learn CSS to know CSS better. It's not as complete as the official CSS Specification, but at least, you can get some information about CSS in brief. It's on PNG format.

OOo NLC Conference

OOo NLC (Native Lang Confederation) was holding another Conference via IRC on #ooonlc in irc.freenode.org. We talked a lot of subject, related to OOo development and also helping and encouraging people to get more involved in the OOo Development. I missed the last two conference, but i managed to join the last conference. The title of the last conference was "Addon development: another way to bring value to OOo". You can download the slide on the http://native-lang.openoffice.org/conference/. The moderator is Daniel Carrera.

Multiple Paths

Just like the TCP/IP Routing that can use multiple paths to deliver packets from sender to receiver, my friends also uses multiple ways to congrats me on my birthday. Some people uses email, SMS, Yahoo Messenger! and the other also uses Friendster and send it as a new testimonial. What a creative one. Thanks to everyone, especially my auntie who lives in the Indiana, USA right now. He called me when i'm the lab. Sorry for the short conversation, but i'm not used to talk loudly in public area :(