OOo 2.0.4 RC3

OpenOffice.org has released their third beta version this week and hopefully, they will release the final version next week (well, it will be a week delay though, but i think it's worthed rather than delivering a buggy application which will be used by many people around the world).

As you know, there will be a new format introduced in the next release of OpenOffice.org, OXT which will be the new format for the new extension for OOo. I'm looking forward to see many new extensions build to improve OOo's main functionality, just like Firefox's success by making an extension for the products

Gaim 2.0 Features

We all know that Gaim is the most well known IM client on GNU/Linux platform. It's simple and working on most platform (Windows and GNU/Linux). It can be used as an alternative for YM for Linux which is not developped again. The current version is 1.5.0 and the latest development version is 2.0.0beta1. The road to 2.0.0 final is a long way and therefore, Sean Egan made a Planet Gaim to aggregate all of Gaim's developer to talk about Gaim's status right now.

He notted that he will release another beta version in short time and here are some of the new features that will be included in this release:
* Global Buddy Icon Selector
* Buddy List Group Indenting
* libgaim and gaim-text

Everybody that had used Gaim will be glad to see the webcam support included in the final version. I also heard that it will support audibles for YM also. It will be nice features as well if it will be included :D

Extended to End of 2006

I totally forgot that i have 2 Mandriva Club account and the one that will expire in the next 33 days is the original account. I got that account at the beginning, but i wanted to have another one which uses my primary email address, so they create another one for me and since i helped the translation project for Mandriva Linux 2006 release, my account was extended until the end of 2006, so i can still provide the Power Pack Edition link :D

When Mandriva Linux 2007 is released, i think my account will be extended again (i hope).

Mandriva Linux 2007

Mandriva Linux 2007 is out today (or should i say yesterday) with lots of updates to the distribution itselfs. By default, it came with kernel 2.6.17, GCC 4.1, GNOME 2.16, KDE 3.5.4, glibc 2.4, Xen 3.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.7, and OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 (it's too much to list all of them). Here is the review taken from LinuxLookup:

The key innovation of Mandriva Linux 2007 is the spectacular AIGLX and Xgl 3D-accelerated desktop. Mandriva is the only distribution to provide both technologies, making it compatible with the widest range of hardware; a special tool features auto-detection of the best 3D solution for your hardware. Mandriva is particularly happy to have achieved this major breakthrough in desktop appearance.

Enjoy Mandriva Linux 2007 :D

Update #2: When i browsed Mandriva Linux 2007 Page, it says that it will be released in a couple of days, so i think it's not downloadable right now. So, i'm removing my username/password information for now and i'll post it again when it has been officially announced.

Extensions on OOo 2.0.4

OpenOffice.org will have an Firefox's extension-like on their next release, 2.0.4 which is in RC2 version now. The current OpenOffice software can accept some extensions (using UNO and ZIP format), but the upcoming 2.0.4 version will have new extension format, OXT. That format can accommodate extensions written in a variety of programming languages, so you can also build your own extensions if you like and send it to OOo to be included or being put on the repository. Open-source extensions will be housed at a central site, extensions.openoffice.org. People will be able to download the software there. However, because OpenOffice is governed by the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), it's permissible to link proprietary extensions as well.

You might want to read Charles Schultz's blog post also to know more about this.

By the way, there's a feature being requested by Indonesian people in OOo which asked for backup/restore autocorrect in OOo (Bug ID #69491). I think it will be helpfull if this feature will be implemented in 2.0.4, but i kindda doubt it, since it is in RC2 and new features are freezed and perhaps it will deployed in 2.0.5.

Final Fantasy XII

The next sequel of the popular RPG game from Square Enix, Final Fantasy XII has been developed and scheduled to be released on 31 of October 2006 (in North America of course, since it has been released in Japan. Thanks to Oskar for the correction). You can look at the trailer on their official site. It's an amazing movie trailer and i'm very impressed by this trailer. You will have a smoother video and supported by stunning visual effects.

Too bad i don't have PS2 console. I have been enjoying playing Final Fantasy Series since Final Fantasy VII on PS console and continued to Final Fantasi VII, IX, X, dan X2 version. I also travelled back to the ZSnes console to play the old version of Final Fantasy Series and it's still fun to be played :D

This will be the front cover of the Final Fantasy XII (Credit by Square Enix)

Opera 9.02

The fastest browser in the world (that's what they claimed for) has arrived with new version, 9.02. It's only a minor update, but it contains a security update. Here are the changelogs:

User interface
* Fixed quick find field in Windows panel.

Mail, messaging, and newsfeeds
* Fixed high CPU usage while downloading big emails.
* Properties can now be accessed within the contacts and bookmarks panel after deleting items.
* Image attachments can now be saved using the context menu.
* Accessing a news link when no news server is configured will now prompt to configure a server.

Display and scripting
* Fixed a DOMParser bug affecting some menu scripts.
* Click events are now correctly received in designMode.
* Implemented support for Node.selectNodes, Node.selectSingleNode, and Attr.text.
* Improved rendering efficiency for repositioned elements, as in Flickr's updated "organizr".
* Allow large integers to be used in object declaration property names, as on the comments form on Slashdot beta.

Plug-ins and Java
* Fix for playing sound clips on Amazon.

Security
* Fixed an OpenSSL RSA signature verification flaw. See the advisory.

Miscellaneous
* Multiple stability improvements, including a stability issue on my.yahoo.com.
* Improved handling of downloads when the disk is full.
* Improved handling of Web site logins on slow connections.
* Improved handling of WAP text inputs.

Windows-specific changes
* Fix to allow opera to be set as default browser using the prompt at startup.
* Fix for attaching read-only files in mail.
* Support for the Windows XP Media Center Edition remote control.
* Added new settings in the Java section of opera:config to allow you to override the system defined JRE.

Online Riddle

Today i got an email from my almamater mailing list about an online riddle game called Notpron. It's quite easy at te beggining, but after few levels, you will see that it's getting harder and harder. It has more than 100 levels, so if you have a dedicated Internet connection and also a lot of spare time, just try this puzzle. They claimed that it's the hardest online riddle puzzle available on the Internet, but only you can prove that. There are several other online riddle listed on Wikipedia, so choose one of them and play them :D

SlackWiki

Today i browsed LinuxQuestions forum and i found a link to a slackware community based wiki site which provide tutorials and also other information about Slackware. Nice site. If you do need information about Slackware, please consider this site as one of your primary reference beside SlackBook and LinuxQuestions.

Last night, i also upgraded my kernel into 2.6.18. It has lots of new features and also drivers, so i had to fill some questions first before i made the compilation.

Kernel 2.6.18 is Ready

Finally, after 7 RC version had been released by Linus, final version of 2.6.18 kernel is ready to be consumed by many Linux users. The long changelog describes all changes has been made to the latest version (beware, it's quite long so it will take some time to be finished completely). Also, you can see in more human view by looking at KernelNewbies. Can't wait to try this new kernel at home :D

Dissappear Again

Again, i had my friend list dissappear on my Yahoo Messenger application. I didn't realize when was the exact time, but this morning i noticed that had 0/0 in my friends list. When i tried to use my own laptop, it's fine, so i guess the problem lies on the Yahoo Messenger on my office laptop. Maybe an upgrade will fix this. This is not the first time Yahoo Messenger doesn't display all of my friends list.

Well, at least my friend can still see me online and we can share and discuss things online via Yahoo Messenger.

Power Failure

Today, most of area near my office has power failure and it lasted for about 8 hours (it's reported to be available around 8 PM at the evening). It's an unplanned power failure and it effect most of Jakarta area (but some of them were turned on again in few hours, mostly because they are business buildings which is important. I hope the PLN won't do that again in the future, as it will make most of work plan are screwed up.

SpellCheckers Problems

Yesterday, i was asked by one of my new friend about problem that he had on his company that has relation with OpenOffice.org. He said that the spellchecker features were not working on his XP and Ubuntu computers. I test the document that he sent to me and he was right. It didn't notice the errors (features was typed fetures and the spellcheckers ignored it), but when i tried to make a new document and activate the spellcheckers at the beginning, it would recognize the errors. I was thinking that it might have problems when we didn't start the auto spellcheckers features from the start, so i send a bug report to the OOo and today i have got the answers.

The problem lies on the language settings for the document itself. It uses English (Australia) for the language and by default, only English (USA) and English (UK) dictionary that was given by the OOo team, so it wouldn't recognize the errors. When i changed the language into English (USA), it will work perfectly.

The conclusion is if you have such kind of problems, please look at your language settings first. If you don't have the language dictionary, you can download them from OpenOffice.org's website.

Template/Clipart Creation Contest

Documentation project of OpenOffice.org has held a new template/clipart contest. The purpose of this contest is to enhance the cliparts/templates collections within OpenOffice.org package. Winners will get a total of US$5000 (divided per category) provided by the sponsor, worldlabel.com. When your templates are accepted, they will publicly available from OpenOffice.org's template repository.

The competition will run from September 13, 2006 to October 13, 2006 at 23h59EDT (GMT-4). Submissions received later than 23h59EDT (GMT-4) on October 13, 2006 will not be eligible. Awards and prizes will be announced on November 1, 2006.

For more information about the project, please visit Contest Page

Last Day of Training

Today will be the last day of five days training as it will be the execution phase, where in the last four days, we have been educated for project awareness, project tracking, project estimation, and also making the project plan. We do have the project plan and all of the schedule of the mini project that has been developed for this purpose.

The target was 30 solutions of Brick by Brick, 30 solutions of Square by Square, 12 solutions of Cubes to Holder, 12 solutions of Cubes to Cubes, 10 solutions of 50 pieces puzzle, 1 solution of 100 pieces puzzle, 1 solution of 200 pieces puzzle and 1 solution of 300 pieces puzzle. The time was set for two hours and it will begin in 10 AM this morning.

Let's hope it will be finished as it's a tight schedule and let's finish this training with joy and glory :)

Hijacking Busway

No No No... i'm not a hijacker that you might think of. We are not actually hijacking the busway, but the road that busway used to have for their private road. Today, we went from our office to U-Smart office and it was a heavy loaded traffic jam, so when there's a chance to move to busway's road which is definitely faster, our driver took the chance (as there're more than 5 cars that did the same way) and we were driving away as the other cars stopped because of the traffic jam.

By the way, this is not my first experience, as i have experienced this before. It was back few months ago when i arrived at the airport from Jogja. I took airport bus and the way to Blok M (the last terminal) was very very crowded. So the police allows the airport bus to use the busway roads and we were very very fast and watching other people stucked at the road. It's like riding in the highway :)

Got a New Title

My girlfriend has passed her final exams and she finally got her new title, S.E (Sarjana Ekonomi) from Duta Wacana Christian University. Although she had problems when doing the final project (we called it skripsi), finally she made it and it has been approved. Now, she is waiting for her graduation which will be held on November/December. Congratulations to my cute girlfriend :)

Photos of her can be seen in my Friendster account.

Little Time

It seems that i have a little time in the morning and after the training to check my emails and updating my blogs (this blog and my SlackBlogs). It's quite tiring, as i have to go to the training was held (in U-Smart office in Mangga Dua area) in the morning and then i got to back to the office to check my project status (as i'm the project leader), but luckily today i got a good news from one of my colleagues which works on the same project. It's been a tiring day, but finished with good news is OK and acceptable :)

One Week Off

Next week (starting tommorrow), i will have a project training and workshop once again. This time, it will be a Planning and Tracking Awareness Workshop and Estimation Awareness Workshop. This workshop was already held last year to all of the employees in QnAp Asia, and except for me, and all the employees from UKDW (i only had a chance to get the last day and it was fun). Now is the time to start the workshop again to improve our skills of planning, estimating, and tracking a project.

During this week, my activities on the net will be minimum and i don't know if i have time to update this blog. I don't even know if they had Internet connection there. A week without Internet is not a good news. I think i'm already Internet-addicted :)

Kernel 2.6.17.12

New -stable kernel for GNU/Linux has been introduced, 2.6.17.12. It's been some time since the last release and no wonder if it contains quite a lot of updates in this release. You can view the ChangeLogs if you would like to see what changes has been made in this release. Most of the changes are taken from the main tree which is on -RC6 right now and will be included in the next -main kernel version, 2.6.18.

Too bad most of them are not related to my own system, so perhaps i will skip this version and wait for the next release or even jump to 2.6.18 if it has comes out.

Having Spam in Your Inbox??

Do you have spams in your inbox? Maybe the answer will definitely YES. Most of our inbox has been filled with spams from all around the world. They can be in plain text or an image (more advanced techniques to bypass the spam filter). How do we solve this? Well, if you use Postfix, then you might try to use this solutions from HowToForge. It will guide you to configure a default Postfix installation and add Spam Assasin with a range of RBL (Realtime Blacklists) and RHBL (Same but different), Greylistings and Helo Checks.

One note before you start implement this tutorial : There's no 100% secured inbox unless you limit your inbox by yourself. If you publish it to the Internet, then someday a spam will come and visit your inbox :D

GNOME 2.16 Released

GNOME fans around the world will be very happy this week, as GNOME has released another minor updates to their product, GNOME 2.16. Although GNOME 2.16 is a minor update, it adds some highly desirable functionality and touts much-needed aesthetic improvements in addition to a veritable mountain of bug fixes. You can read the detailed article in ArsTechnica. It is quite detailed and will give you a brief about what's new in the next GNOME, even though you will get the most detailed by looking at the RELEASE NOTES.

Well, i'm not a big fan of GNOME, and i rarely (or never) used GNOME (only onced exactly when i first installed Slackware 10.1 which shipped GNOME. I tried to look what GNOME looks like, but then i prefer KDE and it still true up to now). GNOME has been removed also in Slackware 10.2 and also in the next 11.0 release, but Slackware users can use other alternatives, such as FreeRock GNOME or Dropline GNOME.

Kernel 2.6.18-rc6

The next RC (Release Candidate) of the next Kernel release, 2.6.18 have been released by Linus. The changelog is rather smaller than the previous release. Maybe Andrew Morton and Linus wants to make it more stable by rejecting unstable code for this release and will think about it in the next release. I don't think 2.6.18 will be included in Slackware 11.0 as it will need some acceptance test by Pat to be included in /testing (not in /extra as 2.6.17.11 has been proven stable for now). Maybe in the next two weeks, we will be able to see the shinny 2.6.18 if this should be the last RC version.

New Blog

I made a new blog few days ago using Blogger Beta and i called this SlackBlogs, which will be a place where i put everything related to Slackware. It could be the latest Slackware changes, or even my Slackware changes. It's still new, so you won't find many post over there, but i tried to update that blog regularly like this blog. This blog can also be used to write some tutorials related to Slackware or GNU/Linux in most cases and people can have a look on it.

The design was made as simple as possible, just like Slackware which adopts simplicity approach. I didn't change the design at all. I just use the template given by Blogger Beta and it was fine for me. I have put a technoratti links and also feed burner over there also.

Happy Blogging and Slacking :D

Firefox 2.0 Launch Party

There will be another party when Firefox 2.0 launched in 6 of September 2006. If you are interested, please visit Firefox 2.0 Launch Party Organizer. Up to now, there has been 19 people who will join the party. Are you the next person?

Slackware RC4

Finally, the next RC has been out after few days without any updates to the -current. Most of the updates were due to updated kernel and MySQL packages which has an unintentionally ABI changes, so most of the packages had to be recompiled. Here goes Slackware 11.0 RC4. Can't wait to see the final version of Slackware 11.0 released.

Congrats for Pat also as he became a new uncle :D

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2

Mozilla finally released their second beta version yesterday with quite a bunch of updates. Here they are:

* Visual Refresh: Firefox 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience. For instance, toolbar buttons now glow when you hover over them. We will continue to improve the look and feel throughout the release candidate process.

* Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled. Please note that at this time we are using a limited list to test the core Phishing Protection framework within the browser. Users are encouraged to wait until a future release of Firefox 2 to verify the accuracy of the list of Web forgeries.

* Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.

* Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.

* Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.

* Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds: Users can decide how to handle Web feeds (like this one), either subscribing to them via a Web service or in a standalone RSS reader, or adding them as Live Bookmarks. My Yahoo!, Bloglines and Google Reader come pre-loaded as Web service options, but users can add any Web service that handles RSS feeds.

* Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a seperate application.

* Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title". Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.

* Improved Add-ons manager: The new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.

* JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.

* Extended search plugin format: The Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.

* Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.

* Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.

* SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.

* New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.

If you want to see their new look, you can try to install it or just browse here. It does looks better now and getting slicker than before, but we won't get the final release for now. There will be another beta version after they got a lot of feedbacks on the new features that has been implemented in this version, mostly for the phising protection. We'll just see if this new product will be more sensational than their first 1.0 release.

OpenOffice.org Premium

Do you need a full collection of OpenOffice.org packages, such as documentation, clip arts, templates, fonts, and etc? If yes, then you might want to look at OpenOffice.org Premium project. It provides an addon to the original OpenOffice.org packages, including templates, cliparts, samples and fonts. It's developer come from Hungarian's Native Lang project. Thanks to them, people will only need to download the packages once and it will include all of them.

Please bare in mind that the word premium doesn't mean it's commercial. Its still free as usuall. So what do you waiting for? Grab them and use it.