Nice Farewell Party

The farewell party is great. Most of my colleagues came to the office to participate on the BBQ party. It's more like a reunion rather than a farewell party. Well, it supposed to be like this, as this is not a permanent farewell, since i'm still alive, just moving back to Jogja to continue with my study. The BBQ party went so wild, but we managed not to burn the house hahahahaha....

Working in this company is so fun. The working style is not very strict as in other companies, i'm pretty sure. I will miss my colleagues and also the way of working in QnAp Asia. Thank you for everything guys (and gals) for what you have gave to me...

Items Moved

At Saturday, the truck that picked up my luggage has arrived and finally they brought all of my items back to Jogja. I only prepare some clothes to stay in Jakarta for about 5 days since i'm leaving next Wednesday to Jogja. My motorcycle was among the items that were brought back to Jogja (by now, it should have arrive). Today is my last day in my office and as i said yesterday, we will have some kind of farewell party here in our office twice (one for celebrating my birthday two days ago) and one for my farewell party. It's gonna be fun today :D

Better Internet Connection In The Future?

Telkom has agreed to joined AAG (Asia-America Gateway) Consortium in order to upgrade their international bandwidth into 70 Gbps (and they will have to pay about US$40 million for this). This step is taken to solve the bandwidth problem for years, but the main questions is that whether it will improve the Internet connection in Indonesia significantly. Having bandwidth that big must be supported by good infrastructure, so it can be used by a lot of people, not only in big cities like Jakarta, but also in smaller cities, so everybody can have Internet access wherever they are. It's useless if it is fast, but only some people who can use them.

Cost is another problem for Internet connection in Indonesia. It's been a long way since many people has gave their opinion about how expensive Internet connection in Indonesia compared to other Countries in the South East Asia. In Singapore and Malaysia, the government has taken a step further by planning to provide a free hotspots all around the country (it has started and it shall be completed in about one or two years again). What about ours?

Schedule Confirmed

Finally i made up my schedule after i resign from my current office. My last day will be on Monday, 30 April and we are going to have some small farewell party at the office and invite some other colleagues and ex-colleagues (thanks for coming and sorry for someone who's still in the Netherlands hehehe). Tonight i will move all of my package in my place and i will stay at my auntie's house until i leave to Jogjakarta. That means i will have to go to the office by motorcycle on Monday (Urgghhh, it will be a traffic jam everywhere), but that's OK. It's just for one day.

I have also confirmed my ticket to go to Jogja which will be in Wednesday. I have just called the travel agency and they will send the tickets at noon. Since i already have a fixed schedule, i can use the non-refund tickets, thus i can get the lowest ticket available. Well, i hope there will not be any delays again :D

I probably won't be blogging during Monday and Wednesday, but let's see about that. I will try to get Internet access, since i have to moderate new users from Linux Forum as well (or they think that their account hasn't been approved). Another solution might be change the registration method to email again for a few days (which leads to some work for the moderators to remove the spammer's post) until i arrived in Jogja where i can get Internet access again.

A lot of things to be done in Jogja, so i start making up plans also.

World Without Cellphone?

Few days ago, i had to go back from the office early, because i didn't feel well (i have posted this also) and at that time, i forgot to bring my cellphones which i put inside the drawer. I realize that i forgot to bring it after i changed my clothes. My side pocket seems to be empty and at that time i realized that i forgot about my cellphones. When i tried to rest, i was thinking, what will this world be without cellphones? Cellphones are not only means of communication nowadays, but also being used for many other things, such as Internet Banking, Personal Information Manager, Internet access, and many more.

Imagine that you don't have any cellphone in your hand today and when you go out and you need to call somebody, you will have to find public telephone first before you can call your friend/business relation. Everything seems to be simplified ever since cellphones comes into this world. No wonder the usage of cellphones has surpassed usage of local phone, since besides it's getting cheaper, it's also portable and sometime smaller in size, so you can bring it on your pocket.

Few years ago, cellphones only being used by many rich people, but now, even six years kid also uses cellphones (even though they probably use the camera to take pictures), but it proves that cellphones has been accepted as a global trend and almost everybody has cellphone (some has more than one cellphone). It's a phenomenon trend that cellphone could bring.

KDE Screen Saver

One think i like in KDE, the window manager that used on my Slackware system is that it already contains a lot of screen saver (if you install the package) and most of them (well, the 3D ones) are very attractive. One of my favorite is Euphoria. Look the screenshots below

Recently, i browsed to KDE-Look and browsed the Screen Saver section and i find this interesting screen saver called KCometen3. Basically it shows a comet-like effect combined with some Compiz's Cube-alike plugins (it will show your desktop as the default background, but you can change that). Since they only provide source and ubuntu package, i had to use the source and i compile it manually, but at the end, i used checkinstall rather than make install. This command will generate a tgz format which is being used by Slackware. What is the reason for this? Using tgz means It's easier to remove and it will make sure to clean up every files the package had installed. Here's the screenshot for KCometen (I have to retry several times to get the best one, but i know it's not the best one, so you might want to try it by yourself if you are interested in this screen saver).

Much Much Better

After congratulating my girlfriend for her birthday last night, we talked a little bit until 00:30 this morning and finally i could took a rest and right now i'm feeling much much better than yesterday. My head are still quite heavy but it's not that dizzy as yesterday. I took Vitacimin as a supplement when i feel my body is weakening and it does effective for me as it contains enough C vitamin to raise the body endurance. So if you think that you are feeling ill, go get some rest and take a supplement which includes C vitamin (Thanks to Nurul for his tips on getting Yahoo's emoticon works on Blogger)

PHPMyAdmin 2.10.1 Released

After few months of development time, finally PHPMyAdmin 2.10.1 has been officially released. This version is bug fix version only and it fixed several security problem, such as XSS Attack and other bug fixes. Please refer to their Release Note for more information about this release.

Just short information about the project:

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 50 languages.

Not Feeling Well

Last night, after i went back from my friend's house, i started to felt dizzy and i got a headache. I didn't know why, but my prediction is that i am too tired in the last few days. Today i forced myself to go to the office, because i have to give something to my friend, even though my head and body was heavier than usual. Perhaps i will go back to my house after lunch time if all of my works is already finished and took some rest. Tomorrow is my girlfriend's birthday and i want to be the first person who congrats her at midnight, so i had to take some rest as soon as possible.

Last year, i almost got a typhus and it happened also in April, which forced me to take quite long rest for about three weeks. Is it annual sickness? I don't know and i don't want to happen each year. Everybody likes to be healthy and so do i.

For those who registered to Indonesian Linux Forum after lunch time, perhaps you will have to wait until tomorrow before i can approve your activation request since i will not be available until tomorrow. Sorry for that. It's not what i expected, but i do have to take some rest before it get worse.

Update (15:00) : i forgot to bring back my cellphones which i left it on my desk, so i had to get it back and when i reached the office, it was started to rain, so i had to wait there for a moment and update this blog again :(

NBA PlayOffs 2007

Well, NBA Fans will definitely like it. NBA PlayOffs 2007 has just started. 32 Teams from west and east division will fight for the finals which is scheduled to start at June 7 2007. Last night i saw one of the matches, between Houston Rockets and Utah Jazz and Rockets won by 84-75. It was broadcasted by Jak-TV. I was amazed by how T-Mac played the game. Struggling only scoring 1 point in the first half, he scored 23 at the end of the game with 16 on the third quarter. Awesome!!! Yao Ming gets the game's high with double-double (28 points and 13 rebounds) to secure their first match on their home.

Actually at the first half, Rockets were behind the Jazz with 33-42, but they fight back and makes the Jazz trailing 26-11 in the third quarter. This was the Rocket's momentum and at the end, they deserve to won the game.

I'm planning to watch every matches that was broadcasted by Jak-TV. They had published their schedule on their website, so if you don't have ESPN/StarSports access like i do, just watch Jak-TV or other local TV which broadcast this match.

Tariff Changes

Mobile-8 has changed it's tariff for their prepaid products. I just got a confirmation SMS message that now they have changed their tariff to IDR 20/seconds to other operators. They also use IDR 25/seconds rate if you calls to home numbers (local/non local). Since they use per second rate, so you will only pay what you have used. For example, if you spend 25 seconds, then you will get charged 25x25 = IDR 625, not being rounded to 30 seconds again like before.

For more information on Fren's tariff, please see their official home page.

Download Legal Music

Few days ago, my friend played his play list and i heard that he has Stevie B's songs (only two of them). He's one of my favorite since when i was in junior high school. Luckily i still remember some of his songs lyrics, such as Dream About You, Funky Melody and Because I Love You. Today i am looking for the albums, but it's very hard to find it, since it was an old song. I saw the entry in MP3, but it cannot be downloaded. I searched Google (as usual, my favorite search engine) and finally i came to EZ-Tracks which provides legal mp3 downloads and you can download them (or to be used as a ringtone in your mobile phones) without any fees. You can download the music from ITunes also, making it easier to add it to your IPod, IPod Nano, and IPod Shuffle products.

At first, i'm confused, since i couldn't download anything, but after that i realized that i have to use the Music Manager provided by them in order to download the songs, so i installed it and finally the download page offers a .ezt file which is some kind of metadata about the songs and it will directly available in Music Manager and start downloading (see the screenshot). This application also offer an online radio, but i haven't tried this yet. The user interface is very simple. You will get a download queue, download folders, and download status (and also the online radio i discussed just know).

When you sign up, you will have 100 free songs to download and if you need more, i think you can buy some kind of credit to download more songs. Use this chance to download old songs that you couldn't find it anywhere.

Update (21 September 2007 : 7:54 AM): EZ-Tracks has launched a Facebook.com application this week that allows Facebook users to install a free music player on their profiles. This Facebook application is called ‘Free MP3 Music Player’ and allows all of their EZ-Tracks music to be played on Facebook user profiles completely free! Isn't that nice? Start using Ez-Tracks now

Spiderman Advertising

When i went to Taman Anggrek Mall yesterday, there was a new event on the main hall, which is the advertisement of Spiderman 3 which should be available on movie studio starting next month (May 2007). Too bad none of us brought our camera, so there are no pictures of it, but you might want to see it by yourself by going to Taman Anggrek Mall. I don't go to the hall (i just went to Gramedia), so i don't know exactly what event they are holding on.

It's very common to see this kind of event in Taman Anggrek Mall. It seems that the main hall is never empty. They always had an event in this mall. It's interesting, since visitors will likely see different things when they visited this mall (unless you go very often, then you might see the same event for a few days before it changes to another event).

Another Books

Today, i went to Gramedia again in Taman Anggrek Mall with my colleagues. Actually i wanted to buy a book from my colleague who's leaving the office today, but i found something interesting there. They have great sale for imported books (the old one) up to 80% and i saw some books which were interesting and finally i decided to bought one of them, called Extreme Programming Installed. In Amazon, the book's price is $34.99, and the original price was IDR 238.850 and i got 80% discount, so i only had to pay IDR 47.770, nice right? There are still some books there and the offering is still available until the end of this month (30 April). I don't know whether it will be available on other Gramedia book store also, but i bought it on Taman Anggrek.

Well, as usual, i also bought a novel books and i never missed this one also. I bought The Broker by John Grisham. Hopefully it will be a good novel book.

Michael Dell's Computer

Do you want to know what computer is Michael Dell is using? Check this URL, but don't get surprised. It has the state-of-the-art computing platform in many components and the price.... don't ask (it's very expensive). Here's some specs from his PC/Laptop:

Dell Precision M90 at home
Hardware:
* Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 Processor
* 4GB DDR2 667Mhz DRAM
* 17" WXGA+ Widescreen LCD
* 160GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive
* 8X DVD +/- RW optical drive
* NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 512MB

DellTM XPSTM 710 H2C
Michael's Home Computer
* Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz
* Vista Ultimate
* 4GB 667MHz memory
* 320GB RAID 0 ( 2 x 160GB 10k drives)
* DVD+DVDRW
* Two UltraSharp 30-inch widescreen flat-panel monitors
* Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 graphics cards
* X-Fi Sound Card
* Dell AS501 FP speakers
* McAfee+
* Razer Taurantula Gaming Keyboard
* Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse

DellTM XPS M1710 Mobile Gaming System
* Intel® CoreTM Duo Processor T2600 (2.16GHz, 2MB Cache, 667MHz FSB)
* Vista Ultimate
* 4GB of Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 memory
* 512MB NVIDIATM GeForceTM Go 7900 GTX Graphics Card
* High definition integrated stereo sound with Integrated subwoofer.
* Stereo 2 watt per channel main speakers and 5 watt, class D subwoofer with bass reflex port
* 8X DVD+/-RW with Dual-layer DVD+R write capability
* 120GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive
* 17" Wide-Aspect UltraSharpTM TFT Active Matrix WUXGA (1920x1200) display with TrueLifeTM

Dell LatitudeTM D420 on the road
* Intel® CoreTM Duo Processor U2500 (1.20GHz, 2MB L2Cache, 553MHz FSB)
* Vista Ultimate
* Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (224MB)
* 60GB SATA 10K RPM w/ 8MB DataBurst CacheTM
* Dell HyperConnectTM for extended wireless connectivity
* Dell Wireless 5700 Mobile Broadband CDMA EVDO (Verizon Wireless US)
* Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth internal card
* 802.11n-ready, and features the Wi-Fi CatcherTM
* Integrated Smart Card Reader, Trusted Platform Module 1.2 and UPEKTM finger print reader
* Dell Embassy® Trust Suite by Wave Systems security software
* 1.5GB DDR2 shared 533 MHz
* 24X CD-ROM, 8X DVD+/-RW, 24X CDRW/DVD
* Wide-aspect 12.1" WXGA (1280 x 800 UltraSharpTM resolution)
* Dell Road ReadyTM certification
* 90 Watt AC adapter; Primary 9-cell/68 WHr Li-Ion battery

Precision 690 for work
* Dual-Core Intel® XeonTM 5080 3.73GHz, 1066 FSB, 2 X 2MB L2 Cache, 130 watt
* Intel® 5000X chipset
* Vista Ultimate
* Quad-Channel DDR2 Full Buffered DIMM Memory
* NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 4500 - PCI Express x16
* SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM with 16MB DataBurst CacheTM up to 500GB
* Dell 30" Widescreen UltraSharpTM Flat Panel Monitor (2)
* Microsoft Office 2007
* Dell Workgroup Laser Printer W5300n

The interesting part is that even though Dell Computer hasn't started to sell pre-installed Linux operating system on their product, it doesn't make Michael Dell not curious with Linux, and he is using the latest Ubuntu version, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in his Dell Precision M90.

This is one way of advertising their own product, by publishing their product which is being used by an important people, the CEO himself. You might want to see other Global Executive's computer though :D

Burning Failed

Last night i scheduled to download Mandriva One Spring 2007, which consist of one CD (not DVD) of Mandriva Spring 2007, the latest Mandriva distribution based on Mandriva 2007. It was finished in about 3 hours and i have checked the MD5SUM value that it's valid. But when i tried to burn it, it failed at the last stage with an error message like : "Cannot calibrate... " (i didn't remember). I'm guessing it is related with the CD i used. Perhaps i will use another CD to burn this distro and i will try it later on. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next try :D

I just want to try the Metisse and Beryl, since i already tried Compiz and it looks great, but i think Beryl is better then Compiz. The cube rotation is more realistic with Beryl rather than in Compiz.

Mandriva 2007 Spring

Mandriva has released their latest distribution, called Mandriva 2007 Spring which comes in several flavor: One CD (Live CD) One DVD of Free Software Packages and of course more version available for Club Mandriva users.

Mandriva Spring will include the latest version of most package, such as GNOME 2.18 desktop, the latest stable KDE 3.5.6, OpenOffice.org 2.1 (with experimental 2.2 packages available), the latest Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and the upcoming Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0 beta 2. This release also features an impressive 3D desktop software suite, with the groundbreaking Metisse desktop technology, the latest Compiz as well as all the newest and most impressive Beryl plugins - and you thought you knew what 3D-accelerated desktops looked like. It even provides Dolphin 0.8.2, the future KDE file manager, which should be available in the next KDE 4. Nice....

To you Mandriva's Fans, start your engine and download them...

Some reference:
Mandriva Spring
Release Note
Notes
Errata

New MID from Intel

Intel has just demonstrated their prototype for their new MID (Mobile Internet Device) product which is similar to Ariya's N800 tablet. This device will have 4-6 inch of display, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, and Linux filesystems with footprints of about 500MB. Screen resolutions will be 800x480 or 1024x600. The distribution is based on RedFlag MIDinux which uses 2.6.20 kernel.

Below are some screenshots:

The MID device















User Interface of the MID






























Software Architect of the device




















More detail information can be seen on LinuxDevices, UMPCPortal, and ZDNet Australia

New Member in Google Docs

Google has admitted that they are planning to add new member for Google Docs application, which is an online Office suite, designed as an alternative when you don't have Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org installed (probably at your friend's new computer). Currently, they only provide Word Processors and Spreadsheets application, but soon they will add a presentation application, suitable for Power Point alternative. As usual, Google will try to be as compatible with other formats, such as PPT (MS Office's Format) and probably ODP (OOo 2.x format) and SXI (OOo 1.x format).

Google will make use of Tonic System, which they've just acquired. Tonic System is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great partner for Google to make their new application for their Google Docs product. They are planning to release it this summer. Let's hear more news from Google few months again.

Reference:
News.Com
GoogleBlog
Google Groups

Another School Tragedy

There has been another tragedy that involves education institution. This time it happened in Virginia, US. A man killed 33 peoples in Virginia Tech university (Thirty-one, including the gunman, died at Norris Hall; two died at West Ambler Johnston Hall. Fifteen other victims from Norris are being treated at area hospitals). For now, the campus is being closed for investigation by the authority. It's considered the worst school shooting in US History. In fact, there has been a lot of school shooting in the US, but most of the the victim are less than 10. Some people survive by pretending to be dead and they can tell the story to CNN about this.

The first reported shootings occurred at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory that houses 895 students. The dormitory, one of the largest residence halls on the 2,600-acre campus, is located near the drill field and stadium. The second one was at Norris Hall where it took 2 victims.

My condolence to the victim's family. I'm just hoping that this kind of tragedy will not ever happened again in the future.

Reference:
CNN
Virginia Tech University

Wi-Fi Bug in Linux

A critical bug has been found on WiFI driver for Linux platform which enables the attacker to control the victim's computer, even if there's no WiFI (i stressed that out, since normally when you are not connected to any WiFI hotspots, your computer couldn't be accessed by outside people). This bug affects the widely used MadWi-Fi Linux kernel device driver for Atheros-based Wi-Fi chipsets and luckily the developer has provided a patch to fix this, but most Linux distribution hasn't update their package to include the patch, so most of the users would have to do the patch manually.

I personally don't use MadWi-Fi driver, since i'm using Intel Centrino's driver that was already built in inside the Linux kernel package and gets an automatic updates almost every final kernel release. So far, i don't have any problem with this driver and it's working like charm.

Should Vista be Open-Sourced?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from Linux-Watch has wrote an article about Dear Mr. Gates: save Vista, open-source it. In this article, he gave several reason why Microsoft should open source vista and let everybody contribute to the core code for better quality and security handling. He predicted that Vista would have serious security problems and it does, with this month's security release (related to CSRSS and GDI) that includes Vista on it (and probably more will come next month. Here's a text from the original site which described one of the reason why Vista should be open-sourced:

CSRSS is an essential subsystem of Windows that manages most Windows graphical commands. It wasn't rewritten. ANI, on the other hand, is a trivial program that animates cursors. It wasn't rewritten either. So what are we to think? After years of work, after years of being told Microsoft was making security job one, Windows users are stuck with the same old, same old when it comes to security.

He didn't deny that Open Source application or operating system has bugs on it (in fact, every software have their own bugs), but he pointed on how fast the patches are ready in Open Source development compared to Microsoft's monthly cycles. While they are testing the patches, the exploits would have spread via Internet and targeting unpatched system and resulting big loss to many individuals and companies.

Team Medical Doctor

Last night i went to my friend's house and borrowed one of his DVD collection which was Team Medical Dragon. It's a story of a genius doctor called Ryutaro Asada who was fired from his hospital because his friend was scared that he was unable to compete with him and gave a false report to his professor when a patient died in a surgery. Later on, he met Akira Kato, assistant professor of the Faculty of Cardiac Surgery at Meishin University Medical Hospital and he was offered to do BATISTA operation which has high risk for her thesis. It's a nice movie, but i haven't finished it yet. Probably i will finish the third DVD tonight. There are also a comic version of this movie and once i have read them, but not completed yet.

I also borrowed some of his comics collection. I borrowed God Hand Teru, which also a story about a doctor with interesting sense, so in the last 24 hours, i have been reading and watching a lot of medical stuffs around.

Weird Error Dialog

When i tried to do something on my project, i got this error message dialog. It's weird. If you see carefully, the error message is not consistent with the icons displayed. The message stated that the action completed successfully, but that's not what happen with the icon on the left side (X means an error or failed). What i did is try to insert a JPG image as an icon on a form. I don't know whether this bug has been fixed in VS2005 or not, but it still happened in VS2003 :D

Registration Method Changed

Finally after having problems with Spammers for quite some time, i decided to change the registration method (after asking for confirmation to Ronny Haryanto) in Indonesian Linux Forum from email (system will send a confirmation code via email and user has to open the link given) to admin (every new user must be activated by admin). This changes will make admin's work more busy, since he/she has to approve all new users, but i think this is the best for now.

For new users: If your account doesn't get approved in 1-2 days, please mail me (probably it got stuck in GMail's spam filter so it ended up in SPAM folder).

I also have added some new categories because some of the forum member request this for some time. New categories are OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD under Unix Distribution Specific.

Indonesian Version of Blogger?

Pete has announced that Blogger has add 8 more languages on their system, so in total they have 19 languages for now and you can change the language in this URL. I wonder when will Indonesian language included in Blogger? Does this addon will make more people come to Blogger? We will see when it has been realized :D

New Look on Why Project

It's been some time since my last visit to OpenOffice.org's Why Campaign. I think it was one or two months ago, so today i checked the site again and it has been drastically changed. The front page is now has better look and it's more stylish then the original version. They have moved some files also (which makes the local why page became miserable when they link their CSS file to the original CSS file in the why project directory, since it has been renamed).

I might need some time before i have the localize version of the new Why campaign. I already prepare all the resources i need on my local repository and the next job will be translating them into Indonesian and commit the page into OOo's CVS server (well, i do have committed the images to the server since the image will be reused). I hope i can finish this project by the end of this week.

Update (18:13): Some of the pages are already up and running (it's 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Strict). Please have a look on this URL. I will continue to finish this tomorrow and have this done by the end of this week.

Update (12 April 2007 07:05): Now everything is committed to the server and all of the new Why project is finished. I finished this last night :D

Biggest Win Since 1968

This morning, there was a match between Manchester United (my favorite team) and AS Roma on their way to Champion League semifinals. AS Roma won their first match back in Roma with 2-1 victory and that leads United to MUST win condition in order to reach semifinals again after they failed to so in the last few years after they won the treble on 1999 where they hit Bayern Munchen 2-1 after 1 goal behind (thanks to Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solksjaer). Honestly, i did predict that MU will win this game, since MU has a good record when playing at their home base at Old Trafford, but i never expected to have this big win, mostly when most of the player was injured and suspended. I was really surprised that MU knocked Roma 7-1 in their home to reach semifinal with 8-3 aggregate.

With two goals from Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Carrick and also Wayne Rooney, Patrice Evra and Alan Smith, i think it's the payback time after they lost two game before this match (one was from AS Roma and they other was from Portsmouth). It seems that MU has recovered quickly and forget that old story and they regain their confidence in order to step forward to the next level. This win also the biggest win after they defeated Irish minnows Waterford by the same scoreline on the first stage of their run to the 1968 Final.

There's only one word that i can say : WOW

But the game is not over yet. They still have a chance to win treble again if they won all competition they have left (Barclays Premiership, Champion League and FA Cup). I know it's hard to do that, but that's not impossible, so go get it MU :D

Reference:
Soccernet

The scoresheet never lie:

Slackbook Project Updated

Finally i have some time to update the Slackbook again after i left it for several months due to tight schedule and also lots of works to do on my current project. Today i have finished section 8 and a bit of section 9 and i have commit them to the CVS Server. Hopefully i can continue to work on this project while keeping my current work on schedule (this is the main priority). Don't expect to see this project finish on short term as currently i'm the only active person who works for this project. I will need help in order to make this project finishes faster.

It's too bad that the original Slackbook is not being updated again, since there has been a lot of changes after the release of Slackware 11 and also the upcoming Slackware release (11.1). Many people still refer to this slackbook when they tried to use Slackware for the first time. I wish somebody will start updating it and synchronizing it with the latest Slackware release (and probably with the upcoming Slackware release).

Update (12 April 2007 16:21): Section 9 has been committed to the CVS server. I will start translating the next section this weekend or perhaps next week

Zencafe 1.0 Released

Zencafe is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Zenwalk distribution that was aimed for Internet Cafe. Since Zenwalk is based on Slackware, Zencafe is likely to have the same characteristic and it's backward compatible with Slackware, but with some polished design and include some new packages needed by most Internet cafe, such as billing tool, recovery tool, and many other program that are commonly used in most Internet cafe, such as browsers, IM client, Graphics (for capturing screenshot), multimedia), etc.

Recently, Zencafe has just released it's 1.0 version. Included in this release are:
- Kernel 2.6.20
- Xorg 7.1.1
- OpenOffice 2.10
- Gimpshop 2.2.11
- Firefox 2.0.0.2
- Gaim 2.0beta6
- GyachEnhanced 1.0.7
- CCL Billing 0.7.1
- Deepfreeze like tools

Here's some feature included in Zencafe (taken from original site):
* Awesome (powered by GNU/Linux Zenwalk as base)
* Modern (latest stable software)
* Fast (optimized for performance capabilities)
* User Friendly (designed for various internet cafe user technical background)
* Rational (standard internet cafe mainstream application only)
* Evolutionary (netpkg installation, deepfreeze like tool, and internet management software included)

More over, it's maintained by Indonesian people, A. Hardiena (he posted the announcement on Indonesian Linux Forum). If you are Internet cafe owner and you want to migrate to FOSS, i recommend that you should try this distribution and you can also contribute to this project by giving feedback to the maintainer to improve Zencafe for the next release.

So far, only 2 mirrors are provided and one of them is provided by Ozzie in Indonesian Slackware Community Site (FTP). Any other possibilities for mirrors?

Email Pattern With Regex

I was looking for some good pattern to verify someone's email address with Regular Expression. Some quick search on Google has put me on this link which gives me a quick headache, since the code is very very long and confusing (try it by yourself if you don't believe me). I believe there's a lot of good pattern in the Internet, so i tried to look for information in offline version of Microsoft's MSDN system and i got this pattern:
"^([\w-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([\w-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$"

I started to test this pattern and it gives me a good expression at the beginning, until i test to use some combination, for example user.@domain.com or user-@domain.com. The pattern above failed to detect this as a invalid email address (well, i don't know whether it's valid or not based on RFC822, but i never see people use that kind of format). So i tried to modify the pattern above and here's my modifications that can detect that format as invalid email address:
"^([\w]+)(([-\.][\w]+)?)*@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([\w-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$"

What i add was some kind of constraint for characters after there's a hypen or a dot. So if there is a dot or hypen before the "@" sign, then you must have characters after that, or else it will produce an error. You can have as many dot or hypen as you like, so you can input you.long.name.here@domain.com

I hope this pattern can be used by other people who are having problem of finding good pattern for validating email address.

I know that this pattern is far from perfect, so if you find any problem/bug, please let me know and i'll update them as needed.

How To Extend Your IPod's Battery Life

PCWorld has uploaded a video about How To Extend Your IPod's Battery Life. Apple claimed that IPod can be used for about 24 hours (up to) before it needs to be recharged (fully empty), but after some time, it will degrade. You won't get 24 hours again, but probably less than that. The video shows you some tips on how to extend your IPod's battery and maximize it between charges. But, look at the notes below:

Rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced. Battery life and the number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.

There's also some tips on Apple's website (here and here) on how to extend your IPod's battery (actually IMHO, PCWorld's video is based on what information is given here, but they made in visual form).

Hey, Caps Lock Is On

In many services, we always find a form which should be filled in, including Internet. You will have to fill your username/password to check your inbox or to access certain information. In many cases, password is being made as case sensitive, meaning that "hello" and "HELLO" is different. The problem is that sometimes, we push the Caps Lock key without ever knowing it, so the password is typed as capital letters, where it should be in small letter. Thus, the system refuses to let you in, since you don't provide the correct information to the system.

Well, Daniel Glazman has been kind enough to provide a Firefox extension which will notify you when you have an active CAPS LOCK key, called Capswarning. This extension will add a new visible label (with red text) in every dialog prompt which ask for password if CAPS LOCK key is active.

Here's a screenshot, taken from the original website of Daniel Glazman:

Get Organized With BackPackIt

Do you ever write your notes or ideas on a piece of papers? If you do, the probably you will do the same thing with PDA or smart phone, since it's very common to put those information in your gadget (since most people will bring their gadget to everywhere they go). But there's also other way to make it accessible, which is Internet. That's when BackPackIt comes to play.

What is BackPackIt? Well, here's the original definition from the site:

Backpack is a simple web-based service that allows you to make pages with to-do lists, notes, files, and images. Backpack also features a Calendar and Reminders that can be sent via email or to your cell phone at predefined times.

In short, by using this services, you will be able to share your ideas, todo list, notes, and many more. You can do lots of things with this services. And since it can be configured to be publicly accessible by other people, people can also give their suggestions or even remind you if they notify that you had something to do today. Nice isn't it?

I'm Back In Jakarta

Well, i'm back here in Jakarta safely. I just heard that there was a plane accident again in Halim Perdanakusuma airport, but not a commercial plane i guess. I heard from Radio that was broadcasted while i'm in the airport bus going to Blok M to be picked up by my sister. Luckily this time there was no delay (well, actually it got delayed for 30 minutes from the original schedule, but since the airways had told me few days before, i didn't have to wait at the airport). I departed from Jogja at about 13:30 PM using Lion Air. I got seat number 35 C, which eventually didn't exist at the airship, so i got 37, the last seat in that plane, and people who actually got the 37's seat were moved into other seats. I wonder why did Lion didn't know the plane capacity. The stewardess just tried to allocate the passenger on the available seats. Well, at least i got a seat (even though it's very busy at the back, since the engine was located at both of my side, so it's fifty minutes of pain hearing the roaring engines). The plane was bumping up and down during the take off. Since i sat on the last seat, i could feel the bump very hard. But finally it could take off and about one hour later, we arrived at Soekarno Hatta Airport in Jakarta.

Next, i took an airport bus to go to Blok M, the nearest terminal to my aunt's house. There was a tourist who look like Eric S. Raymond and he was quite confused about a certain route. Luckily the driver of the bus was willing to help him out. After we arrived at the Blok M, my sister picked me up and we went to the JCC building to saw the house expo at that place.

After that, we went to Plaza Semanggi and i knew that there is a hot spot facility in this mall, so i went to Starbuck and use the hotspot to post this blog and download some package for the Slackware (it's good for testing the connection also) hehehe

Going Back to Jakarta

Today i will leave to Jakarta again after having day off for about one week in Jogja and also registering for my master degree. Everything is already finished, and i'm relieved that everything runs smoothly as planned. Now i just have to concentrate on my work and also wait for the call from the admission next month. Well, see you in Jakarta again guys :D

As usual, i will post a journey report after i arrived in Jakarta later on.

Mandriva Flash 4GB Released

After a successful release of Mandriva Flash 2 GB, now Mandriva has released 4 GB version of it's Mandriva Flash. Mandriva Flash is a pre-installed Mandriva Linux distribution on a 4GB USB key, so you can bring your favorite Linux distro (if you are Mandriva's fan) everywhere you like, since it's placed in a flash drive. This version will use the same base, Mandriva Linux 2007 KDE 32 bit, but with some updates for Mandriva Linux 2007 and you will be able to upgrade your key to Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, the upcoming new release of Mandriva distribution!.

Here's the announcement i got from Mandriva News Letter:

Mandriva has launched the 4GB version of Mandriva Flash, its live flash drive!

Mandriva Flash 2GB, which was released in December 2006, was a true success. It was sold out in less than two weeks! Mandriva has listen to user feedback and decided to develop a new version of its best seller flash drive.

Mandriva Flash 4GB still provides a full-featured system - Mandriva Linux 2007 KDE 32-bit - that requires no installation, on a bootable USB 2.0 key. All you have to do is plug in the USB key, turn the PC on and the Mandriva Linux operating system is ready to use in no time, with all you need for office work, Internet and multimedia
tasks. System configuration, preferences and data are all saved to the key.

The main advantage of Mandriva Flash 4GB is that there is only one 4GB FAT partition and you decide how to divide it between the system and the share partitions. At first boot, you are asked to allocate space for your system. For instance, you can allocate up to 3GB for your system and keep the rest of the free space for your personal documents. Freedom is a choice!

Mandriva Flash 4GB has also been updated with all recent updates for Mandriva Linux 2007 and you will be able to upgrade your key to Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, the upcoming new release of your favorite distribution!

Get more information at: http://www.mandriva.com/linux/2007/flash

Mandriva offers free shipping all over the world! Take advantage of the free shipping, don't miss this special offer and order now:

http://store.mandriva.com/product_info.php?products_id=277

15% discounts will be granted to Club members on Mandriva Flash 4GB! If you want to benefit from all the advantages of the Club and get this 15% discount on the Mandriva Flash 4GB, join the Club now!

http://www.mandriva.com/en/community/resources/club

The Mandriva Team

You will also get a nice Flash Drive with Mandriva logo embedded on the body of the flash drive. Here's the image of the flash drive:

Unplanned Movie

Today i went to Plaza Ambarukmo again with my girlfriend and we originally just wanted to take a walk there and try the free WiFI provided by Citranet, the same ISP i used for dial up at house, but when we went to the 21 movie theater, i saw that a new movie has been rolled out, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I asked my girlfriend whether she wanted to see this movie or not, and she agreed, so i bought two tickets. Luckily there weren't too much people who saw that movie, so i could buy the first schedule (12.15, and i bought the ticket at 11:47) and not waiting until the next schedule (14:25). The movie was quite nice, but too bad it's too short. It was written 86 minutes in 21 Cineplex's website, but i don't think it last for that long. In my calculation, it only lasted for about 75 minutes, because the movie started at 12:15 and it ended around 13.30. This was an unplanned movie that we were going to watch. I also see a trailer of Fantastic Four and also Harry Potter: The Order of The Phoenix. Perhaps in the next few weeks/months, we can start looking at this movie :D

Next, we had our lunch at the food court and tried the WiFI. At first, i got an IP address, but suddenly it tried to acquired new IP address and always failed and this happened very often. I don't know why. Perhaps someday i will try it near the elevator which is where the AP is placed.

1000th Post

This is my 1000th post in this blog since i started to create an account in Blogger in August 2004. My first post was about Mandrake Linux 10.1 Beta 1. It took me less than 3 years to reach 1000 post and i never thought that i can reach it in less than 3 years. Currently i have 3 blog accounts (2 in Blogger and 1 in Friendster), but i only post in Blogger account.

At the beginning, i post everything in this blog, but when Blogger rolled their Beta service, i wanted to try that, so i made a new account and give it a name of SlackBlogs, which i used to post almost everything about my Slackware system (and also some Open Source packages that i often used on my Slackware system). Since that time, i divide my post between this two accounts and i use this blog for my personal idea, thoughts, opinion and left the other blog for more specific topic (Slackware).

Ok, first milestone has been reached. Now i'm aiming for 2000th post. I hope i can reach that in less than 3 years (or probably i can make it in 2 years). Well.. who knows. Let's just wait and see...

Hackergotchis For Business Card

Linux.Com posted an article about Creating Hackergotchis Using GIMP which is very interesting. Hackergotchi is a picture of a person's head that's used as an avatar for identification on a blog (usually 80x80 pixels, so it can be used as Avatars also). All you need is a picture of yourself (or other people whom you wished to be cropped) and an image editing application (there are a lot of application that you can find on the Internet who can do this). The point is removing unneeded area and leave the main head alone and set the size into Avatar size (80x80 pixels). Slashdot also uses this kind of icon on their site to reflect something related (for example Bill Gate's face for Microsoft-related news).

Next step is to use Hackergotchis for business card. Is it really possible? Well, Jeff Waugh had an idea of making this into business card and the result is very cool. I guess soon we will see hackergotchis embedded in business card :D

Knight Rider Car For Sale

When i was a kid, i really liked to watch Knight Rider, where Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) and KITT worked together to bush the bad guys. Today i heard that KITT is going to be sold. This car is offered $US149,995 at a Dublin auto dealership. The car belongs to Tim Russo of Livermore, a Kassabian customer who figured now was a good time to test the market, with the 25th anniversary of the show's debut coming up. Russo purchased the car 10 years ago at an auction in San Diego, and has spent the last decade finding parts to restore it and now he wanted to sell it.

Don't think that you can do whatever seen on TV, since KITT isn't even legal to be used in daily activities, due to some modification and lack of components required to be used for daily activities. But, you will still have the red scanner in front of the car and also the sound. The car has two working video screens on the dashboard, and the cockpit features buttons that light up in green, yellow and red: ski mode, rocket boost, micro jam, silent mode, oil slick and eject.

Anybody interested buying the legendary KITT?

GMail Can be Angry :D

Today when i checked my email at GMail, i got a message dialog like this (I put this image on Blogger since Photobucket is still having short maintenance. I might update this post later with more images on when Photobucket is back online, since i prefer to host the images there rather than in Blogger).

Another strangeness that i found is when i tried to search for something using Firefox's built in search box, it turned out that i got a Javanese version of Google. Usually i only got Indonesian version, but today i got the Javanese version. I wonder how they detect it :D

Click to enlarge the images below

UPDATE (23:39) : images are now being placed in Photobucket

The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code

I got this email from my friend Irfin which was sent to my college mailing list (he got it from ACM Computer Magazine probably). It's about 10 rules for developing safety-critical code. I hope it can be useful for developers :D

Rule 1: Restrict all code to very simple control flow constructs—do not use goto statements, setjmp or longjmp constructs, or direct or indirect recursion.

Rule 2: Give all loops a fixed upper bound. It must be trivially possible for a checking tool to prove statically that the loop cannot exceed a preset upper bound on
the number of iterations. If a tool cannot prove the loop bound statically, the rule
is considered violated.

Rule 3: Do not use dynamic memory allocation after initialization.

Rule 4: No function should be longer than what can be printed on a single sheet of paper in a standard format with one line per statement and one line per
declaration. Typically, this means no more than about 60 lines of code per function.

Rule 5: The code's assertion density should average to minimally two assertions per function. Assertions must be used to check for anomalous conditions that should never happen in real-life executions. Assertions must be side-effect free and should be defined as Boolean tests. When an assertion fails, an explicit recovery action must be taken such as returning an error condition to the caller of the function that executes the failing assertion. Any assertion for which a static checking tool can prove that it can never fail or never hold violates this rule.

Rule 6: Declare alldata objects at the smallest possible level of scope.

Rule 7: Each calling function must check the return value of nonvoid functions, and each called function must check the validity of all parameters provided by the caller.

Rule 8: The use of the preprocessor must be limited to the inclusion of header files and simple macro definitions. Token pasting, variable argument lists (ellipses), and recursive macro calls are not allowed. All macros must expand into complete syntactic units. The use of conditional compilation directives must be kept to a minimum.

Rule 9: The use of pointers must be restricted. Specifically, no more than one level of dereferencing should be used. Pointer dereference operations may not be hidden in macro definitions or inside typedef declarations. Function pointers are not permitted.

Rule 10: All code must be compiled, from the first day of development, with all compiler warnings enabled at the most pedantic setting available. All code must compile without warnings. All code must also be checked daily with at least one, but preferably more than one, strong static source code analyzer and should pass all analyses with zero warnings.

Using AngkasaWave at Galeria

Today i went to Galeria Mall with my girlfriend after i gave presentation at UKDW. Luckily this time i brought my laptop, so i could try the free hotspot provided by AngkasaWave. They gave two kind of connection, the free user and also the commercial one. If we use the free user, it will only last for few minutes (10 minutes i guess) and we will be redirected to the login page again (you can do this as many time as you can). The connection is quite fast, but not very fast, but at least i can write a blog and also check my emails.

Busy Day

Today i had to go to many places. It started at Atma Jaya University to find information about the master program, but too bad. The administration was closed until next week (due to easter day). Next was UGM. I went to the MIPA faculty to get more information about the master degree there. I got what i need and the admission guy remembered me (because i had registered to MKOM also before i joined QnAp Asia, but i canceled it). He also gave me a calendar as a gift (Thanks for that).

Next stop was Computa, one of the biggest computer shop in Jogja to find more information about ADSL modem, since i'm planning to use Speedy as my future ISP. There were two kind of modem that were available on this store. The first is SMC which only had 1 port and the price was US$40 and the other one is D-Link which had 4 ports and the price was US$75. Maybe i'll take the second one, since i still have 3 spare ports which can be used for other purpose (for example for WiFI or to be used for my laptop). I also bought Citranet voucher because my voucher is already expired.

Next stop was at my college, UKDW. I met several lectures and also some friends there. I was also invited by one of the lecturer to share some information in Software Engineering class about how important documentation is. We might know some terms such as CRS (Customer Requirement Specification), FRS (Functional Requirement Specification), TLD (Top Level Design), DD (Detail Design), and many other documents. This document are very important, since without proper documentation, it will be very hard to maintain an application in the future (enhancing or upgrading the current application), mostly if the developer who build the original application is not there anymore.

It's quite a busy day and it will continue tomorrow. Tomorrow i will have busy day also, but i don't think it will be as busy as today. Ok, stop blogging and start making the materials for tomorrow :D

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS' Killer Bug

NVidia engineer gave clarification about bad performance found on NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS and poor Vista driver support which was complained by most gamers who uses this card. He/She (i don't know, since it remains anonymous) admit that the report was correct (although the report of bad driver support is not the main cause of the bad performance). NVidia found a bug in the vertex shader that causes the GPU to generate slightly incorrect geometry transformation data. The difference was minimal enough to escape attention but it was significant enough to render a scene incorrectly. Here's some analogy from Tech ARP:

Now, what's the big deal about a slightly incorrect scene? After all, you can't even tell the difference between 2xAA and 4xAA. What would a slightly different scene matter when you are zipping along at 60+ fps? Well, that's what YOU think.

Here's the bummer. What it really means is that objects can be rendered off to one side. For FPS gamers, this can cause shots aimed at those objects (like your opponents) to miss when they should really hit. In RTS games, it may cause you to click on the wrong unit or send your units to attack a different target. So, yeah, you can now blame your poor gaming skills on a bug.

So, our next question as a consumer will be "What's the solution?". The answer is NO SOLUTION (yet). The engineer don't know what will happened in the future, but he/she think that one of this two possibilities are the highest one:
1. NVIDIA might recall all affected cards and replace them with GeForce 8900 GTX/GTS cards when they are released in the "near future".

2. NVIDIA might recall all affected cards and replace them right away with GeForce 8600 Ultra/GTS cards, and offer those affected a free day-trip to NVIDIA HQ and lunch with NVIDIA CEO and President, Huang Jen-Hsun.

PS: I don't know whether this news is april fool jokes or not (hey, it's april mop's day, so anything can happen). You can see the detailed information on Tech ARP site.

Remember, today is April 1, so please be careful when reading a news. It might be true, but it may be hoaxes

First Flight on Airbus A380

Airbus A380 is the biggest passenger airliner in the world with 555 seats in standard three-class configuration or up to 853 people in full economy class configuration inside that plane. Do you want to see the situation when the first commercial flight goes off? My friend Markus sent me an email containing images from the first flight which was spectacular. It amazes me (and i hope you too), since i have never seen this (since i never been abroad) in my life.

I have upload them on my Photobucket account, so i'll just give you the link and you can see it for yourself.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6
Link 7
Link 8
Link 9
Link 10
Link 11
Link 12
Link 13
Link 14
Link 15
Link 16
Link 17
Link 18

UPDATE (5 April 17:54): Markus sent another images on AIRBUS A380, so i updated this post with some new images (Link 10 - 18). Have fun :D