Managing Server Easily

Once, i met a person whom was forced to become a sysadmin on his office, even though he never had that kind of background. He was one of the IT support division, but lately, his boss wanted him to handle the servers with all those nitty bitty configuration (as usual, bosses wanted other people to be able to do lot of things). It's a very unwise decision, since sysadmin is responsible for taking care the servers and the infrastructure of the office. It's not a job that every people can do (even though many people learn it by doing it). He's taking a big risk, mostly if they had a public servers.

If you want to have a single application that can help you manage your servers easily, i would recommend Webmin. It's is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix (and it also works on Windows lately). It already supports lots of modules, and it's very easy to add more modules on the application itself. This application will be suitable if you install Usermin also (if you want to manage mail servers). It uses modules as well as Webmin.

Mandriva Translations Started Again

Few days i ago, i browsed Mandriva's site and i found out that the SVN has been restored and it's working again, so i started a terminal and checkout all of the translations project again from the new SVN server (well, the old one was corrupted) and i have update some of the translations. I hope to update more files next week, as i will have more spare time. I hope it will make it on the next Mandriva 2008.0 release, even though i don't use Mandriva anymore.

One of the main problem here is the translations page. We used to have a page with some statistics number where we could see the statistics of each translations files. By looking at this page, we would know if there has been an update on each file. But since the page doesn't exist any longer, i had to check using this command every time:
msgfmt -c -v -o /dev/null id.po

Another problem is when you have very big file. Locating one line of change will be very hard. I hope Mandriva developer will revive the old page again.

It's Like Day Off

Starting next week, UKDW students will have their mid test for this semester. It will be started on first of October and it will end at October twelve. After that, followed with national holiday until sixteen of October, so it's like i have two full weeks of day off. Meanwhile, the other lecturer is going to Bandung and Jakarta starting tomorrow, i don't come along with them. I had other activities here in Jogja. I should also finish my work before next class is started again, but at least i will have more spare time starting next week

Change of Requirements

Ten days ago, i wrote a blog post about IBM's new office suite which requires huge requirements. When i came back to the requirements page, the information has changed. The requirements needed to install IBM Lotus Symphony has been reduced into:

* Supported Windows® platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista

* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5

* 750MB disk space minimum on Linux and 540M on Windows

* 512MB RAM memory minimum

That's great, BUT, there are additional notes that i didn't see before (or probably i missed it, so i just put them here):

* On Linux, you need to perform either of the following actions before you can print the license page during installation:
- Install a correct driver for your local printer.
- Or use your current Postscript printer and set the GhostScript pre-filtering as Convert to PS level 1 on the Advanced tab.

* You must uninstall Lotus Symphony before you switch to a different account on the same machine to re-install Lotus Symphony.

* On Window Vista, you cannot install Lotus Symphony from a remote server.

* The installation folder should contain valid characters only.

No Uninstaller?

I just got this from OpenOffice.org's mailing list:

To all the OpenOffice users who might be interesting in trying out IBM Lotus Symphony (Beta):

DO NOT INSTALL IBM Lotus Symphony (Beta) !!!

I tried it out. It took over all of my OpenDoc file associations, without warning, and installed itself into a handful of other file associations. IT HAS NO UNINSTALLER, SO THESE CHANGES CANNOT BE EASILY REVERSED!

Basically, it made a mess out of my registry. Its taking me about an hour to fix it.

WARNING: INSTALL IBM Lotus Symphony (Beta) AT YOUR OWN PERIL!

Can somebody give more details about this? Any experience or testimonials after using IBM Lotus Symphony? I know it's still Beta and it sure has bugs, but at least they should give confirmation if they want to change the file associations and they should have planned to make an uninstaller for the application just in case the user don't feel like to use it in the future.

I myself decided not to try out this application for several reasons:
1. It requires higher hardware specs.
2. It's based on the old OOo 1.1.4 code base.
3. It may not support ODF Specification as complete as OOo or any mature application
4. It's only limited to word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation application (perhaps they will release more bundle in the future, but i don't know yet)

EPL Matches Again?

According to this news and this, there's a probability that EPL matches will soon be broadcasted by local TV station again. From the first link, it seems that Lativi has the permission to broadcast the EPL matches every Saturday, 9 PM. There will be a delay matches at 11 PM.

We are still waiting for Trans7. We hope that they will get the same license and we will have more matches on TV again. Great news for footballers around Indonesia

More Support on MMC Flash Memory Card

In the upcoming merge window of 2.6.24 kernel, MultiMedia Card (MMC) subsystem maintainer Pierre Ossman is planning to merge his work to support MMC Flash Memory Card. If this gets merged and integrated in the next 2.6.24 (which usually takes about 1-2 months to get the final version), then in the end of this year, we will have more support on the MMC Flash Memory Card in Linux operating system. Meaning that most laptops peripherals will be detected out of the box after installation process. So far, the most troublesome devices in laptops are internal modems and some MMC Flash memory cards (WiFI, Bluetooth, Sound card, and VGA Cards are slowly disappearing, except for the newer version).

Linux is on their way of becoming the desktop operating system

Excel Bug??

When i was in my campus, my friend, Yahya Kurniawan sent me a message via YM about a bug on Microsoft Excel 2007. He said that he got this from some mailing list, but i didn't ask further. He asked me to try this simple calculation on Excel 2007:

=850*77.1 (a simple multiplication formula)

If you calculate this using a normal calculator, the correct result should be 65535, but in Excel 2007, it was calculated as 100000. Is this one of Microsoft's hidden easter egg? I don't think so, since this behavior is only at Microsoft Excel 2007. I tried this on 2003 and it worked like normal. I also tried this on OOo and it calculated correctly. Any ideas where this number came from? I really have no idea

Update (27 September 09:00 AM) : It seems that not only the above sample that works, but there are some other examples. Like this one:

=4.1-2*2

If you just write down, it may display the correct answer, 0,1 (or 0.1 in some countries, due to separator difference), but what happened when you format the cell and ask them to display 17 digits after the separator? You will get 0.09999999999999960, and not 0.1 anymore (well, if that number is rounded, you still get 0.1, but does it should be a 0.10000000000000000 ??)

Well, Microsoft has noticed this and wrote a description about this bug and they are working on the solutions (Thanks to Fajran) and Joel On Software also wrote about this bug and showing his experience working back with Excel team few years ago. It's quite technical, but i think you will get it

Here's the screenshot:

Lights Out

I just came back from book rental. I borrowed some books yesterday, and today, i had to return it. On my way there, i had to cross an intersection near my house, but the traffic lights went out, so everybody just cross the road as fast as possible. The police post was also empty, since nobody there (it's only occupied at morning until noon). It's quite dangerous, since if you aren't aware, you might get hit by a vehicle (if they were quite fast and don't have time (or don't want) to slow down. There's no specific rule to follow when traffic lights went out. I wonder what happened on other cities or countries? Do they do this as well? Any experience?

dyne:bolic 2.5

Jaromil has just announced the availability of the new dyne:bolic 2.5. It's been more than six months after the previous release and it's ready to be consumed by public.

Some new features on this release includes writable NTFS support (ntfs-3g), supports on firewire audio cards, and Nesting capability. Besides these new features, new application are also build in, like Ekiga, Guarddog and Wireshark plus all the GtkPython and WxPython libraries. A graphical desktop repair button and a mount utility for Ssh accounts are also provided. Plus they fix some bugs and update their software collection to the latest version.

The developer also intends to release the second CD containing external modules, like OpenOffice, Development packages, Java, Wine and kernel sources. I think it has the same procedure as Slax. Only the base system is provided and the rest of the application is build into modules, thus increase flexibility and people have a choice to select which application they need.

FYI, Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux is a live bootable cd, containing a whole operating system that works straight from boot, without the need to install or change anything on the hard disk. Unlike other Linux distribution, this distro is focusing on multimedia, so you will find a lot of multimedia applications on this distro, such as audio and video manipulation, sound composition and synthesis, 3D modeling, photography, peer2peer filesharing, web browsing, veejaying, desktop publishing, word processing, cd burning, email, encryption, anonymity tools and more.

Amazing House Wife

I got this video from one of my colleague. It's about an amazing house wife who works very hard, even though she didn't have any hands. She uses her feet to do her daily work, like driving a car, babysitting her baby, changing the diapers, organizing food in the refrigerator, and buying some food on fast food restaurants. She also runs some business from her house and typing on keyboards using her feet. You should check this out.

The moral : Never ever give up, if there's a will, there's a way

Download Link (RapidShare, 3008 KB)

Slowly But Sure

Mr Budi Raharjo will not like the result of the matches that has just finished. Manchester United beat Chelsea 2-0 on their home, Old Trafford. Even though i didn't see it live (i don't have Astro or any TV Cable service), i saw the semi live on LiveScore. Other source i use is Soccernet. They gave me this statistics:

                   Man Utd        Chelsea
Shots (on Goal)         18(9)          4(1)
Fouls                   10             15
Corner Kicks            10             1
Offsides                0              0
Time of Possession      57%            43%
Yellow Cards            2              2
Red Cards               0              1
Saves                   0              6

Looking at this statistics proves that Chelsea is still under pressure after the shocking news that their coach, Jose Mourinho went out of Chelsea just few days before the big match against Manchester United. Most of their new players didn't agree with the new coach, resulting a big loss. I have never seen Chelsea's possession under 50% (they mostly dominate the game). The others statistics were very low (corner, shots), but they got 2 yellow cards and 1 red card. Ohh my....

There are also some rumors that the players will do some exodus following their ex-coach, but Peter Kenyon has stated that it will not happened. Another problem is the qualification for their new coach, Grant.

Meanwhile, MU is starting to crawl to the top three after having a bad start on this season's league. It's slow, but they are working on it and they are on track again.

Watching EPL Matches

If you really wanted to watch EPL matches, but you don't want to join Astro, there's a solution for you. If you live in Jogja, you can watch it on Abu Bakar Ali parking lot, where there are a big TV screen near the traffic light. When i went back from my girlfriend's house, it was broadcasting Newcastle United VS West Ham United (it's over now). I had a chance to saw who's broadcasting it and i saw ESPN logo on top right of the screen.

The area was filled with people who watched the match and most of them just sat in the side of the street and ignore other people who starred at them. They were enjoying a free EPL match

I know it's not the best option, but if you want to watch without spending any money, you will have some trade offs.

GMail : Super Clean

It seems that GMail is testing their new beta version again. This time, they tried to have "Super Clean" interface with gradient color on the background. I like this features. Check it out.

For those who doesn't have a GMail account, you should try it, as GMail has opened their registration process, so you don't need any invitation anymore. Go to the main page and click on the create account link.

9 SR Earthquake: OMG

According to CNN's articles, Indonesia will have a big earthquake in a near future :

It could be a rare magnitude-9 quake, and with the plates so tightly sprung, it will happen sooner, rather than later.

We can only hope that it will not happen (again), since it will became the biggest disaster in Indonesia's history if it really happens.

MadWifi developers move to ath5k

Michael Renzmann, one of MadWifi developers has announced that they are move away from the binary-only HAL and change the focus of our future development towards ath5k, a completely free (as in freedom) driver which will eventually become an integral part of the Linux kernel. Read the full announcements on LWN.

If you look at the bottom of the announcements, you will get this ads:
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/

Another RC released

It seems that Linus is not yet ready to release the final version of 2.6.23 kernel. He choose to release another RC version, 2.6.23-rc7. Here's the announcements taken from LWN:

Ahoy me laddies (and beauties), time for the traditional "Talk Like a Pirate Day" kernel release!

Now, last year we had a full release (2.6.18 was immortalized on TLAP-2006), but this year I'm chickening out, and we're just doing what is hopefully going to be the last -rc release for the 2.6.23 series.

I'm not including the diffstat, because it got blown up by the resurrection of the sk98lin driver - because skge that is supposed to supplant it doesn't handle some of the hardware. Oh well.

Apart from that, we had some mips, powerpc and xtense updates, and various driver tweaks. Things like the USB autosuspend revert should make people happier, and some more clockevents fixes should help suspend/restore on i386.

But the shortlog probably tells it best.

2.6.23 has quite a big change compared to 2.6.22 which includes a SLUB (now becomes the default slab allocator), new scheduler from Ingo Molnar : CFS, better virtualization process, Movable Memory Zone, UIO, rewrite code for X86 asm in C, and still many more. Since it encompasses so many big changes, he wanted to make sure that the regression comes down to minimum (it's impossible to have 0 regression) before he finalized the code and release it as the final 2.6.23 kernel. More detail information can be seen on the Changelog or for better human friendly article, please have a look on KernelNewbies

Bigger Requirements

I already have a feeling that someday, IBM will release it's office application to the public, but i don't expect this soon (after the announcements that they will join OOo for the collaboration). When i saw the news (via Vavai), i tried to gather more information about this and i browsed their site.

At first, i was amazed on the user interface. It has better interface than OOo (even though it's said that it used the same OOo code for this product). It has good icon also. BUT.. what surprise me more is the requirements:

* Supported Windows platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
* Supported Linux platforms: SLED 10, RHEL 5, Redhat5
* 900MB disk space minimum
* 1GB RAM memory minimum
* US English locale

They support fewer platform, and need more resources than OOo. Also, it's only available on US English for now (does i18n version will follow soon?). Well, it's their debuts and they still have plenty of time to make this application better along with(out) OOo community.

Security Problem on ITunes

In the last two months, Apple has released several ITunes version. Some of them are to support the new Apple products (IPhone, IPod classic and the new version of IPod), and it also fixed some security problems. From user opinion, it's a good thing to release the next version as soon as problems are detected and fixed, but it would be better if they can have some kind of automatic updates that will download the necessary files instead of downloading all of the installer. Some application have used this method, such as Firefox and Clamav. It's faster and it won't take too much time to do an update.

Lucky me i have a better connection than in the past, but still, downloading 49 MB takes time (it's bigger than Linux Kernel's source code)

Spicy Blog

Do you want to get your blog spicy? Well, according to InformationWeek, you can do it by adding this tools in your blog. I'm not so sure whether it will increase your traffic or not, since the main point someone goes to other people blog is seeking for news or to give comments. Other features are just like cosmetics. It can boost your traffic, or the opposite, they can make your blog crowded and bloated. Well, here they are:

1. Bubble Guru
2. Eyejot
3. Google Maps
4. EBay To Go
5. FlexiPoll
6. SlideShare
7. Zoho Viewer
8. Meebo Me
9. BlogTV
10. Movavi Video Converter

I don't think any of these tools will help your blog to get more spicy, but that's my opinion. What about you?

Rest Time

It's been a long day for me, since when everybody is resting on weekend, i had class to attend, so it seems that no time to rest for me (working and studying). Well, i enjoyed it so far, but i think it's sleep time and i know my limit, so here i go, resting

OOo 2.3.0 Released

Finally, after several RCs, the final OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 has been released by the OOo team. It may not reach your favorite mirrors yet, but you can start looking at it at Goodie Domain System. As always, there's no official announcement yet until the mirrors are ready to serve the public. But at least you can see the latest Release note from RC. It will have the same base system with some fixes on it.

Research Project

Today, i got an email from a PhD Student from Center for Organization and Management Sciences Ecole des Mines de Paris, named Nordine BENKELTOUM (it was forwarded from our LUG email address). He asked for people to participate on his research project about Free/Open Source Research by filling the form on this URL. It's available on three different formats, RTF, DOC, and ODT. Please fill free to use one of them and submit them to the person directly.

I'm only helping him to spread this information. I hope he can finish his research project by gathering more information from all of you

Introduce Yourself

Have you ever received an email message from someone you don't know and then bombing you with questions which is actually easy to solve if you read the documentation? Well, i had this several time. For me, it's not a big problem, but for some people, it's very annoying, since most of the cases, the sender never introduced him/herself before asking. Introducing is very simple. One or two line will work it out, but sometime it's forgotten. Also, sometimes, they wanted ASAP answers or writing using CAPITAL WORDS LIKE THIS. This is usually done by people who never read about how to ask by Eric S. Raymond. It's a good document and being referred by a lot of people when there's a person who doesn't follow the guidance. Even though it's a technical guidance for developers, but in reality, it can be used in most cases, like in forum, discussion room, chat rooms, mailing list, etc.

So if you want to start asking, don't forget to introduce yourself first and also don't forget to read the document above. It will increase your chance to be replied by the recipient.

VMware Tools Is Now Open Source Application

VMWare has released a new open source application, called Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) to public and it's an open source application. It will enable Linux vendors to integrate VMWare tools into their products (operating system).

FYI, VMware Tools is a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and improve management of VMware virtual machines.

For now, it's only for Linux users, but when demands rise up, they will consider to release Windows version.

Always Review Your Work

Often i saw an article which has a typo in it. Some people just simply ignore them, but some does care about it. Even simple mistakes can bring ambiguity. For example, invincible and invisible. Only a single "n" and "s" would make a difference.

Here are the definitions about both terms:
Invisible : the state of an object which cannot be seen
Invincible : the state of being impervious to all methods of harm

What happened if you write a journal or international publications? You will get embarrassed or people might think you are lazy to do some reviews before submitting your work. In most cases, you can use the spell checker which is available in most application (mostly in Office suite, such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org). Unfortunately, in some application, the default language is English, so if you want to use Indonesian, you will have to download more package.

Reviews will not only improve your quality of works, but sometimes, it can find defects on your product (it could be documentation, papers, software, etc). More over, review is proven to be very effective when it's done in a right manner. Start spending some time to review your work

IBM Joins OOo

It's official. IBM will join OOo community to develop and promote OpenOffice.org's technology. See the press release here. It's a big win for both side. IBM is a big vendor and it has proven to support most of Open Source projects by releasing some of their patents and promote the use of Open Source application by publishing articles about it in IBM DeveloperWorks, mostly in Linux and Open Source section. Meanwhile, OOo is the big product from Sun and community which has proven to be a great office suite and it also supports ODF, the standardized formats.

Playing With OracleXE

One of my first subject in my master program is about database management. It has a practical class also and it will use MySQL and also Oracle. I don't know which Oracle version will be used, so i just download the Oracle 10g Express Edition, which is free to use, develop, and also distribute. It's a simplified and lightweight version of Oracle Standard (or even worse Enterprise) version, so it will be easier to manage, but it also has some limitations even though you have higher specs than listed below:
- Only store up to 4GB of user data
- Use up to 1GB of memory
- Use one CPU on the host machine

The installation was very fast (since i left my computer up and running when i went to somewhere else tonight and when i came back, everything was fully installed).

Next step is to install the same application on my laptop. For this, i have to remove some of my applications, mostly games and unused files (i still have the backup on my desktop or portable hard disk), since Oracle will use to 2 GB of my space and i'm running out of space on my laptop. Installation was smooth, just like before.

I have unlocked the hr account, and then what?
I need to create a local account that i can use on daily activities without have to worry if i do something silly (just like in Linux where you are recommended to create local account for your daily activities). Next thing is to copy hr's data into mine. I tried to remember how to export and import hr's data into my local account by looking at the internet, and finally i finished it. Now it's already up and running smoothly

I have used Oracle 9.2i before and it was very painful to manage the data at that time. Now, everything is controlled via web interface, so it ease the administrator's work. I wonder when will Oracle 11g Express Edition will come out.

Curious About Kernel Developers?

You might be wondering, what is Kernel developer looks like. Well, here's a photo from LWN at Kernel Summit 2007. More pictures will be uploaded tomorrow.

It's an amazing event, since people around the world gathered in the same place and talked about the future kernel development, even though some of them were having debates on the LKML mailing list.

This is my first time looking at Andrew Morton's face. At first, i thought he was a geek, but after seeing his face, i changed my imagination hehehe

Real Time Collaboration

One day (i don't really remember when, but it's quite a long time ago), i got a question about OpenOffice.org. He said that it was possible to have a shared document and do some collaborative work on it (meaning several people access the file simultaneously and work together), but he used Microsoft Office (i don't remember the version, but i guess it's 2003 and above). He asked whether this feature is already available on OpenOffice.org. I said it wasn't available (please correct me if i'm wrong, but i have never seen this feature on OOo campaign and also on any tutorial i found for OOo). He was hoping that he could have the same features he had on his previous office suite. I can't do anything about that.

In the Office 2.0 event, Google and several other vendors have stated that "The future of work will include real-time collaboration". I really hoped that this features are not only implemented on Google Docs, but also in OpenOffice.org, because it's one of the critical features that most companies need when they wanted to migrate their application to OpenOffice.org. We are not talking about a single application that can access single file, but a single file can be accessed by several application and the users can work in collaboration, thus increasing productivity as they don't have to wait until other users close the file first.

How Geek Are You?

I'm 92% geek about blogging

Corrupt VS OOXML

Kai Puolamäki from Effi has published an interesting article Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format after there has been some incident that happened in some country that has an ability to vote for OOXML. Effi has studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries and the conclusion is:

More corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal

They use the CPI Index (Corruption Perceptions Index) as a measure of corruption. CPI index is a number between 1 and 10. A small CPI index means that the country is perceived to be very corrupted, while a large CPI index means that the country is perceived to have little corruption.

Based on the data i got from the site, Indonesia is in 130 (out of 163 countries) with 2.2 - 2.6 of CPI, but we finally decided to abstain, after there was no major decision (half of the member is accepting and the other half is rejecting). I think that's a big win for Indonesia, even though we should be able to say No instead of abstain. Perhaps they should raise our CPI index

The interesting part is that Sweden, which has 9.0 - 9.3 of CPI (meaning lower corruption) has a scandal about this, when a Microsoft representative was caught offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML.

One note about the statistics shown in the site :

It does not naturally tell anything about the reason of the relation between corruption level and voting behaviour of a country; in any case, whatever the reason for the correlation, also some quite uncorrupted countries voted for the approval. And although the trend is interesting and the results informative, the [above] conclusion is still not particularly strong due to a relatively small number of voting countries.

New IPods From Apple

Yesterday, Apple held an event and they wanted to announced something new and they did. They have released a new version of IPod, which is similar with IPhone, but without any phone capabilities. That means you will get better visual animation, multi-touch interface, bigger display, WiFi features, and many more. It's called IPod Touch. They came in two versions, 8 GB and 16 GB, starting at US$ 299.

They also change the old IPod Video into IPod Classic and came with a new design (new design changes applies to IPod Video and IPod Nano). It has bigger display and slimmer size. It also has rounded borders, which means it's slicker than ever. The great thing is that IPod Classic and Nano is now able to play videos. Both IPod Classic and IPod Nano have their storage capacity upgraded up to 160 GB for IPod Classic and 4 and 8 GB for IPod Nano.

You might want to check PCWorld's video about this IPod

Nice works Apple

NUnitLite

A new unit testing tool has been released to public (it's been a while actually). The new tool is called NUnitLite. It's inspired by NUnit, but it will use minimal resources and be suitable for execution on various classes of devices. Since it's based on NUnit, it will have most of the basic feature of NUnit, but please note that this package is delivered as a source code only, so you won't have GUI like in NUnit, multi-threading features, etc.

One good news is that it will support .NET Framework (including Compact Framework) and Mono. Great application for unit testing.

Curious About OOo 2.3?

Well, i do and i found some information (not the final one though) about some new features that will likely appeared on OOo 2.3. It's quite a big improvements, but OOo team has made it very clear that they don't like to use Big Bang approach. They know how user will react if they implement a MAJOR changes in the main components (you know what i'm talking about).

One of the nice thing that most people wanted is having a sound on Impress presentation. They have waited for a long time and finally it's here for you (well, you will have to wait until the final 2.3 which is predicted to be released next week).

I also have some complaint about PDF Export features. The file size is different when i use Windows and Linux operating system. When i use Linux, the size is doubled, thus i got a bigger file. I don't know why, but in OOo 2.3, they have improved the PDF Export filter, so it's most likely that we will get smaller and consistent file size, both in Windows and Linux.

OOo 2.3 also brings in some security enhancement, by setting the default macro security level from medium to high. This will make executing macro a little bit harder, but prevents malicious macro, such as Bunny.

I think it will be a great release and everybody is waiting for it right now. Viva OpenOffice.org

Abstain About OOXML

Indonesia was given an opportunity to join the vote about OOXML whether it will be an ISO standards or not. Since there's no majority on the vote itself. So, along with some other countries in the world, Indonesia has finally voted to abstain.

Get Ready For Opera 9.5

Based on an early reports by Ryan From CybernetNews, Opera 9.5 will have a lot of new features in their next release (they planned to release alpha version on Tuesday, September 4). Not only the speed, but also the compatibility to the web standards and also performance. Here's the list of updates related to the rendering machine:
* A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
* Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
* AJAX compatibility has been improved
* New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
* Improved HTML table layout algorithm

Most of this information has also been published by Opera Desktop Team on their blog. I think it's quite a big improvements on Opera, mostly the URL search capability. Check the video guys and you will (most likely) be impressed with the new features that Opera will bring in Kestrel (codename for Opera 9.5).

Thesis Information

Since i have started my master program, i should start looking for more information about my future thesis title. First of all, i need to know how to write a good thesis, so it's not just to fulfill the requirements, but also benefit for me. I found this paper quite convincing, but it's for Computer Science. Any other suggestion?

Baggage Lost

Last night, i had a chat with my ex-colleague. He is in Netherlands right now and i asked him how about the flight. He said it was OK, except for one small problem. He almost lost his bag. So his bag was considered lost and then after few days, they found it and it's still in pending status. So, i don't know how he survived without any clothes there. I guess he had to borrow from his friends.

We had this situation for several times, not only for Indonesian people who travels abroad but also vice versa. When some people from Netherlands came into my office, they had their own experience about this, but it was not always in Indonesian airport (most of them are outside Indonesia).

Does anybody has this kind of experience also?

PHP 5.2.4

It took three months for PHP Developers to release their next stable version, 5.2.4, which fixed more than 120 bugs found in 5.2.3. But it's worthed to wait, as PHP 5.2.4 is getting more bug fixes and some improvements. It has fixed some security problems also, so people are encouraged to upgrade to this version. If you are still using PHP 4, please have a look on PHP 5 and start planning to migrate to PHP 5, because the end of life of PHP 4 is getting near. Click here for the Changelog.

My First Class

This morning, i attended my first class for my master program at UGM. The class started at 8 AM and since i have two sessions, it ended at about 12:40 PM (with breaks between sessions of course). First session was talking about Model and Information System, by Daliyo and the second one was about Database Management System by Retantyo. The class was fun, and since the students were not that much (around 24 people i guess), we mostly will know each other very well (most of them have met each other in the matriculation class, but not me and the other two people who passed the exam and can go on without having to go through matriculation again).

Tomorrow, i will have my class again, but this time, 3 sessions (1 is practical class) and it will ended around 3:40 PM. Feels like a new students again