New Building Is Official

Today, UKDW's new building has been officially launched. It's the main event of this year's DIES NATALIS event besides the launch of TV Campus. Every year, UKDW has tried to launch new facilities that are expected to help students or increase the quality of UKDW as a learning center. Two years ago, UKDW has launched quality assurance for campus activities and last year, UKDW launched an internal auditor team. I hope next year, we will have INHEREN network ready so local access between universities will be much faster.

Btw, we are going to move to the next building next December, so new year, we will have our new office then

Yahoo Messenger Beta

Yahoo is working on a beta version of Yahoo Messenger that tried to bring new Yahoo Messenger on desktop application. So far, the new features that are written on the site are:
- New Look
- New Emoticons
- New Skins
- Usage of Flickr to swap photos

I guess it's more than that. It's just a matter of time before they publish the new features list For now, check the video first.

The bad thing is that they didn't make an effort to update the Unix version of Yahoo Messenger. People have preferred Pidgin or Kopete rather than using old-fashioned Unix version of Yahoo Messenger

New Building

This week, my campus will held a dies natalis event, meaning birthday of my campus. This year, the main event will be a ceremonial for the new building that has been used for some activities, mostly for practical class. My new office and also the other lecturer will be on this new building also as the old one will be used for students community. It has bigger space, so it will be more fun than before....

Let's hope we can have fun with the new building

Changes to Google Page Rank

Some sites have reported that there's a possibility that Google has changed their Page Rank algorithm, resulting some decrement to their page rank point, including YouTube from 8 to 3 (From Googlified). From SitePoint, i got this new update:
# Boing Boing: Was 9, now 7.
# Engadget: Was 7, now 5.
# Forbes.com: Was 7, now 5.
# New Scientist: Was 7, now 5.

My blog is affected also. It has dropped from 6 to 5 currently. Does your blog gets affected also?

Support For ILC 2007

Ok, i admit that i was so curious about Blogger Party 2007 which was held yesterday, but i couldn't join the party mainly because i had a test on that day and also today. This is something i couldn't skipped just like that, so sorry folks. Hopefully i could join next year party

Next big event will be ILC 2007. I have wrote about this previously but let me stress that again. They have make an official invitation that has been published to some mailing list, forums, and websites (including their own site). The only thing left is that we need more publications and thus, we need your support, just like what you all did with Blogger Party. Help ILC 2007 by spreading news in your blog, websites, and chat rooms. You can use the official ILC 2007 logo to spread it.

There has been a change of plan about the main activities. One national seminar and one workshop has been dropped off. I don't know the reason, but they are still working on it. It won't decrease the quality of the main event though.

So start spreading and hopefully we can meet next month

Downloading Mandriva ISO

I have just finished downloading Mandriva 2008.0 ISO. At first, i wanted to use download manager to download all this ISOs (there are 3 ISO for CD version), but my cousin was running his bot for his online games, so i choose the safe way, using a browser. It's not the safest one actually, since there's a big risk when the download is stalled. I couldn't resume it.

The first attempt was made two days ago at around midnight. I left my computer up and running and in the morning, the download process was finished. Second attempt was this morning and again i left my computer because i had to go to my mid test. When i came back at around 11:30 AM, it has been finished. Wow... nice...

The third attempt was the longest one i guess, since i began downloading again at 2 PM, a bad time to download, since it's very slow usually. The third attempt finished around 8:20 PM, so it took about 6 hours to complete (without using any download manager, just a single thread of Firefox). The previous attempt was faster, which was about 4 hours (since i couldn't tell what time it finished it's job, but i can look for the main estimation when the download process has started). The speed was ranging about 29-40 KBps.

So far, i have downloaded Slackware 12.0 (3 CDs), OpenSUSE 10.3 (1 CD, KDE Only), Mandriva 2008.0 (3 CDs), and also (K)ubuntu 7.10 (2 CDs). So far, my used bandwidth this month is about 16 GB when i looked on speedy portal. It was more than that, i'm pretty sure, since speedy bandwidth meter sometimes gets reset automatically. I don't know why.

New Blogger Feature

Eric and Blogger team has pushed what they called "small-but-crazy-useful new feature" to Blogger which enables visitors to subscribe their email when they give a comments. Before this feature is available, you will have to revisit the website again to check whether your comment has been replied or not. By using this feature, all you have to do is tick the option that will active the feature while you are giving a comment on Blogger blog. Of course, it will only be active when you have logged in using Google account, since it will only use Google account to avoid flooding your email account.

Check the announcements on Buzz Blogger and also in Blogger Help

ILC 2007

Next month, Jogja LUG will held ILC event, called ILC 2007. Last ILC was held on Surabaya in 2006. The event will be held on 17 - 20 November 2007 and there will be some activities:
- Seminar
- Workshop
- LUG Meeting

There will be a lot of participant from the community on this event. Let's say ubuntu-id, fedora-id, slackware-id, OpenSUSE-id, and many more. Other LUG are also invited. You can check the LUG Meeting invitation on Linux.Or.ID or Mail Archive or check the information at the official website. Some people have confirmed their attendance and it will be a great opportunities to meet each other. Some of us have had communicate before, but we never met each other face to face. So take this chance to know the people behind the community.

I will try my best to attend the LUG Meeting so that we can discuss lots of things (even though i may have to skip one of my class on that day, since i had a class on Sunday for my master degree).

See you guys next month...

Mid Test

This week, i will have my mid test for my master degree. Because of that reason, i had to change my weekly plan in order to spare more time to study. Usually i review my presentation for next week on Friday/Saturday and upload it on Sunday, but i have finished it today so i have no burden for next week. I'm not a person who likes to work in one night. Usually i made it long long before the class and then few days before the class, i review my work, just in case i need to add/update things.

Mandriva Club Is Now Free

Good new for Mandriva users. Mandriva Club which used to be a commercial service, is now offered for free to public. By becoming a member of Mandriva Club, you can get the Mandriva releases earlier than other people who don't have Mandriva Club access and also other stuffs, like forums, newsletter, knowledge base, etc. Here's the interesting stuff about Mandriva Club:

* a news feed with community articles and interviews
* a knowledge base, with tips & tricks and a special zone for Linux
newcomers
* the RPM farm service for an easy access to online application
packages and repositories
* Bittorrent downloads with access to the final versions a few days
before the release for early seeders
* the official documentation
* a personal blog service for community members
* a nice e-cards service for the holiday season
* access to a complete e-training program, with 25 free training modules
* access to the Mandriva Expert support platform
* an HCL database

I used to have a VIP account at Mandriva Club since i contribute to Mandriva for translating it to Indonesian, but lately, my account hasn't been extended again (but my friend said that we could ask for extension and they will approve it if we really give our contribution to them). But it doesn't matter anymore, since i don't use Mandriva again since 2005.

Mozilla Problem

This noon, my colleague from architecture faculty asked me about Firefox. He has been using Firefox for some time, and few days ago he had a problem with this product. After he installed the latest one, he could open the firefox and browse normally, but after he closed the firefox, and tried to reopen it again, it won't work. It popped up and then shut down. He has tried to reinstall it again, or remove the application and then install a fresh installation, but both method didn't work out.

So i gave him advice to remove the Mozilla's preference. The disadvantage of this method is that your customization will be gone, since it's a directory which saved all of your settings, including your extensions and themes. In Windows it's located in C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Mozilla and C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla and in Linux, it's located on your home directory and inside a directory called .firefox. Firefox will create this directory automatically if it doesn't exist, so it's a preferred way if you have problems with Firefox. After deleting this directories, he could start his Firefox and work normally.

Another problem was that he never save his extensions or themes, so he will have to search and download again. Well... happy hunting....

Electricity Problem

Few days ago, when i was working at my store, there was an electricity problem, cause the work should be ended prematurely. Today, i had another electricity problem again, but this time, on my campus. I was giving a class at 5 PM and suddenly, the electricity went off at about 6 PM. I was supposed to give a demo about NUnit, a free unit testing tool, but i canceled it because there's no power on the projector. I will give this demo next week and hoping that no more electricity problem again.

Since the material is not finished when the lights comes off, i continued a bit to finish of my material for a few minutes and speaking in the dark with some lights from the students who turned up their light from their cellphone. It's very annoying, but luckily it happened at night, where most classes were already done and most of my materials has been covered up before the power down, so it didn't messed up my schedule for the class.

Working Overnight

In the last two days (and until the next two days), i will work overnight helping my father to monitor people that are placing an ads on my store. We usually start at 9 PM and finished around 12 AM because we all have to work again in the morning, so we couldn't continue until morning. It's quite tired actually, but i had to accompany my father because we need two people there.

Ah... well... better get prepared now. It's almost 8.30 and i'm sleepy already

GPU For Password Recovery

For some time, people only understand that GPU (graphics processing unit) is only used for processing and manipulating computer graphics. A better GPU can process more data and resulting in a faster and better view of a graphics on your output device (mostly are monitors or screens).

In the future, GPU will not only being used to process computer graphics only, but can be used also to help application doing their job. Elcomsoft has filed a patent for revolutionary technique to recover lost passwords by combining CPU and GPU resulting a faster process. It's said that this combination will decrease the time that it takes to perform password recovery by a factor of up to 25.

The logic behind this idea is that most modern GPU can process fixed-point calculation, not only floating-point which is used by many cryptography algorithm. As we already knew, GPU has higher computational output than CPU, so if we can use this advantage, the user will be happier, since the process can be reduced in a manner of time. Devices are also utilized, so it's a win win solutions. VGA Card vendor such as NVidia is also supporting this by launching CUDA:

NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology is a fundamentally new computing architecture that enables the GPU to solve complex computational problems in consumer, business, and technical applications. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology gives computationally intensive applications access to the tremendous processing power of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) through a revolutionary new programming interface.

This technology could bring a home edition of supercomputer by combining CPU and GPU to do quite-complex computational in personal computer in the future. What a brilliant ideas

Source:
Net-Security
NVIdia CUDA
Elcomsoft

Back to Daily Activities

Today, most people will go back to their normal activities, after having quite a long holidays. Some of us have started to work since last week, but since the government has stated that the holidays will took place until 19 October, the normal activities will start today. Luckily, bank activities has started last week also, so people can enjoy their holidays and still can access their accounts without any problems. Just think when banks were closed until today. What a mess for travelers who didn't bring money at all, since they thought bank and ATM will be available.

Two days ago, Jogja has became less crowded. Many people from outside Jogja has came back to their cities thus the street wasn't as crowded as before. It's very common for Jogja to be as crowded as before, since many people came to Jogja on holidays (including foreigners). Jogja is one of the target when people came to Indonesia (besides Bali). Perhaps they were interested with the cultures and probably the palace. It's good to see many foreigners came back to Indonesia again. Tourism will be a good assets for Indonesia

Enjoy new day and happy monday

Replacing Feisty With Gutsy

Few days ago, i have finished downloading the latest Ubuntu and Kubuntu distribution, 7.04 (aka Gutsy Gibbon). Previously, i have Feisty installed on my Windows XP, using VMWare (i don't replace my Slackware and i reserved my Linux partition only for Slackware). So yesterday, i removed my Feisty virtual machine and i installed Kubuntu (i'm trying new things here, since i previously installed Ubuntu). The installation process hasn't changed much since last version. It consist of 6 steps (reduced from 7 in Feisty) and it's very straightforward. I don't know much about package selection, since Kubuntu ships different application than Ubuntu. But my first impression when Kubuntu started is very minimalistic. The application is very limited (perhaps the developers only choose the most used application and leave the rest in the repository to save some spaces).

Firefox is not shipped by default in Kubuntu (they do shipped in Ubuntu), so in order to use it, i have to install it using apt-get, but that's when the problem arose. Since i'm using Indonesian time zone, the installer create a sources.list file that contains a link to Indonesian site, such as http://id.archive.ubuntu.com. The problem with is that sometimes, Indonesian sites are inaccessible, so i couldn't get anything when i ran apt-get update. The solution is to change the id into us and re-ran the command and voila..... everything works like charm. I can install Firefox again

The default resolution that was picked during installation was so high. It was about 1600x1200 if i'm not mistaken. I choose to reduce it to normal resolution, 1024x768 using KDE Control Center. If i don't do this, i won't be able to have full screen mode.

As usual, Ubuntu never shipped codecs, so people will have to download some package from the repositories when they want to listen to musics or songs or videos. Lucky me, Slackware by default shipped this application, so i can start listening to mp3 files out-of-the-box.

Firefox Blocker Site

Even though Firefox gains a lot of users nowadays, there were still some sites who doesn't like or became inaccessible when viewed using other browser than IE. Check this list and you will be quite surprised, since some of them are big sites. I think they should start working to make their site browser-friendly by removing the text "We only support Internet Explorer".

What's the point of only supporting a single browser? People around the world has their own browser preferences and some have known that Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, or Safari works best (or better) than IE in most cases, so they choose that browser. If a site only accept IE, then they are wasting lots of customer who didn't have IE on their computer (mostly are from Linux people). If others can switch, why wouldn't they?

Word Processor : Jarte

For you who need a simple Word Processor application, you can consider Jarte a look. It's cheaper than MS Office (it's a freeware, but they do sell a commercial one if the customers wants more than the basic feature) and it's lighter than OOo. It has tabs, like IBM Symphony, it can open OOXML documents (MS Office 2007 format), and it could export documents to PDF formats like OpenOffice.org. New features in Jarte Plus are:

* Background Spell Checking
* AutoCorrect
* AutoOutline
* Jarte Personalities
* Choice of Background Patterns
* Remembers Saved Clipboard Clips
* Define Your Own Reference Bar Buttons and Links
* Attach Document Notes
* Smart Quotes
* Roman Numeral Page Numbering
* Customer Support

Increased Capacity

GMail has started to rolled up an upgrade to their customer's inbox capacity. After it stacked on 2,8 GB, it has been increasing almost 4 GB currently (and it's showing an increasing trend, so it my be different when you saw your inbox).

Meanwhile, some of their competitor had promised an unlimited capacity, like Yahoo. For me, capacity is not the main thing, but about how the system handles my email so i can search, look for it. So far, GMail has done it. Besides, not many people will have their inbox filled with 10 GB of messages.

However, GMail is not a perfect solution either Few things i don't like in GMail currently:
1. I couldn't right click any message and then open it on other tab/window, except i switched to the basic HTML style
2. The spam filter still bypass lots of spams emails. They surely need to start thinking about solutions here. Nobody wants their inbox is filled with spams.
3. Attachments problem. GMail rejects certain file to be transfered via their SMTP. While it's good for security measurements, sometimes it's annoying.

I'm looking forward to get this problem fixed in the near future

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8

Mozilla has released an update to Firefox, 2.0.0.8. It has Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) support (with some glitches) and also a bunch of Security fixes. You can download all version here (all platform and also all languages).

Seamonkey and Thunderbird will follow in the next few days i guess, since most of the code are shared among these three products

Ubuntu 7.10

Yep, it's show time for Ubuntuers to grab the latest Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) and upgrade to this version. It's not a LTS (Long Term Support) version, but it's still a great distro with good support (18 months is enough since they will roll out a new version after six months from now). Here are the new features in Gutsy:
* Hardware management improvements
* Improved support for display systems
* Windows compatibility
* Enhanced user interface
* Desktop search
* Firefox plugins

Indonesian mirror has been updated with the ISOs, so grab it and enjoy it

I will try to install this on VMWare, since my favorite distro is still Slackware.

10.159.702.832 Bytes

That's my bandwidth consumption until i write this post and it will increase in the next few days, since Slackware-Current tree has been updated (meaning that development of Slackware 12.1 is starting again) and i'm downloading the packages right now. KDE packages has more than 200 MB and the rest is also big enough. Perhaps i will spend my weekend to upgrade my desktop system to Slackware-Current first, and the followed by my laptop system

FileZilla Translations

Yeaah.... FileZilla Indonesian translations is now finished (for now since it is being constantly updated). Look at Translations page for more information. Right now they are preparing to release 3.xx version. Please mail me if you have a suggestion about incorrect translations. I will merge them with the latest translations.

Indonesian is the only translations project that have finished 100% besides Spanish. Hopefully more will finish by the time FileZilla 3 is ready for prime time.

Crowded Jogja

Jogja nowadays is very crowded, since many people come to Jogja for vacation. I tried to avoid using car when going somewhere since most of the streets are very jammed. I prefer to use motorcycle rather than car. If possible, i prefer to stay at home and prepare for my mid test in the next two weeks.

Last night, i had a reunion with my friends again. Since i had to pick up my girlfriend and had to go through Malioboro, i picked her up using motorcycle and then i went to my other friend's house where we supposed to meet. From there, we went to Galeria using my friend's car to have dinner and then we went to Own Cafe to chit chat and played card and making noise everywhere (luckily we got some private room, so people out there won't be distracted by our voice). We stayed there for about two and half hours before finally we left and came home. It was a nice small party, even though many friends of ours couldn't join the party we conduct last night.

Well, today is the last holiday, as tomorrow normal life will begin again. Work.. Work...

Vietnam Is Migrating To Open Source

Vietnam's state agencies has started to migrate their application to Open Source application as the software products that were asked by their government is too expensive. It was a program that was developed on 2004 for 2004-2008 period, but it wasn't working until now (because of their government influence).

According to VietNamNet Bride:

The Office of the Communist Party of Vietnam has announced it has replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice, an open source software product. Accordingly, by the end of 2008, all 20,000 desktops at Party organs throughout Vietnam will be installed with OpenOffice.

Other state agencies like the Department of Post and Telecommunications of Khanh Hoa province, the Department of Post and Telecommunications, the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Trade of HCM City are using OpenOffice on a trial basis.

They are planning to expand the trial use of this open source software at three more departments and five districts in early 2008.

Here's an interesting part of the article:

The experience of agencies which have successfully performed the replacement of Microsoft Office with OpenOffice, for example Sacombank, reveals that the problem associated with open source software is not technological but in the habit of computer users.

This is true. Migrating to Open Source application is about habit. People were to afraid to change because they are used with their current application. You don't have to use big-bang approach when doing a migration. You can look at Vietnam's roadmap. They conduct the migration in two phases. The first is partial replacement and the second is complete replacement :

In the first phase, users can still keep the Microsoft Windows operating system and change some basic software such as Microsoft Office to OpenOffice and Internet Explorer to Firefox, Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express by Thunderbird.

After this stage, users can completely change the software in their computers, for example replacing the Windows operating system with Ubuntu operating system. At present OpenOffice has a Vietnamese version. Many popular utilities on Windows are now available on Linux like Acrobat Reader, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

Here's another one:

However, open source operating systems like Linux, Ubuntu or Fedora are not easy to install yet so the change needs the assistance of technicians.

In my opinion, Ubuntu is very easy to install and i have seen many people that are new to Linux can install Ubuntu on their own since the installation is very straightforward. I don't know about Fedora (since i have never used it since RedHat 9), but they have improved a lot since Fedora Project comes up.

Vietnam dare to do this and they have a good roadmap. What about our government? Are they ready for this kind of thing? I'm sure there are a lot of people and organizations that are willing to help on this task. They can also coordinate with some community that can help them, for example LUG (Linux User Group) which has lots of members and are wide spread around Indonesia (You can see the list on InfoLinux magazine).

Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/reports/2007/10/749003/

Next Milestone: OpenOffice.org 3.0

OpenOffice.org is looking forward to release OpenOffice.org 3.0 next year (it's still a long time) and yet there are some rumors about features that will be available on the next major release. Ryan posted his article on Cybernet with a big title: OpenOffice 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook and it's worthed to read if you want to see the direct goal of OpenOffice.org 3.0. Well, here are the list (it may incomplete):

- New Personal Information Manager
- PDF Import and Export
- Microsoft Office 2007 XML Importing
- Improved Pivot Tables and Solver in Calc
- Web 2.0 Support (Blogging and Wiki)
- Presenter Console with Multi-screen Support
- Vista Integration
- New Chart Engine and Wizard (regression curves, 3D exploded pie, 3D doughnut, 3D smooth lines, etc)
- Improved Notes
- Rectangle Selection in Writer
- New Report Engine for Base
- Improved Extension Management
- Icon Redesign
- Better Chapter Numbering in Writer
- ODF Toolkit

Which one is your favorite?

Vacation on Kaliurang

Yesterday, i went to Kaliurang with my girlfriend and her relatives. I hadn't been to Kaliurang for years, since i was in college i guess so it was very nice to be able to go there again. The road was not that crowded, since most people will go to their relatives and celebrates Idul Fitri so we could get there in less then 30 minutes.

Not many people go to Kaliurang at that day, but there were some. We went to the park and stayed there for a while, because my girlfriend's nephews wanted to play. We took some pictures together at the park, but it's still on the digicam, so i will upload it soon on my web album. One of the unique thing about the park was that the green giants were still there (and re-painted). It's like a symbol for that park

Too bad the weather was not so friendly. It was raining, so we couldn't enjoy the park, so we finally left the park at 2.30 PM. Some of us took the semi-train to travel around Kaliurang, and we (me and my girlfriend) took that time to ate Ronde while waiting for the others. We finished on time, since when they arrived back, we're done eating.

Next thing was we were going back to Jogja and it was even faster, since we're going down and the road was still empty like in the morning. It was a good vacation and hopefully there will be another one again while we're still in holidays

Excel Patch

Microsoft has released a patch to fix Excel Bug. It was a huge patch (33 MB) since it fixed lots of components that are related to the components that were affected by the bug. It has been posted on their official Blog and soon, it will hit Microsoft Updates so people could download them automatically (if they allow the Automatic Updates to work). More information about this bug fixes can be seen on Microsoft's Knowledge Base.

Some audience gave their comments and saying that they got an error message : "The installation of this package failed" and also saying that the patch won't fix one of the problem, which was 4-4.1 still give 0.0999999996 not .1. I haven't verified this also, since i'm on my Slackware box right now (i'm still enjoying it)

Heroes S02E03

Heroes season 2 episode 3 (kindred) is out now...
Stay tune for updates

i also start watching prison break season 3 now...

The streaming process is quite fast, since most of the people are already in holidays right now and it will last until next week. Happy Downloading

Finishing Season 2

It's been a few days and i have finished most of the episodes in season 2 of Prison Break. I'm streaming the episode 21 currently and then shortly after that 22. After this, i will continue to season 3. I wonder when will it ends? Michael and Lincoln has traveled in most US cities and now he's in Panama. Some of the fugitives were dead and only five left (Michael, Lincoln, Franklin, Sucre, and T-Bag). Let's hope the streaming goes smoothly and no interruptions

New Default Skin For Winamp

Winamp has just released their final 5.5 version (this version takes some time to finish, but at last it's out and it's worthed if you look at the changes). This version also marks Winamp's 10 year of anniversary. Here are some of the new features that are new in Winamp 5.5:

* New "Bento" Skin as Default
* A Completely Redesigned Interface, including Album Art
* Multiple device support, including iPods
* Access and Share Your Music and Videos with Winamp Remote
* Play and Playlist the Best Music on the Web with Media Monitor
* Get Artist & Concert News, Videos & more with Smart Search
* Enjoy Dynamic Song Recommendations
* Experience MP3 Surround Sound Support
* Access to Thousands of Online Radio Stations, Videos and More!
* 50 FREE MP3 Music Downloads compliments of eMusic's 2-week Trial
* Auto-Tagger provides automatic updates to file information
* Control Winamp From Your Browser with the Winamp Toolbar
* New installer

The filesize has increased as well. It's 9,81 MB now, compared to the version 2 which only less than 3 MB. Here's the screenshot of the latest Winamp.

Sorry For Unfinished Translations

Mandriva 2008.0 has finally been released and lots of new and great stuffs are there. Here are some of them: GNOME 2.20 desktop, KDE 3.5.7, Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, latest Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0. This version will use 2.6.22.9, the previous stable version of the kernel, since 2.6.23 has just gone out and there hasn't enough time to include this on the distribution. You might want to check Mandriva's wiki for more information about this release.

Few weeks ago, i just re-started translating the Mandriva project again and it's not finished yet, since they have added lots of new translations strings, so you might not get the finished work of Indonesian translations in Mandriva 2008.0. The biggest change is in their new simplified menu system. This will take some time to finish and if you want to help, please join mdk-id mailing list. I will try to update the project as soon as possible, but since the old statistic page is now gone, it will be more difficult to look at the changes and it has to be done manually.

2.6.23 Finally

Finally the waiting time is over. Final release of kernel 2.6.23 is out there and it's time to compile time

Read the Changelog for more detailed information.

House Planner

Are you planning to buy a new house or make from scratch? If you do, you can use FloorPlanner to help you design your new 'castle'. You can even share it to your friend and ask them their opinions. It uses a sweet combination of Flash and a little bit of AJAX, so make sure you have Flash player installed and Javascript turned on.

The registration is very simple. All you have to do is enter your email, password, and password confirmation. It will take you to the project page shortly after the registration is finished (it will only take seconds to complete it). When the loading is finished, you can start working on your new house of dream

Credit goes to Teguh who told me about this site

2.6.23, Not Yet?

It's been five days since Linus release 2.6.23-RC9 and still no sign when will final 2.6.23 kernel released. Meanwhile, in LKML people are busy introducing new features that are being planned to be pushed in Linus' tree in the merge window (shortly after 2.6.23 released and after the x86 merge process is finished, since Linus said it will be the first thing after 2.6.23 gets their way). It's been a long process and i hope it will be a smooth release with as little regression as possible.

This Is The Real MU

Now this is what i call a game. MU beat Wigan 4-0 in front of their 75.300 supporters at their home base Old Trafford just now. Who scores? Well, it's all the strikers that MU has (except for Saha and Scholes), which was Tevez (the opening), Ronaldo (double goal), and Rooney (the ending). This is what people are waiting for. A lot of goals from the goal getters. MU spent the most budget this season by buying several players and they were very slow at the start. After winning charity shield, they couldn't show great performance like last season and most of their winning game ended by 1-0 at the score line.

People start to criticize MU for useless spending, but now they have proven that their decision to buy those players were correct one. It happened when MU bought Christiano Ronaldo several years back. Nobody nows Ronaldo and he was wearing Beckham's number (7). People at that time still thought that 7 is a holy number (since it was used by great players. You name it, Beckham, Cantona), so Ronaldo wasn't considered fit to use that number, but Sir Alex have made his decision and Ronaldo prove that it was the right choice. Well, it looks like that Sir Alex was right again this time. It does worthed to buy Tevez, Nani, and other players. They just need time to prove that they are the best team in the England (or probably Europe).

What impress me about MU is that they really have a big fan. Look at the attendance in the last match : 75.300. If i'm not mistaken, MU is one of the top rank club that has the biggest average of attendance on each matches. If one ticket is 30 pound sterling, then in one match, they could gain 2.259.000 pound sterling (equals to 42.132.609.000 IDR with the rate of 18651 per 1 pound sterling). Just calculate if they were competing in several league, such as FA Cup, Champion League, Carling Cup (unfortunately MU lost on this one). That's a big money

Ban Control

phpBB has a useful feature called ban control. It can be used to ban several users to register to our forum. There are several methods to do this, but i think the most effective way to do this is by banning the domain address which is used for their email address. If you ban an ip address, there's a risk on it. What happened if someone who turned out to be a spammer was accessing the forum via public internet cafe? We could block the entire visitor on that cafe to access our forum. It's not a good choice.

What about usernames? It's not that good either, since bot can randomly pick any username they wanted, so you have virtually unlimited usernames to be checked on. So the best pick for now is to ban the domain. For example, one of the biggest spammers came from bigmir.net domain. It's some kind of a news portal, but i don't know which country is it from, since i don't understand the language they used on their site. In order to ban all users from this domain, go to administration panel and access the ban control. Put *@bigmir.net (yes, it supports wildcards) in second to the last field (email address) and from that moment, all email which directly comes from bigmir.net will be denied to register to our forum. I have used this method for several days and it's quite effective.

The major drawbacks is that i have to be very careful not to ban a white domain, for example *@yahoo* which will block all emails from Yahoo to sign up on the forum

IE7 On All XP

Microsoft is releasing an update to IE7 which can be downloaded and installed on all Windows XP (whether they are original or cracked version). You can get this version from Microsoft site or via Automatic Updates (if you are a fans of this feature).

Besides all the updates are applied, the new IE7 by default will have this changes:
# The menu bar is now visible by default.
# IE 7 online tour has updated how-to’s. Also, the “first-run” experience includes a new overview.
# Include a new MSI installer that simplifies deployment for IT administrators in enterprises.

.NET Source Code Will Be Published

In the next release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 (it's scheduled this year), Microsoft will publish source code for their .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows) to the public. In the next following months, they will publish more and more codes to the public (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Read more detail on ScottGu's blog

New Is Not Always Better

Sometimes, people like the old version of an application. Why? Since it's smaller, efficient (in term of memory consumption) and they have fulfill the user's need. Why would they need to upgrade and spent some money on the newer version which sometimes bloated, full of unused animation/features, and of course, more expensive (on commercial application), except for new features that are critical or security updates. For those who like to use the old version of an application, try to visit this site, OldVersion. It listed some of the old application that people still use up to now.

One good example are ACDSee and Winamp. Both of this program has a good history in the old version. They works perfectly and did what they was designed for. It is very fast on the operation and also very small in the term of size. I can run the application in a seconds on the old computer, which i couldn't get with the latest version now.

Finishing Season 1

I have just finished watching Prison Break Season 1. I know it's kindda outdated, since it has been released since two years ago, but i have never seen this before, until few days ago, my friend told me to watch this movie. So i watched them by streaming (since downloading torrents will be much longer). So i finished 22 episodes in just 2-3 days. It could be faster, but since i must do other activities, i can't just sit and watch the movies everyday

Well, season 2 is also available, so i will start looking at it, since the breakout in season 1 is not yet finished. We'll see the progress in the next season. Meanwhile, season 3 has already started in the US. Nice movie by Paul Scheuring. The moral i could take from this movie: Always prepare for the unexpected and plan for contingency plan.

Spam Emails

In the last two months, incoming spam email on my inbox is getting worse. I don't know why, but GMail's spam filter sometimes let them pass their filter and go through my inbox. They came from different email address, so it's impossible to identify them all, but one thing for sure, they have similarity on the content, since usually the message is related to drugs and viagra (and some other things). I think it's time GMail team start reviewing their filters and do something about it.

Is it only me or other people have the same symptoms?

404 Songs

Two months ago, i wrote something about 404 pages (standard code for web application if the browser couldn't find the target), which i took from SmashingMagazine. Few hours ago, i got an email from Walt Riberio who had read my previous post and decided to make it better by creating a 404 Songs. Curious? Check this out

Even though it's very short (only 1,5 minutes), but it expresses most of the common thing when people couldn't find their target (URL, Files) on the Internet. Sweating, nervous, depressed. Well, it's not happening for most people, but to some specific people.

Heroes 2 Is ON

For those who loved Heroes, be happy for this good news. Heroes season 2 is already started (24 September). Lots of new characters and abilities. The first episode is called Four Months Later. It will consist of 24 regular storyline episodes split into two volumes, Volume Two: Generations and Volume Three. During the season's breaks, 6 episodes of the mini-series Heroes: Origins will air.

The video is already available on some sites (and torrents), but it's up to you to find the source. Hm... can't wait to see the story of this new season. Watching heroes is always exciting, since it's full of surprises and shocking events.