Family Reunion

At the end, there's no gifts from Linus nor PV, but i got a nice family reunion at the end of this year (except for Ivan, my cousin who didn't come back from Australia this year). We just had our dinner together at Kobra restaurant, near my girlfriend's house. We are going to play cards until midnight after i write this post

Scrolling Problem

Today i went to Plaza Ambarukmo with my girlfriend and i tried to use the e-directory to find one of the store i need to go to. It was smaller that i saw in Taman Anggrek in Jakarta, but both of them has touch screen feature in it. At first, i thought it would be easy to use it as touch screen is very easy to use, but unfortunately, it wasn't.

I'm not saying that the problem lies in the touch screen, but it's on the system. When i used the e-directory in Taman Anggrek, it has no mount pointer in it, so all you can do is click on the buttons. They provide big buttons to locate the store and also to scroll, so no mouse pointer needed. What i saw in Plaza Ambarukmo was like a Flash format, so the touch screen replaces your mouse input. You can click and also you must drag the pointer to the scrollbar if you want to go down/up through the pages. Clicking is not a big problem, but scrolling does. The touch screen was not very responsive, thus the mouse pointer movement was not very smooth. Sometimes it stucked on one location even though my fingers has moved to another place (dragging it).

I hope they will fix this as soon as possible, as it's very important, mostly for people outside Jogja who has never been to Amplaz before

Going to Semarang

Next week, i will go to Semarang, since my cousin has his first baby (it's a boy). His wife gave a birth last night at around 8 PM and my auntie sent my mother a SMS message. I will leave for one day only, since my sister had to go back to Jakarta at January 3, so i only stayed for one night (i know it will be very crowded, but there's no other choice). Well... anyways... congratulations to Andi for his first baby... be a good father

I'll take this a short vacations also

Will Linus Give New Year Gifts?

After failing to give Christmas presents few weeks ago, most people are expecting Linus to give the presents before this year ends which should happened around the next 50 hours (at the time i write this post). Many people are expecting the final 2.6.24 release as it should have been released by now if it wasn't late and there's no show stopper bugs around. So far, there's 247 oops in the RC release of 2.6.24, according to Kernel OOPS BugCount, which is the biggest since 2.6.17 was tracked (i don't know whether this number has dropped or not, but my guest is that this number reflected the oops counted during the first RC release and it will be updated when the final 2.6.24 released).

Heavy Rain

Yesterday, my hometown had a heavy rain and it caused electrical problem (again) in some places. My girlfriend's house was affected by this problem and so did the other house around hers. My ADSL modem which wasn't connected to the UPS sometimes had to be restarted when the electricity went off even for a second. My computer stays on, since i have UPS connected and working well. Solo, a city near Jogja was rumored to be drowned, but not the whole city, but only some parts of it. I wonder what happened with Jakarta if this kind of rain dropped there? The critical month will be next month and a month later (February). I hope last year's tragedy won't happened again.

MU on Top

MU won it's away matches against Sunderland with a big goal difference, 0-4. Meanwhile, Arsenal was held to draw by Portsmouth, which means that MU is now on top of the Barclays Premier League table, with one point different to Arsenal. It's a good sign and i hope that they will keep it that way until the end of this season.

There's a curse-like that said whoever became the top of the table on the middle of the season (December) will not be the champion at the end of the season, but MU has broke that curse several times and i do hope they will do it again

Yesterday's match was also a nice comeback from Louis Saha who scored twice (one from Penalty) and also Wayne Rooney who scored the first goal. The other person was the winger, Ronaldo. They even got 0-3 in the first half, so it's a big win yesterday. Check the report on Soccernet

Bad Delivery Service

Two days ago i ordered a cake at Holland Bakery. The cake was promised to be delivered at 3 PM today to my girlfriend's house and i agreed with that. I wrote the recipient and sender information correctly and i have strongly said that to the person who received my order so that it won't delivered to the wrong person.

Guess what? The cake was delivered to my house My address was clearly written in the sender field, and not in the recipient field (the receipt was in Indonesian). My sister who noticed this package call them and they said that they would someone to took the package and send it to the correct recipient. After more than 50 minutes without any progress, i recalled them and they said they were just leaving 15 minutes ago because they couldn't find any free drivers. OK, no problem for me. So i waited again... Another 45 minutes passed without any confirmation. So i decided to deliver that package myself

I know that the route from Holland Bakery to my house is not that far and it could be reached under 10 minutes and today is not as crowded as yesterday, so it should be possible. I don't know what took them so long. They arrived at my house 5 minutes before i came back delivering the cake to my girlfriend's house.

Which One Shoud I Use?

Nowadays, there are a lot of Linux distributions and sometimes, it can make people confused. If you ask to someone else, they might give an answer with their preferred distribution, so i usually never pick specific distro and let them choose by themselves. If you are looking for a good Linux distribution, i suggest you read this nice article:
- Choosing a Linux Distro Part 1
- Choosing a Linux Distro Part 2
- Choosing a Distro - Newbie Guide

And if you want better interface, try this website. From this website, i get this results:
- Slackware
- Gentoo
- Arch Linux

Hm... nice... exactly as i used currently (Slackware)

Don't forget to look at DistroWatch for more information about the Linux distribution that you are going to use.

Comments Changes

I decided to change the setting for this blog regarding commenting. It seems that spammers are getting wild again, so for now, i changed how people can leave a comments on this blog. Now, only registered users that can leave a message on this blog, which i guess doesn't have big impact, since most of the them already have an account on other blog services or perhaps OpenID, which can be used to identify themselves.

Merry Christmas For All of You

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2007

圣诞快乐2007年

聖誕快樂2007年

Joyeux Noël 2007

Frohe Weihnachten 2007

Καλα Χριστουγεννα 2007

Buon Natale 2007

メリークリスマス2007

메리 크리스마스 2,007

Feliz Natal 2007

Счастливого Рождества 2007

Feliz Navidad 2007

Selamat Natal 2007

Thanks to Google Translate

Indonesian Version of HP 7

Next month (and also next year), Indonesian version of Harry Potter 7 will arrive around 12 January. In my opinion, it was a quick release, since usually Indonesian version will come out one year after the English version comes out. At least this is what happened in the previous six edition.

Today i went to Gramedia book store and there was a promotion about it. I can get 10% off if i did a pre-order and i did that. I paid Rp. 50.000 and i should pay the rest when i receive the book next month. I choose the soft cover, since i had the soft cover version with the previous version. The soft cover price were Rp. 150.000 and the hard cover were Rp. 195.000. I was customer number 649 meaning that there were more than 600 people have pre-ordered the book before me (some of them were ordering more than one book).

If you haven't done so, then you will have to wait for Wednesday, since i guess Gramedia will not be open tomorrow.

Good and Bad Business

Every year, people celebrates something, birthday, anniversary, Christmas, New Year, etc. When the time comes, people are taking opportunities to get lots of money, either by running good business or sometimes a bad one. One good example of the good business is making the Santa's hat or Christmas goods. Since it's almost Christmas (tomorrow), many Christian will surely buy those things. It happened in most events, like Chinese New Year, Thanks Giving, Halloween, etc.

Well, besides good business, some people do bad business also. One of them is a lazy parking man. Today i went to the Kota Baru Church to celebrate Christmas night with my girlfriend and we went there using a car. Because we were quite late (we planned to go one hour before it, but we arrived there 40 minutes before, which is considered late, since it was already crowded). When i stepped out of the car, there was some men acting like a parking man and asked for money. He asked for Rp. 5000 and i rejected, since it's way too high. Normal rate is Rp. 1000-2000 in Jogja. So i finally gave him Rp. 3000 because it's not my car and i don't want something happened while i was in the church.

When the celebration was over, we went back to the car and nothing happened and that's a good sign, but when we wanted to get out, there were nobody out there helping out. Those guys were busy asking money from people for the second session. This is an example of bad business. They are not responsible for anything after they got the money. It's very crowded and they don't give a **** care about that. All they care is the money

Out of Space

Today, i was checking my laptop and i found out that my Windows primary partition (C) is almost out of space with 1,6 GB remaining. I don't realize this, since in the last few weeks, i rarely boot my laptop and always use my desktop. Even if i boot to my laptop, most of the time, i boot to my Slackware, not my Windows operating system.

Back to main topic here. I was quite surprised when i had that low space problem, since i never added new things on my laptop if it's not very important (i don't like bloated system). The only things i add most of the time were Windows updates. And probably that's the problem. I searched my system and looking for the directory that holds a lot of spaces and finally i found one of them, which is C:\Windows\Installer. On my system it's only 1,25 GB, but on other forums, some of them were having 8-12 GB of space wasted on that directory. What are the files stored there actually? I tried to find some answers on Google, and most of them didn't have a good answer about this. It's said that those files were the installer information that can be used when you want to reinstall the application and it can be deleted, but they don't talk about the potential risk if those files are deleted.

I really really want to delete those files since it doesn't help at all. It's just wasting space. Maybe this space requirements should be added to Windows requirement page

In case you are using Windows, have you check yours? How much does it consume your space? You might be surprised, mostly if you often install/remove applications on your system

Better Gmail 2.0

If you are using GMail and Better GMail extension, it's a good idea to grab and download the second version of Better GMail extension, as GMail has changed a little bit and it could cause problems if you are using the first version. I also had this problem and when i click the Find Updates button, it won't tell if there's an update. So when i activate my better gmail extension, i got a warning on GMail's interface that using the old version of Better GMail could cause problem and it's suggested to update to the second version and i simply upgrade to the second version and now most of my problem has gone with the wind....

Please note that Better GMail 2.0 only works with new version of GMail

Alpine Goes Gold

After being developed for some time, finally Alpine has been officially released by the release of Alpine 1.0. They have slightly different versioning during development phase, but the results is now officially released. FYI, Alpine is a fast, easy to use email client that is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding of power users. It's build based on Pine, one of the most popular text-based email client (i also use it on my Slackware). I don't know whether it will replace Pine or not, but since it's build on Pine, i'm assuming it will be better than Pine. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0

Close to 6GB

What do you thing 6GB represents? It's GMail's quota. It's almost 6 GB and keep counting. My email account is still 35 MB, not even 1% of the quota given by GMail.

Clamav 0.92

A new final version of Clamav has been released by the Clamav team. The changelog is also provided if you want to know further changes compared to the previous version. It's quite big, with 13,6 MB for the file size (source).

If you see the changelog, there's a lot of code cleanup on this release, so in most cases, it's a good progress, but we don't know yet until we tried the application. Hopefully it will compile nicely on my Slackware again

Indonesian Translations for Smarty

Smarty now has Indonesian translations for the manuals. The translation work has been finished by Zaenal Mutaqin. Check the site for the finished task. Congratulations to Zaenal I hope his work will help the adoption of Smarty by PHP users in Indonesia

New Room

Today is the day where i should get my new room for next year. I already received the key from the dean, Mr. Henry Feriadi. It's still empty, since i still don't have any desk nor computer to use, but i hope they will finish the migration session next Saturday and hopefully i can use any free desk and computer (i don't expect a nice shinny computer, but it's a good idea if somebody can give that to me ). I will share the room with Mr. Harald Walcher, a foreign lecturer in UKDW.

I'm planning to wipe the hard disk and install Slackware Linux on the computer, so no more Windows on my computer. I'm tired of having problem with viruses and since the computer does not have the bleeding-edge specs, it would be quite heavy if i force to use Windows. Slackware Linux has been my favorite Linux distribution since 2005. There's a lot of cool things that Linux could do and Windows couldn't.

Well, most of them will have to wait until next year......

Opera 9.25

I know that most of Opera users will likely to wait for 9.50, but it's still in beta version and being developed, so for now, you can get the updated 9.25 that deals with security fixes and miscellaneous fixes as meant on the changelog:

* Fixed an issue where plug-ins could be used to allow cross domain scripting
* Fixed an issue with TLS certificates that could be used to execute arbitrary code

* Rich text editing can no longer be used to allow cross domain scripting

* Prevented bitmaps from revealing random data from memory

* Fixed a problem where malformed BMP files could cause Opera to temporarily freeze.

How SE Fix Things

If you are a software engineer (or programmer), you might often said this sentence "It worked yesterday", "This is designed according to specification", or probably "It must be a hardware problem". Check this page for more complete sentence that we often said when problem arises. It's filled with an image for representation of the text

Task Completed

Today i have submitted all of my results to the administration division on my campus, meaning that my task for this semester (and this year) is already completed. It's time to start thinking about next semester which i will teach more subjects than this semester.

Next semester i will teach 3 different subjects (this semester i also taught three different subject, but two of them were similar, but only in different faculty). Those three subject are distributed system, web engineering, and internet application engineering. Too bad i couldn't join the networking class that uses Linux because my schedule has some conflict with my other class. I really wanted to co-teaching with Hendra Sentono (ex sysadmin on my campus). Well, probably next time

Since i had spare time, i will start working on the material for the two remaining subjects. The other lecturer is busy with moving their stuffs to the new building. I was placed in a room without any window I will try to move to other room which is still empty (i have looked at the room map today and i will ask if i could use that room )

MU Beats Liverpool

MU beat Liverpool on their home base 0-1 to gain the top of the English Premiere League table for temporary (as Arsenal is going to play against Chelsea in a few minutes). This is a big win and it will give a burden to Arsenal if they want to regain their position as the leader. Wonderful goal from Carlos Tevez in 43th minute. Too bad i couldn't watch it as i don't have TV Cable on my house. I just watch the result from LiveScore

Forum Surpasses 8000 Members

Hm... i forgot when did Indonesian Linux Forum surpasses 7000 members, but today, it surpasses 8000 members So next year, we could gain about around 10000 members (if the new member of the day statistics doesn't decrease). It's the next milestone in Forum's existence since 2004. The database has surpassed 100 MB with total of Number of posts: 71284, Number of topics: 11573 and Topics per day: 9.23

New Version Control Application

A new version control application has been released by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu development. Unlike CVS or SVN which use centralized repository, Bazzar (the new application name from Canonical) use a distributed repository (perhaps like in GIT). Any web server that includes a FTP server can be a Bazzar server, interesting huh?

So what's the requirements? Only Python is required. Curious? Grab them at Bazzar's website

Related article: Linux-Watch

IEEE Computer Society Invitation

Few weeks ago i created an account on IEEE and today i got the invitation to join IEE Computer Society. They gave a discount US$90 if i'm willing to join before the end of this year (31 Dec 2007). I will think about it first, as the rate is quite expensive (for me). Personally, it's very interesting, since i can get access to more than 1300 courses and also got IEEE magazines, etc. I wonder if my campus has already subscribe to this community or not.

Lost Integration

Usually, when i sign in to my GMail account, then i launched blogger's URL, it went directly to my dashboard, where i can choose which blog i should write, but lately the integration between those two services were lost (or broken). I don't know why. Perhaps it only happened on my browser. Well, it's just blogger, as i can logged in directly to other Google's service, such as Google Docs, GoogleGroups, and many other services.

More Assignments

From today's meeting, i got a new assignment for next semester, which will be Internet Application Engineering (i don't know if it's the correct translations from "Rekayasa Aplikasi Internet"). The focus for this subject is to introduce Internet application as much as possible to the students in order to prepare them for the next subject, Web Engineering, where students are taught how to develop a good web application, starting from requirements, planning, designing, until implementation.

Sometimes, people need some introduction when they meet new things, and this is the perfect subject for that. I should start making the syllabus for the subject and if it's working as planned, it will be an interesting class, since we will have a lot of discussion about lots of web applications (including blogs). Nowadays, web-based application are gaining reputation compared to desktop application, so i guess it's a good idea to introduce the current trend to students as early as possible

OpenID Commenting

After two weeks of testing, finally OpenID commenting has been released officially for Bloggers around the world. You can check it on Settings > Comments. You will have four options there:
* Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
* Registered Users - includes OpenID
* Users with Google Accounts
* Only members of this blog

For convenience, you can set to Anyone, with some risk that anonymous poster will be allowed to post. If you want to identify all commenter, you should use second or third options. Fourth options is the most strict options by only allowing member of the blog (if you have several contributors) to comment on the blog you are running.

Back in Action

After one week being quarantined at my own room, today i will be back in action. I had to go to my campus since one of my student need my signature for his field work approval (today is the deadline for submission). There will be a meeting this afternoon that i had to attend. It's good to be back in action since in the last 7 days, i only stayed at home. It's quite boring, but i'm feeling lucky that i have quite fast Internet connection. I can't imagine what will i do if i have to stay at home without any Internet connection. I guess i'm quite Internet addicted

One Material Completed

One of my material for next semester has been finished. I completed it this afternoon. I did this because i don't want to get rushed when new semester came and also since i was sick and must be quarantined, i don't have many activities, so it's better to spend it with good thing

Next thing is deciding the silabus for the other material. I'm still confused with this one, since i don't have the textbook (yet), but i will go to the library next week to find the correct book for this subject. Hopefully i can find a good one.

Start Counting Down

KDE 4 will arrive in the next 30 days, so KDE people have started to count down from 30 to 0 and give the banner for that. Even though it has been decided to being postponed from this year's release into next month, people seems to accept that as part of delivering a good release for the first major changes since KDE 3.x

Web-Based OOo

After Google Doc and MS Office online (trial), now it's time for OOo to have online version of it's application. It's not done by the OOo team itself, but by Ulteo. They have made several application to have online several applications, and now it's OOo time.

In order to try out this service, you will have to sign up for an account (which is free and very quick). After activating your account, then fire up the URL and wait until the applet is loaded. Pick the application you want (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, Base) and click Launch OpenOffice.org NOW. You need the latest Java JRE in order to use this feature. Don't try to load this software if you are using slow connection, since it's quite heavy.

It's still based on 2.3.0, but it's not a big deal, since 2.3.1 is only a maintenance version.

Thanks to Florian Effenberger for giving me the information

In The Mood

While you are in the mood of doing something, everything seems to be very quick and vice versa. Today, i'm in the mood of working for next semester's material. I usually had a habit to try to finish the material before the class started, so my burden will not be very big when the class starts. Another advantage is that i already have something to talk about and i don't have to make anymore in case i'm ill. So while i'm in the mood today, i make it as much as i can (and sacrificing my rest time). The result is looks good for me, so let's just hope in this week, all of them should be near complete

Nice Work Place

I wish there are office that have such a nice work place like this in Indonesia (well, not all of them, but only some which i'm interested with). It's truly Monday Inspiration

Almost Done

Today is my last day of my study at UGM. Next week, i will have my final test for this semester. Next thing is preparing to study the material while i had to review the results of my students' test result that will be conducted tomorrow and Thursday. What's next? Holiday of course...
At the start of new year, all activities will rise again, from preparing material for next semester (i think i got about 3 different subject to teach), looking for a thesis title, and some other stuffs. I have to enjoy the limited time i have at the end of this year

For now, i will focus on curing my chickenpox disease. It's getting better now and hopefully less than a week, it will be cured totally

Chickenpox Disease

I was supposed to be on Dieng right now to attend a training held by my campus, but i canceled it because i was not feeling very well and i should attend a busy class tomorrow. I wish i could join the training, but lately, i knew that if i joined that training, it would be bad for me, since this morning, i realized that i was infected by chickenpox.

I guest it was infected by one of my student, because he had this disease also. The problem was i met him at the last meeting of my class when he shouldn't be attending the class, since he still had chickenpox (probably he didn't aware of that), so i got infected also. Plus my condition wasn't fit in the last few days, so it's like 2-in-1 combo that struck me.

I hope it will recover ASAP, since i still had some activities to do next week.

It's a bad event to end this year

Google Chart API

Google has made developer's life easier by releasing Google Chart API which can be used to create chart online. Just arrange your data, and point your browser to Goggle's site with the correct query string and voila... you will have your chart presented If you want to embed it into your webpages, then you will have to use img tag to include it as an image and that's it. Nothing is simpler as that.

Of course the style here is not OOP like in JpGraph and also the parameter can be confusing, as you have to combine all of them in one single query string, but if you're used to it, you will be fine in just a few days.

AIM + Colored Labels on GMail

Two new features has been added into GMail, which is AIM chat client and also colored labels. Now you can chat with AIM's friends (i think it's only popular in US). To use this features, you will have to use the latest browser version (IE 7 and Firefox 2). I don't know whether Opera has support on this, but i think it's just a matter of time if it doesn't.

Forum Linux 7.12 Released

After few weeks of compiling, testing, and working, finally Budi has managed to release the first Forum Linux 7.12 Release. The ISO size was reduced quite a lot compared to the last beta. It's less than 200 MB (about 188 MB).

You can have LiveCD or USB version and the tutorial has been published as well. The data being used is still the same as the last beta, so about 21 November, but don't worry about that. We will release it every six months (yes, it has been changed from three to six months), so for now, enjoy the release

FYI, Forum Linux is based on targeT, which is based on Slackware 11.0.

At Limit

After several days with less sleep time, i think i'm on my limit today. I should get some rest now. It's getting worse and if i let it be, i'd get ill. So.... caooo and see you tomorrow...

Pending forum account should also wait until tomorrow. Sorry for this inconvenience.

OOo 2.3.1 Released

The first maintenance version for OpenOffice.org 2.3.x series has been released. It's called 2.3.1. Since it's a maintenance version, most of the updates were correction and bug fixes, not adding new feature (that should wait for 2.4). Some mirrors are still syncronizing (meaning that most of them are still having empty directory), but for now you can get it from PlanetMirror (Australia).

Car Puzzle

I got this puzzle from one of my friend in Jakarta. He was my ex-colleague. It's a simple car puzzle, but when you play it, it might make you confuse Go get them from my Box Account. I already solved it the same day i got the puzzle, and it's quite interested. I thought you might need some refreshing, so i shared this file to all of you

OpenID in Blogger (Soon)

Thanks to Maseko, i found out that Blogger will (soon) support OpenID for comments. Unfortunately, they don't have any plan (yet) for supporting OpenID for registrations. It will be a good one if they could implement this also.

Short descriptions about OpenID (taken from Wikipedia):

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider" (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

Application on Social Networking

It seems that Friendster has started to add Application (like in Facebook) into their system (they called it Widget). It's a big change and it's a new way to fight back Facebook that have used this approach before friendster. In the future, there's a possibility that they can share application to each other (perhaps by using Google's OpenSocial API)