All England Final

The wish of all England supporters have come true. The Champion League will have All-England Final after Manchester United grasp to the final after 1-0 win at Old Trafford this morning. Now, they are waiting for the other finalist, whether it will be Chelsea or Liverpool.

Even though Barca dominated MU on this game (like the one held in their home base), they can't get through MU's line of defence and take any chances they had on the match. The ball possession was very imbalance, but the final scores still goes to the MU.

Viva MU...

Looking for double title this year

Another Book

Another book has been bought tonight. I just came back from a book exhibition in Mandala Wanitatama building. Today is the last day, so i got 20% discount on the book i bought today. The book is Why Men Lie and Women Cry by: Allan & Barbara Pease (Indonesian version, ISBN: 979-3500-74-3). It's not a novel, but more like a guidance to have better relationship between men and women by understanding each other.

Surpassed 10000 Members

As i expected, 10000 users target for Indonesian Linux Forum has been surpassed today with 10012 members at this time i post this. I welcome you all and have a nice discussion and sharing using the service provided

Working Overnight

After two hours struggling with sleepy accompanied by students who still online past midnight talking in the conference (YM), i finally finished the correction at about 2 AM and upload the results to the servers. I hope everyone is happy with the grade so far (it's not yet the final score, but at least you know what is the maximum point that you can get)

Working at Last Minute

One hour before deadline for my task ended and some students still have problems uploading their work to their home directory at the server (some didn't know how, and the other forgot their user/password). This problem should have been identified long way before the deadline, but as usual, they always did all the work in the last minutes....

What can i say..... i can only wait for the results in one hour

Missing Books

I have been trying to find my old books about PHP programming (i like that book since it contains working examples, so we can try it directly without having to debug the code first). It's been missing for about one year. At first, i thought my friend borrowed it, since sometimes, they did and i probably forgot to ask them back (since most of the time, i don't remember who borrowed what).

Tonight, when i went back from dinner, i saw that book on the top of the poll table. I wonder, who found that book . Thanks for not throwing away the books and let me retrieve it back

Anyways, the books are PHP and Regex from Steven Haryanto. It was published by Dian Rakyat few years ago and it's quite popular among programmers.

Last Minute

When students gets a task to be submitted, most of them submitted at the last minute, even though the have been told to submit as soon as the task is finished. Sometimes, they even get late and asking for an inclusion of their task. I don't know whether it's a habit or because they are truly very busy with other tasks given by other lecturers.

This semester, i have asked my students to do a simple task and i have given the task objective at my first meeting, but most of them start working on those task at the end of the week and suddenly, my inbox is filled with all those tasks (i have asked them to submit them via email). Lucky i have moved to GMail, so i won't get lack of space when the quota keeps increasing like this

Last Day This Semester

Today is my last class this semester. Next week, the students will have their final exams and next class will start again on May-July (short semester) that will be held for about two and half weeks (we used block system and each block has twelve daily classes, so it's very short class).

While the students are taking their exams next week, some other students will be giving presentation about their field work accomplishment for this whole semester and other may have to take a preliminary test for their final project proposal (this will be done this week).

It's been an interesting semester and i hope all the students enjoyed the class as well as i do

77 More to Reach 10000

Tonight, i saw the statistics of Indonesian Linux Forum and the growth is quite amazing. Nine days ago i posted about the current situation and we need 254 members to reach 10000 and today, those number has decreased to 77. I'm quite optimistic to reach 10000 before the end of this month (or even better, before this weekend).

Here's some statistics from the ACP:
Number of posts: 85486
Posts per day: 61.80
Number of topics: 13530
Topics per day: 9.78
Number of users: 9923
Users per day: 7.17
Number of attachments: 40
Attachments per day: 0.03
Board started: Sat Jul 10, 2004 3:09 pm
Database size: 242.69 MiB
Size of posted attachments: 1.84 MiB

Official Dilbert Feed

Dilbert, the famous Internet comic strip is going official with a new RSS Feed located on this URL. Insert it on your RSS reader and every day, you can gain access to the daily comics to reduce your stress level

The old feed URL is not working anymore, so update yours now

Oh.. and they have color strips now...

More Verbose Output

One visible changes to the USB drivers in the latest kernel (2.6.25) is the information shown is more verbose than in the previous kernel. Currently, you will get more information about a product when it's connected via USB ports. Here's an example taken from dmesg output when i plugged in my USB flash disk on my computer:

usb 2-6: New USB device found, idVendor=0951, idProduct=1607
usb 2-6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-6: Product: DataTraveler 2.0
usb 2-6: Manufacturer: Kingston
usb 2-6: SerialNumber: 200706200000000059188363
usb-storage: device found at 20
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 16:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] 7888896 512-byte hardware sectors (4039 MB)
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] 7888896 512-byte hardware sectors (4039 MB)
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
sd 16:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

The bold one are new information after i installed kernel 2.6.25 few days ago. It reveals more information about the vendor, serial number, device strings (for identifier) and also products name.

Wine 0.9.60: It's About Time

Two weeks since the last Wine release and here comes another release which is closer to 1.0 release in June. The highlight changes in this release are:

• Better support for Windows IMEs.
• Option for Windows-style window decorations.
• Improved system tray behavior.
• Window management fixes.
• Improved quartz audio support.
• Better support for launching apps from Unix file managers.

I had some troubles after upgrading to 0.9.59, mostly with Systray icon. Some application which usually reside at Systray is no longer there, so it's confusing to look for the application. I hope it will be fixed in this version as it's one of the highlighted changes in this release.

Slackware package is already available, build by Ken. It's quite fast, since usually i have to wait several days before the distro-specific build is ready

Update (9:18): The system tray problem has been resolved in this version. Yeeeaa...

Upgrading Linux Forum

This morning, i logged in to ACP of Indonesian Linux Forum and i saw a notifications that the version used in the forum is out of date. Seems that phpBB 3.0.1 has been released and has fixed quite a numerous problems found on the first release of phpBB 3.0.0.

I download the changed files and upload them to the servers and running the upgrade process and when everything is done, i must re-add the MOD (yes, most of the MODS are overwritten ). After few minutes of down time, i re-enabled the forum again (it's a good idea to disable the forum while doing maintenance) and sent a notifications to all users.

I hope it's OK right now and enjoy the new forum (you may not notice the difference though but if you are interested what has been changed, you might want to see this thread)

More Notes About 21Cineplex

Continuing from Thomas' post about 21Cineplex's website, i would like to add some more, based on my own experience. This is about 21Cineplex in Jogja, not their website or 21Cinpelex in other cities in Indonesia though.

1. Inconsistent schedule. Sometimes the schedule displayed on the website is not the same schedule when you get to the ticket box.
2. Too late opening the ticket box. When you have a schedule of 10.30 AM, i guess the ideal time to open the ticket box is at 9.30 AM, not in 10 or even 10.15. It's even worse if the computer is broken so they have to make a round-robin scheduling to deliver the seat position across three officers using papers and wrote the ticket information at the back of the ticket which wasted too much time (this is based on my own experience last Saturday)
3. No operator ready to answer the phone. They have a line, but no dedicated operator to answer the phone if somebody called, so what's the use of the phone if there's nobody who will answer it?

Ok, three is enough for now (as Thomas also stopped after three complaints even though i have more complaints, mostly about movies selection). I hope the management see this post (and also Thomas') and make an improvements. It's not meant to discredit them, but to tell the management that there's something wrong and hoping that they will fix that.

Watching Movies

In the last few days, i have watched few movies, but the top three that i thought was the best are The Forbidden Kingdom, Kung Fu Mahjong 3 : The Final Duel, and Final Approach. The last two movies i got from Internet, while the first one was the movie i watched this morning with my girlfriend at movie theater in Ambarukmo Plaza.

I would like to write a morality i learned after i watched the second movie, Kung Fu Mahjong 3. In this movie, a person called Ken was a son of a master of Gambler and he was gifted a good "hand" when playing mahjong, but ever since he met a girl named Nancy, he lost his fortune and became so bad at doing things and always failed on every decision he made. Even though the girl has said that she would bring bad luck to every person she met, Ken still refuses to believe that she's the reason why he had such a bad luck. and bla.. bla.. bla.. (you should watch the movie yourself and it became not interesting if i tell you the story)

The point is that he need to have his luck back to fight against his father's enemy which are Bowie and his new mother, Sophie or else they would take his family business. He then asked by his father to met a person who was a great gambler (nickname : Grand Slam Ben), but he had the same "accident" as Ken, which makes him changed his name to "Chicken Ben". He got a training from this men and finally he got his luck back and won the match.

One good point that i saw on this movie is that people are not always in bad position (like in the bottom of a wheel). Sometimes, when you try hard, God will not be unfair to you and give you a better position again (at the top of a wheel). Both of Ken and Ben has proven that they still love their couples, even though they knew that their couples brings bad luck to them. They had their own ways of doing things without having a bad accidents.

The movie is so funny and i often laugh when i watched this movie this morning

PayPal To Ban Unsafe Browsers

PayPal is planning to ban unsafe browsers in the future. What is "unsafe" according to PayPal? Well, they said browsers without anti-phishing features will be considered "unsafe" meaning that Apple Safari 3.1.x will be on the list since they don't have that feature (yet). PayPal is recommending the use of blacklists, anti-fraud warning pages, and EV SSL certificates.

So if you use Safari right now to access PayPal, you should try to look for another browser to access PayPal in the future.

Reference:
Slashddot
eWeek
ArsTechnica

Kernel 2.6.25 and NVidia Drivers

This morning, i have managed to upgrade my PC to the latest kernel, 2.6.25 (actually i build the kernel last night, but i reboot the computer just now). As usual, after booting with new kernel, i had to re-ran the NVidia installer to compile the driver for the current kernel. Unfortunately, it failed, because there was changes in the kernel source code during the 2.6.25 development cycle, so the current driver (71.86.04, 96.43.05, 169.12 and 171.06) are all broken without prior modification.

The NVidia team has anticipated this by releasing a patch for those drivers which can be found on their forum. To execute the patch and ran the NVidia installer, use this following command (using 71.86.04 as the example):
# sh /path/to/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-71.86.04-pkg0.run \
--apply-patch NVIDIA_kernel-71.86.04-2305230.diff
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-71.86.04-pkg0-custom.run

After that, you can start recompiling your NVidia driver again. It works on my system

Finally: Kernel 2.6.25

At last, the final version of Kernel 2.6.25 has been released by Linus after Ingo Molnar fixed the memory corruption found on -RC9 on the development process. This ends the frustation of the kernel developer over the past two weeks (or probably more). Good job for Ingo and all of the Linux kernel developer

Safari Updates: 3.1.1

Apple has released an update to their Safari browser, which is tagged as 3.1.1. Although Apple hasn't revealed what changes has been made into this version, they advised people who used previous version to upgrade.

My quest trying to install Safari on Linux ended in dead end before i met Kyle's posting and wrote it on my other blog. Today, as both Safari and Wine has been updated, i wanted to test whether the interface is still scrambled or not. I ran wine SafariSetup.exe and in no time, the Safari Installer is loaded and i installed the application. In just a few seconds, the installation is finished and you can start launching your Safari browser.

It seems that the menubar is still screwed, even with the latest Wine version (probably it's not their main priority right now). HTTPS is still not supported (yet), so we can't use Safari for online transactions which requires HTTPS, like PayPal.

Speedy Down (Again)

This morning (around 10 AM), i got a phone call from Yahya, asking whether my Speedy connection was down or not, since he couldn't connect to Speedy. I couldn't answer that, since i had to replace my colleague at 8 AM (he had to attend a meeting in Jakarta), so i went to campus at 7.30 AM. At morning, i woke up at 5.30 AM and i still saw my download was progressing, so i thought i had no problem at all, so i asked him to call 147. Few minutes later, he sent me an SMS message saying that Speedy in Jogja did have a problem.

After finishing my work at the campus, i went back to my house and i saw my modem's LED turned to RED, meaning there was a problem. So i turned off my computer and waited until the connection has been restored. At around 4 PM, i went back to campus to teach my class again and when i arrived at home at around 7 PM, i turned on my modem and voila.... i can connect to my Speedy again

The strange thing is that when i was in the campus, i can browse using the same ISP (Telkom), but with different name, AstiNet (which i thought for corporate users). I thought they share the same system, but unfortunately, i was wrong.

Another Novel Bought

My bad habit come again. Whenever i entered a book store, i usually take a look on novel and whenever new novel comes out, i wanted to buy them. In most time, i can force myself not buying those novels, but today, those forces has no effects and the result was two novels bought tonight at Gramedia@Amplaz.

Upgrading OOo in Slackware

After reading Mr. Harry's post, then Vavai's, i want to share the same things, but in different operating system, Linux Slackware.

OOo is not included by default in Slackware, but we can easily install it using SlackBuilds script or using the original package from the download page. I prefer the latest approach. Nothing personal with SlackBuilds script, as it works also and many people have used it and found no problem. It's just a matter of style

Slackware officially doesn't support of RPM (even though it includes rpm as one of the official package) by default, so it's not recommended to install RPM packages into Slackware, since you will have many problems due to different package scheme (Slackware doesn't use the same database as RPM, so you will notice a lot of missing packages, even though those packages already installed in the system).

The main problem is that OOo is distributed as individual RPM packages. So what's the solution? Do we have to compile from the source code? That would take too much time, so the solution is to convert it using rpm2tgz (another official Slackware package) using rpm2tgz *.rpm command. First, extract the tar.gz file to some directory, then go to RPMS directory where all the RPM files reside. Next, use the above command to convert all RPM files into tgz. Please be patient as this process takes some time to finish (depends on the specs of your computer).

When you are done converting, the next step is to uninstall the old version (if you have installed it before). I have tried to use upgradepkg command to upgrade the package, but the result is not as i expected. You can use pkgtool to help you removing the packages. When all of the OOo packages has been removed, you can install it using installpkg *.tgz. That's it. OOo is installed on /opt/openoffice.org2.4 (the version depends on the version you installed).

You can start the application by using command line or if you installed kde integration package, you will have OOo on your application menus. I didn't install those package, so i add it by myself. After some dialog, you can start working with your new OOo. The screenshot below is the original about dialog from OpenOffice.org without being modified.

254 To Go

At the time this post is made, there were 9746 members in Indonesian Linux Forum and that means only 254 members to go to reach 10000. I know it's not too much compared to other forum, like LinuxQuestions, but i guess it's a big achievement.

The new member progress was slowing down a bit due to a migration to the beta version few months ago (and now it came back to the original domain), but i think it's getting to normal phase again right now, as i saw about 7 new users per day (taken from the statistics in the ACP). I guess many users have found out that Linux is ready for daily use in home desktop and when they need better support, they came to this forum.

We welcome you all

MU VS Arsenal

As always, a big match between Manchester United and Arsenal in every matches always being waited by many footballers around the world. It brings a "hot" match and most of the time, more than three yellow cards are shown by the referee (sometimes a red one too). The last match is not an exception. The referee had to give a total of seven yellow cards (two for MU and five for Arsenal).

The final score is 2-1 for Manchester United Read the reports on Soccernet

Too bad for Astro subscriber, since even though they have subscribe only for watching EPL, Astro can't broadcast the big match.

Blogspot Blocked?

Is it only my feelings or what? I had a feeling that Blogspot is blocked by Speedy (or Google is blocking request from Indonesian IP). Anybody can confirm this? I can't access any site that uses Blogspot domain anymore using Speedy. I can still access the site using anonymous proxy though.

Update (21:09): Now i can access blogspot again without any problem. Weird things

4 Exams a Day

Today, i had to attend 4 exams. Two exams for my final test, one practical test, and the last one was an unexpected test. Last night, i got an SMS message saying that i should give a presentation about my thesis proposal today. I was kinda surprised, since i just put my proposal yesterday morning and at night i already asked to give the presentation in the next day. My friend had to wait for few weeks before they were asked to give presentation and mine was only one day (i don't know if i should be glad or sad about this).

My first test was conducted at 8 AM until 10 AM. I got finished around 9.30 and had some break before my second test coming up. Then, i entered my second test at 10.15 and finish around 12.05. No time for lunch yet, since my schedule for my thesis proposal presentation was scheduled to be at 12.00, so i got there and wait for my friend first. He finished around 13.15 and my turn next. Actually my practical exam was supposed to be at 13.00, but since i had to give presentation, i can attend the test without any problem (still no lunch yet). Finally, at 15.10, all of my exams were finished and i got two weeks of resting before going to the last semester and working on the thesis

Wait, no time to rest yet, since i still had to give a class tomorrow for my students. Kinda sleepy right now but life must goes on

Using -Rf Option in Linux Shell

Linux shells can be powerful, but it can also be deadly, if you are using it without caution. The second one just applied to me. I usually deletes files using * wildcard to make things easier, since i don't want to delete one by one. Sometimes, i used -f parameter to delete without haste, but today, i got a bad experience using -f.

At first, i wanted to delete a movie file that i have downloaded using rm -f blabla.part*, but i accidentally wrote it like this rm -f blabla.part1.rar *. You know what happened. All of my data in that directory is gone

The lucky thing is that i didn't use -Rf option. If that's the case, i'll be surely screaming loudly. Most of the data that were gone were movies (no big deal, since i can re-download them again) and also some pictures (well, i can make those avatars again in short time), so nothing important data is lost. Thank God

Small tips : Make sure the syntax you are writing is correct, mostly when you use -Rf option in Linux shell.

Not Comfy Yet

When someone think something isn't right yet, then don't force to release it. It's what Linus is doing right now. He has just pushed the ninth release of release candidate for kernel 2.6.25. He stated that he will release the final (at last) 2.6.25 early next week, so i guess it's just a matter of days before the new shinny kernel arrives.

He admit that even though he will pushed 2.6.25 next week, doesn't mean that it will be a perfect release, since he can't wait for too long just to wait until all issues are fixed and sacrifice the new features that are waiting to be included in the next merge window. Those problems will (hopefully) fixed in the 2.6.25.x release (released by the -Stable team).

It's quite a long development cycle even though at the beginning, i thought it would be a smooth release. Apparently i was wrong

Fair Solution

So, it's not a rumor again, but it's the fact. The Indonesian government has unblock the blocked site and now uses the per-URL blocking. The URLs identified so far is listed here, but with contributions from a lot of people, i think this list can be expanded as new content is identified. I think this is a fair solution for all of us. By using partial blocking with contribution from the community, no one is hurt and everybody is happy

I wonder will the government officially asked people to report any inappropriate content/URL (that contain Fitna movie) to them to be blocked? I guess if this is an official request, many people will be glad to help the government. It's a win win solution.

Blocking has ended??

My friend told me that Multiply, Rapidshare, and other sites that were blocked few days ago has been unblocked and can be accessed directly tonight. Any confirmation about this by other people? I can accessed those site directly using my ISP, Speedy.

I think the blocking is now applied per URL, not by the whole site, which is the correct way to do the blocking, since the problem is not the whole site, but only at several URLs. I think the government has realized that the previous method is not the appropriate way to solve things and now they have revised it.

Let's calm down for now and enjoy our freedom again

False Rumor?

My friend heard a rumor that Friendster will be blocked also in the future, since it contains too much porn contents. I can only laugh at this . I'm not sure where does he got this news.

For me, i don't really care too much if Friendster is really blocked, since i don't use it as intense as before, but i'm sure others (mostly youngsters or teenagers) will be VERY mad since since Friendster is one of the biggest social networking site in Asia (including Indonesia).

Well, so far it's only a rumor. Don't take it seriously until there is a solid proof (which i doubt it's existence).

Can't They Ask First?

I was wondering, why Rapidshare is blocked without asking them first to delete the files? (or probably they don't know such methods exist in RapidShare) Unlike YouTube, RapidShare support team has a better service. If you have any objection about one of the files that were shared through their service, you can ask them to delete it from their servers. It's not as complicated as YouTube.

The government is willing to give two days for YouTube to give statements, but they don't wait for other services and just blocked it. Even though it's hard to delete all files that contains Fitna in RapidShare, but with some help from lots of people, i think this solution is better than blocking the whole sites.

Now It Comes to Speedy

After XL, IndoNet, now it comes to Speedy that has blocked sites that contains Fitna movies. It has been officially announced by the admin on their website. Will they block Google too ? Let's just wait

Sites that are blocked by speedy (and other ISP too):

• Youtube
• MySpace
• Metacafe
• Rapidshare
• Multiply
• Liveleak
• Themoviefitna.com

Domino Effect

Blocking site that distribute Fitna movies like a never ending story. Every day (or probably every hour or even worse, every minute), new host can be used to distribute that movies and in order to block those movies, we need more resource than we might imagine. If we use the current scheme, then all we get is like a domino effects. One by one, every (good) site in the Internet will be blocked. I don't think it's a good idea and not the best solution i think. I agree with this post that we should forget about it and move on with other better activities that have significant benefit for all of us.

Wine 0.9.59 Released

Every two weeks, Wine developers released an incremental updates to Wine and right now, they are aiming for 1.0 release after this long journey. The latest update is 0.9.59 which should bring more improvement on .NET Framework and also services.exe processes (which is one of the critical process in Windows operating system).

On every release, i always download them and install it on my system. I tried to use several Windows application to be tested on Linux and the result is outstanding. On most cases, the error or warning messages decreased on every new version and layout problem seems to be gone. While it's not for every application, the result is magnificent. I'm quite confident that when the time 1.0 gets released, it will support quite a lot of application (not just installable, but also similar with the native Windows version).

YouTube is Still Accessible

Even though i have posted about the blocking of YouTube in Indonesia, up to now, i can still access the website. I don't know why, but i guess it's because the blocking is only done on IIX network only and not in the international gateway, so if the ISP is using the international connection directly, it can pass the blockade.

YouTube Blocked in Indonesia

Finally, YouTube has been officially blocked in Indonesia territory. I personally disagree with this decision, since YouTube contains lots of good material that can be used for many people. Some of them are inappropriate to be seen (like the famous Fitna), but the rest is good. I hope when YouTube has removed all entries about Fitna from their servers, it will be unlocked again by the Indonesian Governments.

Last Week Before Mid Test

This week is my last week before i will had a mid test starting next week for the second semester. Today and tomorrow i will have to give presentation about the task given by the lecturers. One presentation is done, and one more is waiting to be done

Hackers 3 Movie

I just finished watching Hackers 3 Movie (Anti Trust) and it stresses the Open Source spirit. Knowledge belongs to the world and it's meant to be owned by public, not by an individual or certain companies. It's a nice film (even though it's kinda old film). The funny thing is that the main enemy's face is quite similar with Microsoft's big boss, Bill Gates (not 100%, but roughly similar).

Here's the plot of the movie:

This movie is the fictional story of computer programming genius Milo Hoffman after graduating from Stanford and getting out into the competitive world of computer software. In his contemplation of where to begin his career, he is contacted by Gary Winston whose character is loosely based on Bill Gates. Winston is the CEO of a company called NURV, and they are on the brink of completing the global communication's system, Synapse. They need Hoffman to help them meet their launch date, so after much thought and with the full support of his girlfriend Alice, he accepts the job. Tragedy soon after strikes and Milo becomes suspicious of the company he has been wrapped up in. He learns that trusting anyone could be a mistake, and that nothing is as it seems.

After graduating from Stanford, two idealistic computer whiz kids who are best friends are offered jobs at NURV, a giant Portland company with a driven boss, Gary Winston, on the verge of a world-linking satellite communication system. With support from his girlfriend Alice, Milo takes the job; Teddy says no and continues work on a media compression program he wants to make available free. Winston takes a personal interest in Milo, whose genius can help NURV meet its launch date, and Milo responds with brilliance and long hours. When Teddy meets with tragedy and Winston's offhand remark makes Milo suspicious, he decides to investigate Winston and NURV. But, whom can he trust?

By the way, this post is posted using new Blogger's feature, scheduled post. I scheduled it to be posted at 01:00 AM at 4 April 2008.

KDE 4.0.3 Released

The third monthly updates to KDE 4.0.x has been officially released. Like always, this monthly updates bring many improvements that KDE team has developed last month. Lots of changes has been integrated, bugs has been fixed, and new application has been included. Check the Changelog for more detailed changes. The official announcement can be read in LWN. More articles about KDE can be seen at PolishLinux (Korneliusz Jarzebski usually wrote reviews about KDE's development using build from SVN).

Official Release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5

So yesterday's build has been officially released as Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 today. The release notes stated that there has been around 750 improvements compared to last Beta release (Beta 4). Here are the highlighted improvements on this beta:

• Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar
• Autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
  
• Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
• Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
  

Please note that this release is for TESTING purposes, NOT for public use. Use it on your own, even though it won't bite your system though

Telkomsel New Rate

The Government has asked operators to decrease their rate and Telkomsel has done it. Check their website for the official announcement. It doesn't change much for me (Simpati users) as i only use short distance call. But for those who often use long distance call (not international call, but calling to an area which is quite far from the place you are calling), it may get the benefit from this new rate. Most of the long distance rate are now flat, meaning there are no difference for zone 1, 2, or 3.

I wonder why Simpati who has the most customers are still much more expensive than the other products.

Testing Pre-Release Firefox 3.0 Beta 5

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 should be released soon (within one or two weeks), but i can't wait to see what changes has been made to comply with Acid3 Test (since Opera and Safari has made an official announcement that their internal build has passed the test completely). So i downloaded a Pre-Release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 (NOTE: This is still BETA, NOT YET RC) and give it a try.

It does improved a little bit compared to the previous fourth Beta, since the point has increased from 66 to 71 (it's not that much, but it's not yet a final version of Beta 5, so improvements is still possible). I'm hoping that the final version in June will have 100% compliance with the test.

April Fool List

Today is April Fool day and like previous years, many people and organization publish something funny (sometimes it's like an official release, but it doesn't). For example like this one : USB Pregnancy Test or Super Pii Pii Brothers

For those who wants to see other April Fool's list, check this site. It tries to list all April Fool activities around the world. You can even submit a new one if you found something that is not on the list

Inkscape 0.46

A final version of Inkscape 0.46 has been released. It includes numerous improvements compared to previous version. Download the Windows version here or here (RS). Detailed changes can be seen on the Release Notes (warning, quite a long page).

It's been quite some time after the previous release of Inkscape. I think the developer has made big changes while developing this version and the result is magnificent. Besides improvement on the functionality, they also improve memory management and fixing memory leaks on 0.46. Here's some proof from the Release Notes

In this version, Inkscape starts using the cairo library for rendering. It is now used for outline mode display which, thanks to using cairo and other optimizations, redraws faster by about 25%. More impressive are memory savings: thanks to cairo, in outline mode Inkscape now takes only about 50% of the memory used by 0.45 for the same file.

Exporting drawings with blur was particularly slow in 0.45; some files could take hours to export. Now this is fixed, in part by the faster algorithm mentioned above and in part by a bugfix in the export code. Now even the quite complex files with large blurs export at high resolution in at most a few minutes.

Pidgin 2.4.1 Released

A new version of Pidgin has been released. While it's nature to have an updated version, this release fixed annoying bug appeared in the previous version, which is marking some Yahoo account as Blocked. Full detailed on the changes for this release can be seen on this page.

Offline Google Docs

It's another release of Google's products. Offline Google Docs. It enables users to work offline and then re-syncronized it when you have your access to the Internet again. So far, it has been rolled out to some people, but in the next few weeks, most users will see this feature on their account.

This nifty feature is backed by Google Gear, an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. In the future, when Firefox 3 has been released, we may not need any extension to access this service, because Firefox 3 has offline browsing capabilities. While it's not yet described which other service which will be available on offline mode, it seems that if GMail has this feature, then it will be a nice one

This announcement is made few hours before the April Fool days, but i don't see this new feature on the New Features Page of Google Docs. So, can this be one of Google's April Fool Day? Can anybody confirms this by looking at their Google Docs account and check whether if they get a new icon like in the video below? So far, i haven't got this icon on my account (yet).