Computer Fair

Finally, i had a chance to go to the mega bazzar computer fair in JEC today. It was bigger than the first event this year and more booth were attending this event. I'm not sure about the transactions done in this event, but with higher rate (around IDR 12.000 per 1 USD), i think it's still to high.

I was aiming for Western Digital MyBook 1 TB or Western Digital Passport 500 GB. It's worth IDR 1,8 million and IDR 1,6 million. I'm still thinking about buying it on this event, or should i asked my sister to look for it in Mangga Dua.

Better Security Protection

My friend called me and asking for help because his computers were infected by Conficker worm which is a well known worm, even until now, even though it was first known at the end of last year. This worm has caused a lot of trouble, thus Microsoft is giving away US$25.000 just to find out who created this worm and put him/her behind the bar. Microsoft also put a resource for their customer to learn more about conficker

I asked him whether he updated his antivirus database regularly and he did. Next, i asked him whether his computers are connected to the Internet all the time and the answer is yes. OK, so every computers are connected to the Internet. My next question is about security patches. It seems that he trusted the antivirus application very well and didn't take any other precaution, for example patching the operating system itself. This is the main problem for him and for many other home users.

Anti virus is not a silver bullet to protect your computer against attack from outsider. You may have to regularly patch your operating system and applications to make intruders/attackers harder to penetrate and corrupt your system.

I hope he learn something from this event and prepare better system protection in the future

Me myself never get too interested in virus/worms ever since i used Linux regularly

Redesign

LWN, one of the oldest Open Source news media has redesigned their web page. IMHO, the old design is better than the current version, as you can see all the headlines on the right side. With the new version, you will see bloated news in which some of them are for subscribers (it will be freely available after one week or so).

What do you think about this redesign process??

Busy Wednesday

Wednesday is my busiest day in a week. I have got to reach my office before 9 AM, because there will be weekly meeting and discussion with my students whom i supervised in PK 6. One hour later, i had to prepare myself for two sessions of Unix Programming System. Because this is a lab class, most of the time, it's a full class, meaning it's a continuous session and i have to skip lunch and the class will end at around 4 PM

Starting next week, i'm asked to teach for international class at 4.30, so that i do not have a rest time on Wednesday. Lucky me, on Thursday, i have got no class to teach, just a discussion period with students who took field work and final project subject under my supervision.

Bash 4.0

Bash 4.0 has been released and it encompasses lots of new things, described in the announcement.

The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**' special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of Posix non-compliance.

I personally used bash 3.2 in Slackware-Current and it's still on /testing because it caused some script to break when we used a backtick on it. I wonder if bash 4.0 will have a solution for this and being used as the default shell in the next Slackware release.

Waiting for Good Rate

I have been thinking about buying a new laptop to replace my current laptop, which has been with me since 2005 (that's four years old). My current laptop is still usable and i'm still using it when i teach in class.

The problem with it is the new requirements of software which makes it slower. I have tried to upgrade the RAM into 2 GB, but it won't boot, even though it support it. Other problem is the disk space. When i bought the laptop in 2005, 60 GB was considered quite big, but as time passes by, it's just not enough for me anymore, even though i still have some spare space on it.

When i have decided that i would buy a new laptop, the rate is not at the good position. At the time i write this post, the US$ rate is around 12.000, which is very high and definitely not a good indication for me to buy laptop which is sold based on dollar rate. I think i should wait for some time until the rate is getting better.

ADSL

ADSL is one of the most popular data communication technology available in most countries, including Indonesia. It is basically gives you a broadband access which has different speed between upstream and downstream. In most cases, download stream is way bigger than upstream. Why is that? It's because most people will like to download rather than to upload.

Nowadays, people are not only become a consumer, but sometimes it can become a producer where he/she can produce a new information and distribute it on the web to make it publicly accessible by anybody who need that information.

If we always stick to ADSL, then probably it will not make people interested to distribute an information, because the speed is very limited. I just hope that someday my provider (you know who i meant) generously upgrade their bandwidth for both downstream and also their upstream limit so that people are getting easier to get and distribute information and/or data to and from the Internet.

Graduation Day

Today i attended the graduation day at my own campus. Usually, i never attended such event, but this time, i tried to attend it, because several of my students got graduated today. One of them was Willy Christian Budiman, which has the same name as i do.

The good thing about attending such event is that i got lots of information how they are doing right now. From what i heard, most of them have started to work or in a progress of waiting final call from their future employer, which is a good news. They didn't need too much time to find a job in a real world.

Perhaps i should come to future events like this. Oh, by the way, starting this year, my campus changed the schedule for graduation day. In the past, we held twice a year, but we will try to make it three times a year, so students can aim for faster graduation.

Proficiat for all of you....

Big Day

Tomorrow, it will be a big day for some of my students, because it's the time where they can finally hold the bachelor degree. Yes, it's their graduation day. Becoming a bachelor is not the end of their journey, but merely it's a start where you will enter a new world, which you may not experienced before. It's a real world where new challenges are all around you everyday.

In order to survive, you must improve yourself, both skills and mental because you may never know what lies in the future. You will see lots of differences between campus life and real world life.

Be strong and good luck with your new life and new title

Speedy Goes to UnSpeedy Again

Few weeks ago, my download speed was just like the ads were: up to 1 MBps. It was way so fast and i have posted this on my blog also. Unfortunately, this doesn't last for long, as after i came back from my training, the speed i got is now just like before.

So the speedy, which turned to be a real speedy for a moment has just gone back to unspeedy

Awareness

I tried to build some awareness for regulations to my students who took my classes. I asked them to submit their review papers to my email account with some special subject which i had defined and written on the syllabus. Even i have said it over and over almost every class i attended, there are some students who just don't listen and send me with another subject.

It's just a simple task and yet, they don't think it's a big thing. OK, in my case it's just a matter of points, but when you are in real world, it may cause bigger impact than you may thought. I'm not talking about subject on email message anymore, but other cases that requires small attention, but we missed it sometimes.

I hope they won't make another mistake at another chance.

Wrong Schedule

I was supposed to give special supervising class for IS faculty at Wednesday at 9 AM, but i thought today was Wednesday. No wonder the students didn't come up until 9:30 AM. As my class started at 1.30 PM, i could have idle for about 4 hours, but luckily, i had to discuss something with my colleague, so time was not wasted.

It seems that i'm really overloaded by the schedule of this week. I think i need a time out and reschedule my plan for this week and next week.

Supervisor

Since i have completed my master degree, i'm able to supervise students whom are taking their final project. This semester, i was asked to supervise fifteen students in total, in which i am the first supervisor for two students and the rest are second supervisor. Let's hope they can finish the project in one semester and graduate as soon as possible

This will add my job load, as i'm already being assigned to teach 8 classes a week (two of them are team teaching with my colleague), plus a supervisor on PK 6 for IS faculty, and perhaps another supervisor on field work which shall be announced shortly. I was also involved in several projects at my campus and one candidate project, which is still to be discussed.

This is the toughest semester i had ever had while i am working at my campus, but i enjoyed it, so it doesn't matter for me

Rest Day

It's so good to be able to rest today. After one week of training in Jakarta (Monday until Friday), one day of traveling from Jakarta to Jogja and celebrating Valentine's day, finally i had a chance to rest a while today. I spent most of my day at home, resting and preparing for tomorrow's class.

At night, i joined my girlfriend niece's fifth birthday. I stayed at her house a little bit longer today, because i had to pick my father from the station at 10 PM. He just came back from Surabaya. After i got home, i had to get some rest again.

Happy Valentine Day

I made it back to Jogja safely, after a nice flight with Lion Air, except for some problem during take off. Without those problem, everything was considered perfect. No delays, which is something rare if we are talking about flights in Indonesia, mostly Lion Air. I had to say that i'm impressed on how they manage the flights today. Let's hope it also happened on other flight as well.

But, as usual, we fix something here, a new problem over there. Today's problem is about the seat management. At my flight today, some people had to be moved from their original seat due to some regulations and this takes time and some people do not want to separate from their family. This was what happened at my plane this morning. There were two foreigners who didn't want to get separated from the rest of his family, but it's also impossible to fulfill his wishes, because they had four people on it and the seat was build as three seats at maximum. One person sat next to me and the other one had a little talk with the flight attendance. This conversations took quite a long time (about 10-15 minutes), which eventually delays the flight in overall.

Ok, one problem solved. We all flew together on a nice weather. Both in Jakarta and in Jogja, so we had no problem with weather at all. Some bumps on the cloud was considered normal, so let's skip that part. I did have small rough landing at Jogja, because the plane (IMHO) was not yet stable to land, so there was small bump, but finally it stopped nicely.

I had to take the taxi at the airport to drove me home, because no one was able to pick me up. I was surprised about the taxi services. Actually it's my first time riding a taxi from the airport in Jogja, as i never used taxi before at my own home town. I went to the taxi service boot and asked them to get me a taxi to ride me back to my house. I'm very surprised that they didn't use the machine to count how much should the passenger pay. They declare a price which you should follow and this should be payed before you get your ticket. This happened in the airport itself. Next was that you get your taxi in front of the airport, waiting for you.

I will not complaint if the rate was normal, but it was HIGHER than Jakarta's rate. I couldn't believe it at that moment.

Ah well, it's past already. The great news was that i'm able to celebrate valentine's day with my girlfriend today.

I wish you all had a good valentine day also with your boy/girlfriend, family, friends, and relatives.

Exam Passed

After working for about one hour and completing fifty questions, i finally passed my ECSP exam with quite a good score. All of the participants also passed the exam with good score as well. I'm so relieved everything is now finished. It's a really hard exam.

Tomorrow i will be coming back to Jogja and start working on my daily task, mostly for next week, because my busy week is coming back again. I probably come back to Jakarta in the next two week for another training (different topic), but i'm not sure yet. Let's just wait and see in the next two weeks.

Final Exam on ECSP

Tomorrow i will have a final exam on ECSP (EC-Council Certified Secure Programmer). It's the last step i should take before i can get a new title, CSP (Certified Secure Programmer). There are 29 modules i should read tonight. It's really heavy material.

By the way, i having a small reunion with my ex colleagues while i was working on QnAp Asia. We met after work and the place was decided at Grand Indonesia. I have never been here before, so it's a good choice. There i met another ex QnAp Asia worker who has worked on other place now. He was also from Jogja, but from different university from where i came. We had a talk until about 9 PM and after that, we separated to go back to our house.

Lunascape: Browser With Three Engines

Usually browser has it's own engines. Mozilla and Seamonkey with Gecko engine, Safari with WebKit, Konqueror with KHTML, etc. There is Lunascape web browser which has three engine in one product. You can call it hybrid web browser as it combines three engines in one product (WebKit, trident, and Gecko). I haven't tried it myself, but if they can manage to combine the best of all engines in the world in one product and make it work together, i think it should have the advantage of each engine.

In their latest release (5 Beta), they claimed that they are faster than firefox, chrome, and IE 8:

Lunascape 5 beta is faster than Firefox or Google Chrome, and is fully 4x faster than Internet Explorer 8rc (tested February 2009).

Training Day 2

Today is my second day of training. The materials are getting harder, with more theories and real examples of exploitation using several programming languages. After learning in the second day, i'm getting interested in secure programmer, because it's very challenging, as almost every application can be reversed and we can find lots of tools to help us do some reverse engineering.

There are also some case studies which was done in the lab with testing application that are freely available world wide. In general, it's very interesting.

Too bad i was a little bit late today, as there was a problem with the taxi driver that drove the taxi. I had to change to another taxi, which caused me quite some time. Luckily, the class hasn't started yet when i came because there were some other students who hasn't came too.

I'm sure tomorrow will be more interesting with more analysis on real codes and examples in the real world.

Training Day 1

Today is my first day of ECSP training. I went from my auntie's home at 8 AM and i arrived there around 8.35, making me the first one to come to the building. Because it was raining, some of them were trapped in the middle of traffic jam, causing the training had to be delayed until 10 AM (which should start at 9 AM).

It's a very interesting training and i'm enjoying it. The materials are great and the instructor are quite funny too. Unfortunately, the materials are quite advanced. There are 29 modules which should be completed in 5 days. I just got 4 books and 6 DVDs when i came to the building. It's so amazing.

Let's hope i can finish this course and get the new title.

Arrived Safely

I was kinda worried when there has been a rumor that there was a bad weather. I was using a plane to go to other city, so weather is very important. My auntie was going to Jakarta at 8 AM this morning from Semarang, but since it was raining heavily since last night, Semarang got a very bad flood and caused her plane to be delayed until 6 PM and more over, there's no guarantee that the flight can go at 6 PM. The worst case is that the flight will have to be rescheduled for tomorrow.

Back to me. I have arrived at the destination safely with no harm. Even though there were some "shaky" moment in the air, i can finally landed smoothly here.

One Week Training

I had an opportunity to attend one week training from my campus. My colleague had also got this opportunity in the past, with different subject. What i got is a secure programmer training (and certification) by EC-COUNCIL.

I'll be leaving tomorrow and i'm not sure whether i can be online and check my emails during training or not, but let's just hope so. Please forgive me if there will be delays replying your messages, approving Indonesian Linux Forum new members, and so on. I'll try my best to do that when i have Internet connection.

I'm scheduled to come back here in Jogja at Saturday, so by that time, all pending activities should be done

Multiple Inboxes

I received lots of emails from many people every day. Thus i need a good ways to manage those emails so i can classify my emails. When i was using mail client in the past, i used a folder like which can be used to categorized the incoming messages. After i switched to GMail, they have similar concept, called Labels. Basically it can be combined with filters to manage my incoming messages into several labels. I can search on certain labels, so it will list all emails with the same labels at once.

Sometimes, you will have to work with many email messages from different places. GMail has developed another way to further increase your productivity while using GMail. It's called Multiple Inboxes. You can have more than one inbox on your screen. The first one is the main inbox and the rest can be set on different view, depending on what search parameter you used on it. The second and third view will be placed next to your inbox, so your inbox will be a little bit smaller.

It's part of GMail labs, so you must enable GMail Labs and then pick the Multiple Inboxes, developed by Octavian "Vivi" Costache.

Chinese Cultural Event

Since yesterday, the annual Chinese Cultural Event was held in Ketandan, Jogja. This event was held from 5-9 February 2009 and it was opened by the governor of Jogja, Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono with the mayor. This event has been held for four times in a row, starting in 2006.

Compared to last year, this time, it's getting better organized and bigger. The booth are doubled and the area is getting longer, making it possible to have more booth, say it for foods or any other accessories.

I have been there yesterday and tonight. I saw lots of friends and students there. There were also multi cultural show being held there, so it's not just Chinese culture. It's a proof that Jogja welcome all kind of cultures.

Only Two Days

Two days. That's the time required to fix my issue which i reported yesterday to OOo Issue Tracker (#98794). Today i already got the answer and it's a simple one. Some of the configuration files used by OOo got renamed. I don't know how this could happened, but it did. Some files which supposed to have .xcu and .xcs in /opt/openoffice.org3/basis-link/share/registry are renamed to .xc. Here they are
willysr@desktop:/opt/openoffice.org3/basis-link/share/registry$ find . -name "*.xc"
./data/org/openoffice/Office/UI/WriterFormWindowState.xc
./data/org/openoffice/Office/UI/DbRelationWindowState.xc
./schema/org/openoffice/Office/UI/DbReportWindowState.xc
./schema/org/openoffice/Office/UI/StartModuleCommands.xc
./schema/org/openoffice/Office/UI/DrawImpressCommands.xc
./schema/org/openoffice/Office/UI/BasicIDEWindowState.xc
./modules/org/openoffice/Office/Common/Common-impress.xc
./res/en-US/org/openoffice/Office/UI/BasicIDECommands.xc
./res/en-US/org/openoffice/Office/UI/ChartWindowState.xc
./res/en-US/org/openoffice/Office/ExtendedColorScheme.xc

The solution is very simple. Rename all .xc in schema directory into .xcs and the rest are .xcu. After doing this, restart your OOo and voila, everything is back to normal again.

Thank you to the developer who has helped me during this two days. That's one of the beauty of open communities and open source development. Very fast and effective response.

Issue Processed

I have posted a bug report on OOo issue tracker regarding my Impress menus which are rendered improperly. It's being investigated by the developer team, while i'm giving my system information which may help them track what happened with it. I hope i will find an answer as fast as possible

Thanks to the developer for their time looking at my bug report

Impress Menus Are Gone

I don't know why, but suddenly most of my impress menus are gone. Look at the screenshot i put on this post. I didn't install any package lately, except for security update from Slackware today and Java JDK Update 12, so it's quite mysterious why does it suddenly changed that way.

I was suspecting that JDK Update 12 is the root of the problem, so i tried to revert it back to Update 11 which was the previous version, but it's the same. I even deleted .openoffice.org as the configuration files for OpenOffice.org, but no luck.

It only happened in Impress, and not in other modules (Writer, Calc, Base). It's a weird bug

Any idea on how to fix this problem?

Another IPhone?

While many Indonesian people are waiting for IPhone 3G to arrive officially in Indonesia, Apple is probably testing their new IPhone product. This issue arose because in the latest update of IPhone Firmware update, there's a new hidden string, which may lead to a new product, because it uses different numbering scheme.

IPhone 3G is rumored to be released this month, but up to now, there's no official confirmation from Telkomsel, the operator that holds the exclusive rights to distribute

Time Passes So Fast

It's already the second month of this year. It seems so fast time has passed. Once we had this situation for another eleven times, we are in the new year again, which means we are getting older again.

Well, time to start new month and new week tomorrow. I had busy schedule for tomorrow and i'm not feeling very well today. I should get some rest now.