Upgrading to IE 8

Today i logged on to my Windows on my laptop because i have to do some preparation for tomorrow's class which (sadly) have to use Windows. Usually i always use Linux, but tomorrow's topic is about .NET.

I plugged the cable which connects my laptop to the Internet. After few minutes, a new notifications comes up to update my IE installation to the latest version, IE 8. This update come along with MS Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is a cumulative updates since SP 1 being released. It has quite a big size, around 290 MB, so get prepared . You also have to restart after the installation is finished, something that never happened before.

Next, i installed IE 8 which i have downloaded before and it asked me again to restart . It's wasting my time too much. Finally, after it booted up again, it loads the IE 8. In general, there hasn't been much changes in IE 8. But, when you look inside the application, many things have changed, for example better support for Web application spesification, such as CSS, HTML, XHTML, and many more. Looks like Microsoft has done some of their homework since IE 7 and so far, they are pushing it very nicely, even though i have to admit that Firefox will still be my favorite browser

Sleep Early, Wake Up Early

In less than 2,5 hours, a big match between MU and Arsenal in Champion league will start. I should go to sleep early and wake up early in order to see the match. Let's just hope that MU win this match and lots of goals will be created by MU players

FB Overwhelmed

Thank you for all your presents for me today. It's a wonderful day to celebrate birthday by receiving TONS of Facebook messages since 00:01 AM this morning up to now. I must have received at least 400 emails just from Facebook because my friends sent me a message or wrote in my Wall. I'm kinda overwhelmed, but finally i can replied all of your messages.

Thank you everybody and only Him who could repay what you have done to me

Seminar Notification

Next Saturday, i will be a speaker for another security-related seminar which will be held at my campus. The main presenter is not me, but it will be my student. I almost forgot that the schedule for the seminar is next Saturday, because i thought it will be in next week. Luckily one of my students notified me today and i rushed in to start making any preparation and it's progressing very well.

Thanks to Ary for noticing me

Mail Fetcher

GMail has a mail fetcher on their system, meaning that you can manage more than one email account from your single GMail account. You can POP the email messages on your other account and read it on your primary account.

What happened if someone sent you a message on your secondary account and it was downloaded (using POP3) into your main account? Would you be able to reply as the original recipient (using your secondary account's domain) ? The answer is YES. When you add the account, there's an option to specify whether you want to be able to reply the message using the same recipient or use a single identity for all account.

Recently, i joined SlackBasics translation project which are now integrated in Google Code. The current administrator of SlackBasics (Marco) has given me a new email account @slackbasics.org. It uses Google Apps to host the email account using GMail infrastructure.

I already have GMail account, so why would i have to logged in to two accounts when i can manage all of them in one single account? This is why i add my @slackbasics account into my primary GMail account and from there, i can read and send any email that goes through my @slackbasics.org account without having to logged in to the account

For those who are curious on how to do that, check the GMail settings and look on Accounts tab. Look on Get mail from other accounts. You can add more than one account (i don't know the limitations on the accounts) and after you setup the account, you can modify the Send mail as part to change how will you reply/send new messages between those two accounts. You can change the settings at compose/reply window though, so i guess it's not too strict that you have to define it first.

Avoiding Tuz?

Usually, Ubuntu tried to use the latest bleeding-edge technology. One of them is kernel. Kernel is the core of the system as it's the main application that controls all aspects of the system itself. Without kernel (and applications), there won't be any working system.

I'm wondering, why wouldn't Canonical shippped Ubuntu 9.04 with 2.6.29 and they were going out with 2.6.28 even though 2.6.29 has been out for some time and the kernel developers has released their first update, 2.6.29.1.

Does the reason related to the default logo for 2.6.29 which used Tuz instead of the original Tux? Because Ubuntu will last for about 18 months, meaning that since April 2009 until October 2010, it will show Tuz instead of Tux and people who used Ubuntu will not see other than Tuz until 9.10 is released or they compiled their own kernel.

IMHO, the time frame for testing 2.6.29 is enough to include it on 9.04 release schedule, but in the end, it's up to the developers

Early Review of Ubuntu 9.04

After being released yesterday (Indonesian time), Ubuntu 9.04 is now probably are already being used by some people who have enough bandwidth to download them. LinuxJournal covers an early review of Ubuntu 9.04 which can be used to see what are the new interesting features available on Ubuntu 9.04.

You should also see the release notes, including all the erratas for Ubuntu 9.04 here (just in case you had same problem listed on that page).

MySQL 5.4 Preview

Sun Microsystem do not wait until MySQL 5.2 or 5.3 comes out (and looks like it that they will not use 5.2 and 5.3 numbering) and they are working hard to push 5.4 comes out sometime in the future. They have integrated lots of new features on this version which makes MySQL have more and more features that were only available on commercial products in the past.

Right now, they have prepared the preview version of MySQL 5.4 which (sadly) only available for Solaris and Linux 64 bit only. Here's an article from MySQL which should give you a hint what will MySQL 5.4 look like in context of performance improvements and scalability.

Ubuntu 9.04 Release Schedule

Once again, six month has passed since the last release of Ubuntu and now they are ready to release their latest version in the next few days. According to Ubuntu's website, they will release it on 23 of April this month, which will be around 24 of April in Indonesia due to time difference. Canonical will release Desktop Edition, Server Edition, and also Netbook Remix. Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and other ubuntu-based version will be released shortly after that. It could be on the same day, but it's not meant on the page nor it's available on Kubuntu's website at the time this post is written.

Like always, Ubuntu tried to give something big to their users. In this version, there are several big changes, including the inclusion of OpenOffice.org 3, upgraded from 2.4 in the last version, new integrated notification system, new icons and artwork, faster boot speed, enhanced application suite and more visual appeal, and many more. More about Ubuntu's feature will be available when the release notes are ready.

I guess on weekend there will be lots of people are downloading Ubuntu because the ISOs will be ready on public local mirrors which are faster than downloading from upstream mirrors. Start preserving your bandwidth and prepare to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04. I'm sticking with Slackware

Indonesian Linux Forum and Spamhaus Blacklist

In the last few months, there has been a lot of several user of Indonesian Linux Forum who complaint about their IP was being blocked due to being blacklisted by SpamHaus. Those who have registered will not be able to post a message or reply a thread while the new user will not be able to register to the board.

The message that they got looks like this:
Your IP aa.bb.cc.dd has been blocked because it is blacklisted. For details please see http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=aa.bb.cc.dd

What is SpamHaus anyway? It's a volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 to track e-mail spammers and spam-related activity (taken from Wikipedia). On their operation, they are using four services, which are DNS Blocklists (DNSBLs), Spamhaus Block List (SBL), Exploits Block List (XBL), and the Policy Block List (PBL).

If your IP is blocked by the board, it's not because we hate you guys, but it's because the phpBB engine used SpamHaus to verify every IP address that were used to post or register to the board before it can be process the requests. If your IP are listed on the blacklist, the board will reject your request and asked you to solve the problem before you retry.

My suggestion is to go to link displayed by the board (which will redirect you to SpamHaus website) and see in which category are your IP in (SBL, PBL, or XBL). You can ask them to remove your IP from their blacklist (take a look on the bottom of the page after you click one of the link given by the SpamHaus), but it's also good idea to scan your network for spyware or any other malicious program which uses your network to send spam messages to other people. If they caught your IP again in the future, it will be harder to delist your IP from their list.

Please note that if you use shared IPs, then there might be a big chance that the root cause was caused by other users who used the same ISP with you and their action caused the IP is blocked by the SpamHaus. So you should also report this to your ISP and asked them to check it (and hoping they would do that ).

I hope this post will help those who had problems with Indonesian Linux Forum and SpamHaus.

Oracle Buys Sun

Yes, it's not an April Fool, but it has been announced officially at this site. Oracle is buying Sun for $9.50 per share in cash, which will be approximately $7.4 billion, lot bigger than amount of money spent by Sun to buy MySQL.

Why does Oracle interested in Sun? Because most of Oracle's product are based on Java, so by owning Sun, which developed Java, they can invest more money to make it more compatible and robust for their own products. Besides Java, one of the product that might be interesting for Oracle is Solaris. We might see more Solaris running Oracle in the future

Google's Server Design

I got this information from one of my friend at Facebook about Google's secret about their server design. Do you think Google would use a branded server for their servers? Well, think again after you read this post. It's dated 4/1, meaning it could be an April Fool post (and Google is very good at it. Check it here), but if it's not, it's a simple solution for big problems

We all knows that servers must be operational 24/7, meaning it SHOULD NOT stop working for any reasons. The common problem is about hardware malfunctioning or electricity problem. Google solved the second problem by attaching 12V battery to the supply power and it will work as an UPS.

You can look the screenshot of the images here and here.

What do you think? It is a real article or is it still an April Fool? The design was demonstrated at Google Data Center Efficiency Summit, so i guess it's still real.

Contact List Restored

I have finished entering all of my contact list from my old phone to my new E71. The contact list was deleted during firmware upgrade. I forgot to make a copy of it because i think the contact list are saved on memory card, but it was on the phone memory. Lucky me that i still have the list on my old phone.

Next thing is birthday reminders and other additional entries, such as emails because it would ease me to contact them if i have those information on my phone as well.

This post also marked my 2000 posts since my first post in August 2004. It took me around five years to get 2000 posts, but i have reached this milestone. My next milestone will be 3000 posts

Firmware Upgrade Successfully

I finally successfully upgraded my E71's firmware. After resetting several time due to lost connection with the phone during upgrading, i finally took the last option, reset to factory settings and guess what? It worked to fix my problem after upgrading my firmware

So the problem lies during the upgrade. After the phone restarted, i couldn't see my firmware version along with other information with special number inputted on the phone (for example *#06# to see the phone's IMEI or *#0000# to see phone's firmware version). But now everything is working normally and i hope nothing will happened in the future

Btw, here are the changelog for the new firmware for E71 (210.21.006):
- Support for Searching Hungarian Double Consonants, from Easy Dial and Phonebook
- Reserved Homescreen Plug-in UIDs can now be given to partners

General
- Stability and functionality improvements
- Compliance with FM Radio band requirements for MEA/Tunisia

Browser
- Minor stability improvements

Messaging
- Remote Denial of Service vulnerability fixed.
- Stability improvement in MMS.

VOIP / SIP
- Minor stability improvements

Calendar
- Stability and Minor Functionality improvement

Camera
- New DCC files – Functionality improvement

FS contacts
- Stability and functionality improvement

Share Online
- Minor improvements in functionality.
Thanks to NokiaAddict

ACM's New Online Course

Just now, i received an email from ACM about their new online course, which are brought in by Element K®. Program highlights include:

The ACM E-Learning Catalog - ACM members can access the ACM E-Learning Catalog round-the-clock. It includes 2,500+ online courses on a wide range of computing and business topics, in multiple languages.

Exclusive vLab® Virtual Labs - 1,000 unique vLab® exercises place users on systems using real hardware and software allowing them to gain important job-related experience.

Reference Tools - an e-Reference Library extends technical knowledge outside of the classroom, plus online Executive Summaries and quick reference cards to answer on-the-job questions instantly.

An Offline Player – a downloadable player that allows members to access assessments and self-study courses offline, anywhere and anytime, without a live Internet connection.

I tried one of the vLabs on Security topic and some of the materials are taken from EC-Council's CEH and CHFI course . The cool thing about vLabs is that it provides you with some kind of special environment where you can test or conduct series of action without having to install anything on your system, except for browser and probably flash player. It's kinda virtual environment on your desktop browser.

It's one of the neat feature by ACM.

Upgrading Firmware

This is my first time upgrading my phone's firmware. I noticed an update from the Nokia PC Suite and i downloaded the setup application. It tried to upgrade the firmware and i didn't realized that the installation would download 110 MB for the firmware itself.

Right now, the process is still ongoing (installing) and i'm not sure when will it be finished as it has to be installed onto the mobile phone itself.

The other thing is that i forgot to backup my settings, so all of my settings are gone and i probably would have to set it again after the installation is finished later on

Different Condition

If Ryosaeba got his normal speed, the opposite condition goes to me. Few days ago, when i downloaded something, i can get full speed at around 100-120 KB/s (almost 1 MBits), but now it dropped to 50-60 KB/s. Is there any difference between users in Jogja and outside Jogja regarding the bandwidth limiter?

Open Source Surveillance Application

If you ever wanted to install an open source surveillance application on your system, then you can try to use ZoneMinder. It's an open source application which is running on web server to capture, analysis, recording and monitoring of any CCTV or security cameras attached to a Linux based machine.

You can use single or multiple cameras on your system, including a commercial CCTV devices. It is suitable for use as a DIY (Do It Yourself) home video security system and for commercial or professional video security and surveillance. It can also be integrated into a home automation system via X.10 or other protocols.

I think i will try this with my webcam and see if it works.

Back to Work

It's the first day after long holidays last week. As usual, some people are not too excited to get back to work and they wish to have longer holidays, but for some people, getting back to work is more exciting than doing nothing at home.

Oh well, anyways today's class are great. Let's see tomorrow's class

PHP 5.2.9 Windows Version Updated

PHP developers has released another Windows version of PHP 5.2.9 due to security flaws found on OpenSSL library which was assigned CVE-2009-0590, CVE-2009-0591 and CVE-2009-0789. The fact that only Windows version is affected is interesting as it comes from same source, but different bundling.

Windows version shipped all the necessary libraries into the package, thus larger in size and everytime a single module is updated (due to security fixes or any other problems), it has to be rebuilt and make a new package, thus requiring users to install the new version by removing the old one first (the safe way).

This condition does not applies to Linux which can utilize dynamic linking so that the program will search for the available libraries installed on the system. So you only need to upgrade your existing libraries and the PHP package can link to the new one (if available). In the worst case, you can just use the old configuration parameters and apply it to the source and recompile it so that it founds the new version and linked them in. No need to uninstall the old one

Upgrading My Slack

After finishing my emails and many other things, i finally had a chance to upgrade my Slackware machine to sync with the latest update happening on -Current tree (development branch of Slackware which will be the next Slackware release). It's a big update with lots of new applications, including kernel and KDE. The kernel stock gets upgraded to use 2.6.29.x series and the latest KDE release has been included on this batch. More updates will follow, but i guess today's update was quite big enough.

I'm staying with 2.6.28.x kernel for now as NVidia hasn't released a new update for their legacy drivers, so i wouldn't haste to upgrade my kernel stock as well. Let's just wait for some time before they release a new version of their legacy drivers.

I'm Home

I've arrived safely here at Jogja after spending two days at Semarang. I had good time there (but without good Internet connection, so the best thing i can do is checking my FB and my GMail account). It's a good opportunity to meet my cousins and also Raphael, our newest member of my family. He is the son of my older cousin.

I'm also taking the chance to take my new WD Passport portable HD which i have bought few weeks ago. It was sent to my uncle in US and then my cousion who went there brought it back to Indonesia and his mother brought it back to Semarang (complicated huh?). Why would i bought it from the US site? (i choose Dell at that time). Because it's way cheaper then i bought it in Indonesia.

Besides WD Passport, i also took my new phone, E71, which i bought also from my cousin who brought me the WD. It's a very cool phone, but i haven't learned all the new features, because it has LOTS of new features which i never used before. My current phone has been accompanying me for the last six years. It's still in the good shape with very little scratch on the casing, but i think it's time to move along and finally i decided to pick E71 after Telkomsel announced the crazy prize for IPhone 3G.

Oh well, my emails are waiting to be replied, so i'll just stopped for now

IPhone 3.0 on June

Well, the speculation i posted before is coming true, according to IPodTouchFan. The new IPhone OS, dubbed as IPhone 3.0 which will bring lots of new features to all IPhone and IPod will be ready on June.

The price will vary. It will be free for iPhone and $9.95 for iPod touch. It will be compatible with 1G iPod touch, 2G iPod touch, iPhone, and 3G iPhone even though you may not get all the features if you are using 1G iPod.

Check this forum for more information about the features

OOo 3.1.0 RC1 is Available

The next stable release planned for OOo is 3.1.0 which will bring new features into OpenOffice.org Office Suite. For now, they have released a RC1 release which can be downloaded from here. Please note that this version is NOT yet considered stable as it *might* contain showstoppers and hidden bugs and it's intended for public review which will eventually become the final version of OOo 3.1.0.

The Release Notes will gives you detailed changes on this version, while this page will give you more readable documentation about new features in OOo 3.1.0.

My estimation about the final release is in the next 1-2 months unless something big happened during development cycle.

Leaving for Semarang

Tomorrow, i will be heading for Semarang for a couple of days. As always, i wanted to give some earlier announcements so that people will not be disappointed when their emails are not replied for some time (i used to reply an email as soon as possible) or their request to join Indonesian Linux Forum is still in pending (i'm sorry for this as only admins can approve your requests) or your posting to some mailing list i created are still in pending (such as in ID-Slackware, but i have appointed two new managers, so i guess they will help you).

I still got a lot of work to do next week, so i must try to finish all the job i can finish this week, while i'm having quite a long holidays (Wednesday until Sunday). For now, most of my assignments has been evaluated, so i guess only material preparations that should be done this week

Free Linux Books

Are you looking for free Linux books? Well, probably this site will be your answer. It doesn't contain all the books available on the market, but i guess you will find some good resources there.

Have fun with it

OpenOffice Official Forum

If you ever need a support for OpenOffice.org application, i suggest that you go to OpenOffice.org Forum. It's a very active forum where you can join and discuss about lots of things, including asking for help. They even have a paid support if you need a specialized support.

The site is running on phpBB and it's hosted and supported by Sun Microsystem.

False Alarm

Today i have seen several false alarm conducted by GMail filtering system. They tag messages from Facebook as a spam. Luckily i saw them and marked them as not a spam. Does this happened on my account only or does it also happened on your account as well?

The strange thing is that it doesn't apply to all message from Facebook as i still got some of them on my inbox without being tagged as a spam.

New IPhone Model

For those who have bought IPhone 3G in the last two weeks in Jakarta and Bandung (recently), this *may* be a bad news for them. Apple is readying two new IPhone models, according to ComputerWorld UK. While the rumors are still floating around, the fact that Apple has released an update to it's SDK and also a preview for their new OS is a undeniable facts. The new SDK contains more than 1000 new APIs which will make next Apple OS become more fancy and cooler than before. Here are some new features that will be available on the new SDK:

• Search your iPhone
• Cut, copy, and paste
• Send photos, contacts, audio files, and location via MMS*
• Read and compose email and text messages in landscape
  

According to the speculation, the new model will be sold separately. The high-end phone will be sold in North America and a low-end model in several fast-growing overseas markets, such as Brazil, China, India and Russia. The North American model will have video support, a better digital camera and 32GB of memory. The low-end version will lack video support, and possibly lack a Wi-Fi radio, and have less storage.

Anyways, it's still a speculation and there hasn't been any evidence that this claim is perfectly right. The only thing you can do right now is wait and enjoy your IPhone 3G for now

Liferea 1.6 is Coming

I have been a huge fan of Liferea, a simple RSS Reader for Linux/Unix platform. It's simple and the best thing it suits my need. Lately, i have been using the development version, 1.5.x. It's proven to be stable enough for me, but lately, they raised the requirements quite big. For example, they now require GTK+2 at minimum 2.16, SQLite 3.6.10 and above, Webkit 1.1.1 and above, and libsoup 2.26 and above.

Due to this constraints, i haven't upgraded my Liferea installation and i'm still at 1.5.14 even though the latest development version is now 1.5.15 and they are working on 1.5.16.

The good news is that Liferea 1.6 will come out shortly, which means the end of development cycle for 1.5.x version is coming to an end. Let's just hope they will have a good release on 1.6.x replacing the stable version 1.4.x.

Testing Safari 4 Beta

Today i logged in to my Windows machine after few months i left it out of date. I updated almost every application i had on my system and removed unneccessary applications which i never used again. The results is i got a plenty of free space on my hard disk.

By doing this, i can try to install the newest Safari 4 Beta which was claimed to be the fastest browser available. I downloaded the latest version from Apple's website and installed it. I just can't believe it, but after testing the browser into several site which has a lot of javascript codes on it (mostly due to AJAX), i realize that the claim comes with a proof. Safari is so fast, even in Beta version.

KDE 4.2.2 Released

Another monthly updates for KDE 4.2.x series has been released. This was supposed to be released by the end of March, but it's still early in April, so the delay are not too much (compared to XOrg). The announcement can be read here, while the changelog will list all the detailed.

In general, most fixes are focused on KHTML, KMail, and KRunner, even though there are lots of things gets fixed in other components as well. This version has a new codename called Cano. It will be on your distribution repository in short.

No Recession?

I just read an article in CNN about Who's who at G-20. It listed all the representatives who attended G-20 event in London. I was quite surprised to see this picture below. What do you think? They believe that they can overcome this crisis, which is the good news, even though i doubt it will be solved this year. It requires a lot of efforts, but it's still possible.

RC5-72 Competion

I have been following RC5-72 project for some time and so far, it has been running for 2311 days and guess how many percentage ? 0,591%. Can you imagine that? I have no idea when will this project ends. I wonder how many people are still interested in this kind of project? It's really a big collaboration project ever created and i'm proud to be one of them even though i'm still very new and has contributed so little.