Another Update on South Park Studio

South Park Studio, an online flash application to create avatars has been updated again on 26 April 2009 and it contains more and more items, such as PS3, animals, and backgrounds. Check the website and create your own avatar.

By the way, here's my avatar. Some people said it's identical with me

SSD Benchmarking on brtfs

Brtfs, a new filesystem which has just entered the kernel mainline is a hot topic nowadays. SSD also becomes very popular recently. What if those two are combined on a single benchmark? Well, the answer lies on Phoronix recent benchmark on SSD mode in brtfs.

Brtfs has a mode that is optimized for solid-state drives, but does that mode is working as expected for SSD? Check your answers there

It's quite interesting to see early benchmark from sites such as Phoronix as we as the end users will likely see how the new device or technology works with Linux.

iBiSa is Over

The iBiSa workshop and seminar are now finished. Thanks to the sponsors and others who have helped this event. I know we have lots to evaluate based on this event, but i'm sure next event will be much better than this one with more people from SME who attended this event.

See you next time in another SME-related events

ODF as National Standard

Last year, i wrote about When Will Indonesia Use ODF? Up to now, we still don't have any standard for document format. Do you think .doc or .docx is a standard? Well, think again, as it's not an official standard in Indonesia as it hasn't been approved by the National Standarization Agency of Indonesia. As a de factor standard yes, not not by de jure.

This morning, i had some opportunity to discuss this issue with Betti Alisjahbana, ex president director of IBM Indonesia, which is now head of AOSI (Indonesian Open Source Association). Her team has been aware of this issue and they have started to move on to make ODF as the standard for office document format. The process might take some time, but at least, there is a significant progress since AOSI was born last year.

Other countries have taken same steps and some of them have made it. Take an example of Malaysia who have used ODF as a national standard for two years (since 2007). Another example are Sweden, South Africa, Venezuela, and Korea (more countries can be searched via Google).

By having ODF as a national standards, adoption of Open Source application, mainly OpenOffice for office suite category will be lot easier as it (currently) one of the many Open Source application which fully supports ODF standards.

In OOo 3.x, it has supported up to ODF 1.2 and it's aiming for better support in OOo 3.2 which is scheduled on November 2009.

Sleep Early, Wake Up Early

Today, i will sleep early, because :

1. I will attend iBiSa Seminar tomorrow. It's a one day seminar, so i must prepare some stamina
2. I'm planning to watch Champion League Final between Manchester United and Barcelona this morning (2 AM).

Actually, the second one is more dominant

Seminar and Workshop iBiSA

UKDW collaborating with Senada and USAID are going to held Seminar and Workshop for SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) on 28-30 May 2009 at Duta Wacana Christian University. The main topic is about ICT Business Solution Fair: Increasing Local Business Competitiveness.

Detailed event can be seen at iBisa website or at MyCityBlogging Yogyakarta (most recent update).

Fly Swatter

I found a nice game on the Internet with the help of StumbleUpon. It's called Fly Swatter. It's a small and simple game where you are asked to kill flies in shortest time and it will count your accuracy.

Try it

Back to Work

After having a great weekend with my family, especially my sister who took a day off and went back to Jogja, it's time to get back to work again on Monday. I had plenty of busy schedule on Monday and it will continue like that until next month where i will go to Manado for about one week.

Oh well, time to get some sleep right now

Night at the Museum 2

Finally i had a chance to watch this movie after i watched the first movie last year. In general, the main story is still the same, it happened at the museum and it happened only one night, but believe me, it's a long night and those one night could change someone's life.

Even though it's still quite funny, but i believe the first one is better than this one. I don't know why, but probably i already know most of the characteristics of the old members of the museum.

But it's still a great movie after all

Point or Knowledge

This semester hasn't ended yet, since the students still has to do their final test this this week and next week, but some of the exams has been passed and the results have been published (well, at least mine). Some of them were happy to get a good grade while the rest didn't because they got bad one (some of them failed).

What surprises me is that most students nowadays only looking for points and not the knowledge. They think studying is only attending classes, doing exams and assignment and that's all. They don't really care about the knowledge.

Well, in education, grade or points are means of evaluation to see whether you have understand the knowledge or not. If you failed, it doesn't mean world's end. It only means that you are not yet understands the knowledge.

Re-take the course and learn more about it and i'm sure you will pass

Back on IRC

For some time, i have been away from IRC and now, i have started to go back online at IRC networks again. You can find me on ##slackware or ##id-slackware channel on irc.freenode.net server. I'm using slackid as the nickname

Please note that in most of the time, i leave the XChat window unattended. If you need to contact me, make sure you have write my nickname so it will blink on my system.

Slackware64 on LWN

Slackware has released their new ports, called Slackware64 which has been tested internally by the Slackware crew and now it's ready for public testing. The port is synced with Slackware-Current development, so everything goes into Slackware-Current will also go to Slackware64-Current as well. This has been posted at LWN and i think it will be arriving at DistroWatch shortly

The news also confirms that the next Slackware release will be 13.0. It will contain lots of changes from the current 12.2 release. More about development on -Current can be viewed on their -Current changelog.

Great job to Slackware crew and of course, Patrick V.

One More

Only one more exams that i have to evaluate before i can go on vacation. Unfortunately, the last exam will be held next week, so i still have to wait for that. In the meantime, i'm working on my new course which (i hope) will be available starting next semester. I think it would be a fun class (let's just hope so).

First Impression on Empire XXI

Finally, i had a chance to visit Empire XXI, the new movie theater in Jogja. Build on the old area of Empire, the new one is glamorous compared to the old one (but the old one had a supermarket on first floor, Hero). I was watching Angels and Demons today.

I had to admit the building was so great, but the parking area and also the seat were the minus point of the new building. The parking area is so small and it's so expensive (probably because they own the whole area, so they set any price). The seat is (IMHO) worse than in Amplaz, although the studio is larger than in Amplaz. I had a backache after sitting for about two hours watching Angels and Demons. Something i never experienced while watching at Amplaz.

Novel Finished

Finally i managed to finish Brisingr. This has been postponed for some time and while i do have some time right now, i rushed to finish it while i can. I still have three other novel which i haven't read (actually i still have a lot, but i think these three are the most interesting one), but i'm planning to read it one at June (while i am in Manado) and the rest will have to wait until i got back from Manado

Glory Glory MU

The title race is now over as MU got a draw with Arsenal 0-0 at Old Trafford tonight. Their point is enough to lock the EPL championship title for 18th time, equals to Liverpool. Congratulations to MU and there's still Champion League waiting for you. I hope you can grab this one also

Next assignment: Manado

Starting on June, i will be leaving to Manado for one week. I will have my new assignment there. My job is to accompany my students who will do a field work there for one month. I will not stay there for one month, but only one week at the beginning and one week at the end, but because i have other activity at July, i couldn't attend the end of the project, so i asked other colleague to do it for me.

I have never been to Manado before, so i guess it will be quite a nice trip for me. The WOC (World Ocean Conference) 2009 is also being held in Manado, so it will be quite crowded when i arrived there next month.

KDE 4.3 Beta 1

KDE team is planning to release KDE 4.3 in late July, but they have released their first Beta version today. This release is intended for testing purposes only. Do not try to use them for production as it *may* contains unresolved or known bugs.

The announcement can be read here. Can't wait to see KDE 4.3 in the next two months

Are You Prepared for PHP 5.3?

PHP team has released PHP 5.3 RC 2, which will be followed by RC 3 in the next two or three weeks. It means that the final version of PHP 5.3 is getting ready for prime time. As always, changes in 5.x is quite enormous and sometimes makes people confusing because scripts that was working in prevous version become broken on the next version.

For that reason, PHP team has tried to make some documentation on PHP 5.3 Upgrading Notes. Basically, it gives you spesific changes within PHP 5.3 which will give you some hints on what should you do with your scripts related with the changes implemented on the next PHP 5.3. There are some changes that might break your scripts and it's a good time to test for it before it's too late

Second Novel of Rick Riordan's Collection

I just came back from Galeria and while i was there, i bought the second novel from Rick Riordan's collection, called The Sea of Monsters.I have finished reading the first novel within two days only. Probably i will bring this novel when i go to Manado next month (it's still uncertain, but the chances are high), because i will be spending time there for about a week.

I still had 4 magazines which i haven't read. Two are mobile-related magazines and the rest are Oracle-related magazines. There are still two final project reports which i have to read for tonight and tomorrow, assignments for my classes and also final test which will start tomorrow.

Oh... give me some power to finish all this

Celebrating IEEE's 125th Anniversary

Today, IEEE celebrates it's 125th anniversary. It's a long history since IEEE founded 125 years ago and since then, they have worked hard to engineer the future by doing lots of things, such as holding a seminar/conference, publishing magazines/journals, launching digital library and many more.

You can see the celebration page on this site. You can also become a fan on Facebook

Real-time Update

Facebook has integrated their real-time update notifications on home page and status page. When somebody posted a comment on your status, you will get a notification on your bottom right of the page, giving you almost real-time update to your activities.

The home page also gets an update by giving you a real-time update on your friend's activities and status updates. It will shows you XX new posts, where XX is a number and those number will keep increasing if you don't show them on your home page. When you clicked on the link, it will display all the updates on your home page.

Very nice features by Facebook.

Three More Novels

When i was out of town last week, i went to book store and bought three novels at once. Actually i wanted to buy six of them, but i realize i won't have that luxury to read them, so i return the other three. One of them has been finished only two days since i bought the book. It's called The Lightning Thief. It's one of five books written by Rick Riordan and it's talking about Greeks' mythology. We are talking about Zeus, Hera, Hades, Medusa, Poseidon, and many other. It was fun reading it and i am hoping to see the second and third one published in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, i haven't finished my Brisingr book and i still have plenty of novels which i haven't had time to read, but yet i'm buying another one

KDE 4.2.3 Released

Another monthly release for KDE has been released for public few days ago. I was behind schedule because i was out of town. It has been included on Slackware's tree (in -Current only) and it's getting better. In fact, i have just completed downloading it and upgrading my laptop with KDE 4.2.3 along with other changes made in Slackware-Current which now supports for .txz file formats that already uses lzma compression algorithm to compress Slackware packages.

For changes compared to 4.2.2, please see the changelog.

Upgrading BIOS From Desktop

Upgrading BIOS is like a nightmare for some computer users and it's enough to scare them away and leave it untouched. Phoronix wrote an article about The Flashrom utility developed by CoreBoot project, which can be used to read, write, erase, and verify flash ROM chips from your Linux desktops.

Here are some ofthe cool explanation about Flashrom which is taken from Phoronix site:

This utility supports nearly every x86 motherboard after having worked on support for over 150 flash chip families (and many various for each family), 75 different chipsets, workarounds for non-standard motherboards, and there is no need for CD-ROM or floppy disk.

Previously Linux users have had to create an MS-DOS or FreeDOS boot disk and then run a proprietary DOS-based BIOS flashing program, but it is now becoming easy and universally supported to flash the BIOS from your desktop. Flashrom can also flash a BIOS perfectly fine over SSH or through other means as long as there is root access. Flashrom also supports cross-flashing and hot-flashing.

Codename

Usually, big products have their own codename. Every Linux kernel release has their own names, even though it's never being published sometimes. Mozilla, Windows, KDE, and Ubuntu are examples of products which have a unique names for every release.

This is not what happened on OpenOffice.org. In the past (OpenOffice.org 2.x), they used a specific notation on the about dialog about product versions to distinguish between Beta, RC, and Final release. Currently (OpenOffice.org 3.x), they do not use those kind of naming again, mostly for Final release. What they use is just a build number and milestone (CMIIW). For example, OOo 3.1.0 has a release information: m11, Build 9399.

I think this information might be confusing for some people, because they *may* not know which one is the final release and which one is the RCs. Just a small hint, on OOo 3.x development, the last RC will usually be the final version, so those packages will go into stable directory on every OOo mirror site. Every time a new version comes into stable version, you can say that that's the final release. To be sure, you can wait for few days and make sure that you got the correct build.

Day Off

Starting today until Sunday, i will be taking a day offs and heading for other city in Indonesia for short vacation. I may not be able to reply your messages, your offline message in YM, nor approve any request to join Indonesian Linux Forum. I will do my best stay in touch using my cellphones and public WiFI, but don't count on it

Cheers everybody

Fixing OOo 3.1.0 Installation Problem on Windows

Yesterday, i upgraded my OpenOffice.org installation on Windows and Linux to OOo 3.1.0. On Linux, the upgrade worked just fine without any problems and i have mentioned it on my other blog.

The problem arose when i tried to upgrade on Windows. I downloaded the OOo 3.1.0 from Austrian mirror (GDS) and i removed the previous version prior installing this version. When the installation finished, i tried to try it out but i got an error like this:

the application cannot be started.
loading component library failed:
file://C:/Program%20Files/OpenOffice.org%203/program/../Basis/program/i18npool.uno.dll

I submitted an issue at OOo's issue tracker and the ID was 101570. Several people helped me out to fix this problem as it happened on the final release of OOo 3.1.0, so i guess it will affect many people who will use OOo 3.1.0 on Windows platform.

Right now, i already got the solution, but you will have to fix it manually after installing OOo 3.1.0 on your system. Based on the detailed explanation by sb, he assumed that the dll which couldn't be found (i18npool.uno.dll) depends on other libraries (icuin40.dll and icuuc40.dll) which also depends on icudt40.dll. The problem arose when there are some ICU DLLs which are located on Windows\System32 directory and it has the same name with DLLs that were being used by OOo, but it's not compatible.

OOo's component (soffice) will find the incorrect DLL files from Windows system rather than the correct one from OOo installation directory, resulting the unexpected errors.

The solution is very easy: copy all files named icu*40.dll from OOo's "OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\program" directory to its "OpenOffice.org 3\program" directory. Try to restart OOo and voila, it will work like charm

Thanks to quick responses by OpenOffice.org team and also from the community.

Hesitate to Change

I have been asking my students to submit their assignments using OpenDocument Formats, which is being used by OpenOffice.org and many other office suite applications. Most of them are used with Microsoft Office 2003/2007, so they made the assignment on MSO and then open the file in OOo and save it as .ODT extension. I'm wondering, why on earth do they have to do that? OOo can handle document creation like MSO and best of all, it's free. Geezz....

I made my final project for my undergraduate program using OOo 1.1.x, and for my thesis, i did it using OOo 3.x and nothing wrong with my papers. I believe many of you have done the same thing with your job. OOo can handle most of our needs. It's just the students who hesitate to change/migrate to OOo. Too bad...

Free of Quizzes

Facebook lately are full of quizzes which can be made easily by ordinary users. Not many people like this behavior, so Steeev created a simple script called FB purity which purifies FB to it's original's state, clean. This script will hide all the annoying quiz messages and other silly application spam from your facebook homepage.

This script works only with Firefox 3, Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari. If you are using Firefox, then you must install GreaseMonkey extension prior installing this script. For other browsers, you should check link on each browser.

Thanks for this nice scripts.

Last Week

Starting next Monday, it will be the last week before students at UKDW will have their final test in the next two weeks, starting from Thursday, 14 May 2009. Usually i gave review of all material that i have given, but since this semester has a lot of holidays, my materials are not yet finished. Some of them will have to be delivered this week and next week, some of the class are already for presentation of their assignments.

Good luck guys/girls

Closer to the Title

MU is getting closer to reach their 18th title after beating Middlesbrough on away match held in The Riverside Stadium. With six points ahead of Liverpool who will play their game tomorrow, any mistake mad by Liverpool would made ease their way to get Treble title this season (and i'm hoping for another one from Champion league).

Ryan Giggs, who has just been awarded PFA player of the year and Ji-Sung Park scored a goal each to give another winning for MU. They are not in their full team as they still had tight schedule for Champion league next week against Arsenal at Emirates Stadium.

Little Disappointment

I'm a little bit dissapointed today. I went to movie theater in Amplaz today and i wanted to watch X-Men The originals: Wolverine by using my credit card to get buy 1 for 2 promotions. I was surprised to know that the promotions are only valid in Saturday and Sunday and no longer valid in Friday.

One of my friend applied for BCA credit card just to enjoy this promotion because he often watched movies on Friday and at that day, the price is quite low and you can get cheaper prize by using credit card. Now, it's gone