New Record

Today is the last day in May and i think i'm gonna make a new record (not a spectacular record actually). Last month, i used around 100 GB in one month and i think i will break that record by making it 180 GB in one month. Yes, you saw that number, 180 GB for single user only (equal to 6 GB/day)

Lately, i have been downloading Asian drama movies from several sources in the Internet. They often have huge size so it would end up draining my portable HD so fast. That's why i needed to buy another new HD for future files.

One Full Day

Since my sister was coming from Jakarta for this long weekend, we spent some time together with my girlfriend and my mother to have one whole day trip today. I was at my girlfriend's house since morning and we had semi lunch at Frez today. It was a new small-scale cafe near my house. Since it's new, they offered 50% off from normal price and it's only valid for May, so one day left

Next, we got back home and we went to the airport to send my auntie and her husband back to Jakarta. We then went to Amplaz and do the about half day shopping there. I was mere a driver for them . We left Amplaz and headed to a small Batik store near Galeria mall. My sister and mother bought some clothes there. They sell handmade Batik items. You can check their websites for more information about their products.

Anyway, it's a great day since it's rarely for my sister to come back from Jakarta due to her busy schedule at the office. She is leaving back to Jakarta tomorrow and i think i can meet her again next October in Bandung where my cousin will held a wedding party there

Portable HD Running Out of Space

For the past two months, my Speedy usage has surpassed 100 GB of traffic (upstream+downstream). This rarely happened in the past, as i only download TV series weekly, but now, i'm downloading Taiwan/Korean drama for long vacation after the semester ends.

So far, my 500 GB portable HD is running out of space due to massive download for these two months. I have downloaded more than 160 GB only for this month, so no wonder it is running out of space so quickly

Registering Google Apps

Finally Google has deleted my previous account at Google Apps and i can re-submit the domain again, but i'm limited to 50 users only, since i'm registering an international non profit organization (Indonesian Slackware Community). I wish Google would consider increase the number of users for standard edition of Google Apps for non-profit organizations.

New Facebook Privacy Settings

Mark Zuckerberg has announced the availability of the new Facebook Privacy Settings on Facebook Blog. He started the stories with a short introduction about how Facebook was born and how it turned to be currently.

In the beginning, nobody complained about it and soon people realized that it was too open even though it was the users itself who give their own information to the public.

Nevertheless, please have a look on the blog and give your opinions about what Facebook has done in order to work on privacy issues.

Indonesian Mirrors for Slackware 13.1

As you probably know, Slackware official sites never published ISO images on their site and users or mirror sites will publish their ISOs created from the repository of the -Current tree.

It took some time to propagate the ISOs as most users are rushing to the main mirrors so it would overload them in the process.

Some of the member of Indonesian Slackware Community has access to several local mirrors and we have coordinated the process of mirroring the Slackware 13.1 ISOs for Indonesian users so that they could download the ISOs faster as they are connected to IIX networks (local Indonesian network which should provide faster access to the server).

Here are some of the Indonesian local mirror sites who has finished mirroring Slackware 13.1 ISOs:

Kavalinux (DVD Only)
Duta Wacana Christian University (CD and DVD)
Kambing @ University of Indonesia (CD and DVD)
ICT PNFI KEMDIKNAS (DVD Only)
Gadjah Mada University (CD and DVD)

Please let me know if you hosted a local mirror sites in Indonesia so i can add them here.

At last, even though the ISOs are provided for free, please consider to help Slackware Project, either by using subscription or buy Slackware merchandise or even donate to Slackware Project via Slackware Store.

Indonesian Slackware Community are planning to do so in short time. If you are interested, please join ID-Slackware mailing list.

Have fun with Slackware 13.1, the best release of Slackware currently

Slackware 13.1 Released

Great news!!! Slackware 13.1 has been officially released. In the last few days, there has been no activity in -Current tree and they have prepared to put the ISO into replication phase which will be used for pre-orders in Slackware Store.

As usual, you will not find official ISOs in any mirrors now, but eventually there will be an ISO on the mirrors site within few days. For now, get the ISOs from torrents located in the main page of Slackware.

Read the ANNOUNCEMENT or the RELEASE NOTES and also CHANGES_AND_HINTS

Spreading Already

Fedora 13 is supposed to be released in a few days from now, but i think the final ISO version has been spread out to mirrors site around the world. I accidentally saw the ISO in one of the Indonesian's mirrors site and quickly i download them to being put on my campus mirror site too.

I'm downloading the last ISO DVD version of x86_64 architecture as i have completed the rest of the ISOs. I have put them there on the ISO Server. Take a look on yourself

Congratulations to Budi and Diana

This morning, i was attending Budi and Diana's wedding party. They were a great couple. I wish them a great new life with a new family are waiting for them

Google Apps

Today, i tried to subscribe for Google Apps for two differents domains. One is for non-profit organization and the other one is for Educational. It's very simple to do the registration and configuration process if you have access to the domain.

FYI, for Educational, Google Apps team requested me to give more detailed information for the administration, but i think it has been resolved by now and i'm waiting for the DNS update next Monday since the administrator is not available until Monday.

When it's done, the email migration will likely to start on Monday

This is my first time using Google Apps and i found it very easy to be done

SlackID Meeting

Today is the day where SlackID meeting conducted. It was supposed to be held last week, but i totally forgot and most of the attendees didn't make it, so it was postponed until today. The attendees are bigger in number than i expected, which is very good and the discussion ended with a great conclusion, which should reflect the next Indonesian Slackware Magazine SlackID #2.

Let's hope it will be released as planned and it should be a great present to be together with Slackware 13.1 release schedule

Unexpected Trip

I had a shocking news this morning. My colleague's father passed away yesterday. My deep condolesence for him and his family. I went to Solo this afternoon with my other colleagues to gave the first and last tribute to his father. We didn't know the funeral home, so we asked some local people and combining it with GPS using my E71 phone and finally we got there safely.

After that, we had dinner near the funeral house. We ate nasi liwet and also corn for about an hour and then we went back to Jogja because it was already 8.30 PM. The trip took us about 1,5 hours, but we managed to arrived safely.

Writing Articles

For the past two days, i have been busy with writing articles for PCPlus. They asked me to write 4 pages of articles. It's not a big problem when my schedule is loose, but last week, my students got their final exam and i'm trying to release the marks as soon as possible, so i have to do the marking and evaluation as soon as they finished doing their test. It surely takes my time, so i didn't have any time to wrote the article.

Luckily, they gave me another day to extend the deadline which supposed to be today into tomorrow. I have finally finished the articles today and i hope they will be satisfied with it

Just wait and see for the upcoming PCPlus magazine for my articles

Rescuing Ubuntu

One of my student came to my office this afternoon after her laptop couldn't boot to X. She's using Ubuntu 10.04. The only thing that appeared on the screen was a xterm terminal. I tried to ran startx and it says that the X is already running. I was confused and i searched Google and found the solution. I ran startx -- :1 and it would work, but when i restarted, it happened again, so i guess it was just a temporary solution.

Luckily, i tried to log out from the session and i found the culprit. Someone changed the session from GNOME into xterm. That's why when she logged on using her account, she only got xterm session instead of full GNOME desktop. After changing the session into GNOME, i tried to restart her laptop and voila... the GNOME desktop has been restored as normal

Linux Kernel 2.6.34 Released

After about three months of development, finally the final version of the next Linux Kernel has been released by Linus Torvalds. What i think very interesting in this release is that it incorporates GPU Switching feature which enables Linux users who have 2 GPUs to switch over. This feature are already implemented in Windows 7 by default, but it's now being merged in Linux Kernel as an official support.

Please note that users will still require to restart their X Server in order to switch between GPUs, but i think it's better than having one GPU detected only (usually only Intel are detected).

Other detailed changes can be seen at KernelNewbies

CentOS 5.5 Released

Just when Fedora 13 release is being slipped for another week, CentOS, which is similar to RHEL, but developed by the community has released their latest version, CentOS 5.5. The ISOs are now available in most mirrors in 386 and x86_64 version. Read the Release Announcement for more detailed changes about this release.

For Indonesian users, you can get them in UI. For international users, please go to the mirror site

Slackware 13.1 is Near

The official announcement is not yet ready, but i'm sure that Slackware 13.1 is very close to final release as the RC 1 has been released and it's pretty stable here. I have been following -Current development all this years since i started using Slackware back in 2005 and i don't have any major problems with -Current. Basically, all my needs are fulfilled and i have an outstanding stable system on my desktop, laptop, and also workstation at my office.

As the RC 1 announcement, the base toolchain is now freezed and i believe within few batch of updates, it will soon become a final release and i'm expecting to be released by the end of this month or probably early June

This will be the first Slackware release that includes KDE 4.4.x in history of Slackware's long development

Finding Best File System

Typically, a file system is unique to the operating system, but in Linux, we have a lot of choices. Which one should we use and which one should be avoided? There are a lot of references where you can find information about each file systems, but here's one website which you can use to find the best file systems for your own machine. I hope this one suits you well

Fedora 13 Slipped Again

For the second time, Fedora 13 release schedule will be postponed for about one week due to unresolved showstopper bugs on their bug tracker. The official announcement was made by Paul W. Frields. The record of the Go/No-Go meeting can be found here.

I think it's better to have this release schedule in order to get the best user experience when using Linux rather than forcing them to do unusual things, just like what Ubuntu developers did with 10.04 LTS due to last-minute bug. More over, it's LTS version which should be more stable since it will be used by many users around the world due to long term support.

That's why Slackware never set a fixed date on release plan. It will be released when it's ready and the decision is made by Patrick himself. He knows when will the next release is stable enough to be consumed by public

I'm still waiting for the next Slackware 13.1 to be released this year (hopefully in June or worst case July).

Early Plan for Firefox 4

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's Director of Firefox has posted an early product plan for Mozilla Firefox 4 which can be accessed on his blog. Actually it was presented on a presentation, but since not everybody can attend the seminar, he posted the video on Mozilla's server or if you prefer to watch the slides, you can watch them at SlideShare.

In short, what are they planning with Firefox 4? There are three primary goals: Fast, Powerful, and Empowering.

Talking about speed. Firefox is lagging behind Opera and Google Chrome in terms of speed, but since Firefox 3, they have been working so hard to minimize the gap and they will do more work towards faster performance on Firefox 4. It says, they are going to make Firefox super-duper fast . I'm very eager to see happening in the future.

Powerful is about supporting new and open Web standards, such as HTML 5, CSS 3, and many more. I believe Firefox has been used as a standard web browser when we want to test our web page compatibility. You can't ignore Firefox as more and more people are using Firefox as their default browser, replacing IE. The need of supporting web standards are very critical to Firefox then.

Empowering means that users are in total control of their data, browsers, and web experience. Through Mozilla Labs, we can see that there has been a lot of efforts to make Firefox more empowering. We would like to see more of it and to make Firefox the best browser.

OK, that is all and remember that that plan is not a fixed one. It still has big chance to change in the future, but i'm sure Firefox 4 will be a big release for Firefox community and also to users around the world

Mandriva Collapsed?

Mandriva, a french-based Linux distribution vendor is now looking for buyers after having financial crisis (in French). There are two potential buyers for now and i am hoping that they would find a good solution to Mandriva.

I used to use Mandriva since my early meeting with Linux around 2002. I installed Mandrake at that time and i continued to follow the distribution until 2005. I even contribute to the Indonesian translations and i got a Mandriva Power Pack VIP access at that time. I switched to Slackware since 2005 up to now, and since then, i have never used Mandriva again, even though i believe it is still a good Linux distribution.

Well, good luck for Mandriva

Youngsters

Tomorrow, i and my colleagues will have to evaluate our student's final project presentation. One interesting thing about tomorrow's event is that all of the lecturers in charge are youngsters. There will not be any senior lecturers because one of them have another important task so he asked my other colleagues to substitute for him.

I think it will be a great event

Activities on Sunday

Not much activities that i have done today. Besides finishing watching Korean drama (Witch Amusement), i only accompanied my mother to go to the super market and then i went to my girlfriend's house to fix her laptop which was infected by a backdoor.

I asked her to try using Linux, but she still refuses, even though what she needs can be fulfilled by Linux in most cases, except for gaming (she didn't play online games nor heavy games, only a small one. I believe Wine can still work in most cases). Oh well, i think i have to persuade her more often to try using Linux and get rid of Virus, Malware, Trojan, etc.

Time to Give Marking

It's weekend, and it supposed to be off work, but for me, it means that i should start evaluating my student's assignments and give marks to them. I set the deadline for the second and third assignment last night.

I was quite happy that this semester, number of students who failed to send the assignments before the deadline has decreased compared to last semester, but still there were some students who forgot to send it on time and according to the rules.

Let's hope they will manage to get better next semester

Not Yet Mature

I have tried to give more freedom to my students while they are in my class. They can turn on their laptop to surf the Internet to find more study case related to the material discussed at the class. But, in the end, they are not yet ready to be given such freedom. They use this opportunity to play games, chatting via instant messaging or updating their status on Facebook or Plurk or Twitter.

I guess nowadays students are not yet mature as they should be. It's a pity that such big chance wasted for something which i think less important than their knowledge.

Another example is when they were sleeping while i gave lectures in front of the class. Well, i don't mind if they have good reason, but is it polite to sleep while other people is talking in front of the class? Just pretend that you are standing in front of the audience and the audience were sleeping. How do you feel about that? They just don't get it.

Well, it's just my thoughts about what happened on my daily activities. I only wishes that they will change on the next semester

Last Day

Tomorrow will be my last class for this semester. For the next three weeks, the students are going to face their final exams. I hope they have a good preparation for the final exams because it will affect their final grades

Study hard

Portable Hard Drive

I'm looking for a new portable hard drive as my current one (500 GB) is getting less and lesser every day. I wanted to find the portable version so i can bring it anywhere, but for now, the biggest capacity that WDC has is 1 TB. I'm looking for 2 TB or more if possible.

Any suggestion about this?

Plagiarism

I have stated a strict rule when i started this semester that any violations to code of conduct will have a strict penalty and today, i found two different cases. I saw a verbatim copies of two different extra assignment which should be easy to be done. Actually i'm very pissed off with this action, as the assignment is very easy to be done and i thinking risking one subject for extra 5 points is not worthed at all.

I'm asking them to come and meet me this week and i hope they will give me a good explanation or else i will take serious action about this. I cannot tolerate indisplinary actions on my course

Another Behind-Schedule

Wine is now behind-schedule again. It has been more than two weeks since last release on April 16, and still no sign of 1.1.44, the next development release which should be released last week. I do hope that it will have a nice features compared to 1.1.43 since it has taken more than normal development time to release this version.

Last Week

This is the last week for the students before they will face their final exam next week. I hope they will prepare themselves for the final test.

That also means that we, lecturers will have to start working on the final test questions

Fated to Love You

For the last few days, i have been watching several Korean and Taiwanese drama and from what i have seen, Taiwanese's drama is much better than Korean. My best drama so far is Fated to Love You. It has 24 episodes, quite larger than any normal drama which usually around 16 or 18, but i think it's worthed to watch this one.

Oh and my advice is that you should prepare many tissues, as there are so many touching scenario which will make you cry. I like the moral story of this film. You should check it out.