KDE SC 4.5 is Close to Born

KDE SC 4.5 has been tagged in the SCM and the final date has been set to August 19, two days from Indonesian's independence day according to Release Schedule. I'm looking forward to see the packages in -Current and i will try this version as soon as it's ready to be downloaded from Eric's repository. He has already prepared the build system which should be faster as he bought a new computer with higher spec from his old build box.

I really appreciate Slackware users as they give their donations so much to Slackware Projects and also to Slackware contributors such as Eric. Keep working on Slackware

End of BootCamp 2010

Today is the last day of BootCamp 2010. Overall, i can say the event was a success, even though we realized that there are still so many things that should be improved for next year's BootCamp.

The students has done an incredible job throughout this weekend and t hey were pushed to their limit to understand PHP, CodeIgniter, CSS, and JQuery and work in a team to produce a web-based project using all of those.

I'm proud of them since they worked overnight (some of them only slept for few hours in the last two days). I give you and keep

See you in the next BootCamp in 2011

BootCamp

Today, i will be staying at Seturan since i have to monitor the students who took the BootCamp event since early this week. I will only sleep there for tonight and i will be back to my house and doing my activities for tomorrow normally.

This is very unfortunate, since Slackware-Current development has started again just when i am about to leave to Seturan . I think i will have to wait until tomorrow to get the updates in -Current. Meanwhile, i will start the rsync process in UKDW's Repo Server so you can get the updates later in the evening.

Update (20:44): we have Internet connection here, even though it's not so stable, so i can update using rsync to my campus repo server. Right now, my laptop is running the latest -Current

ODF Become National Format?

What a surprising news. ODF will soon become a mandatory format for all government documents. I have posted this since a year ago and two years ago, but finally it will come true. Right now, the Indonesian government is trying to migrate all computers in the governmental level to use Open Source to reduce it's spending just to buy licenses for Windows and many other Microsoft products (mostly Microsoft Office). When that target has been completed (estimated 2011), they will follow with standarizing the national format to use ODF.

Malaysia has started this move since 2006, and others have gone before Malaysia, but finally Indonesia will use ODF as national format in 2011 . For now, ODF has been proposed to Indonesian National Standarization in order to become a national format.

For now, the best application that has the best compatibility with the latest ODF spesification is OpenOffice.org. They keep working to make their product produce ODF-conformance documents. Other applications are working towards the same goal and i believe they are making good progress to meet ODF standards.

Finished Watching 1% of Anything

I have just finished watching 1 Percent of Anything, an old Korean drama which was airing on 2003. I downloaded few months ago, but i only have time lately to finish watching it. At first, i thought it would be a boring movie as the first few episodes was quite boring, but eventually it changes gradually and i enjoyed it. The total episodes are 26 , normal number of episodes for Korean. Usually Chinese dramas have more than 40 episodes and sometimes 50.

At the end, i gives a very special moral message to the viewer. Even though we only have 1% of chance, we should make use of it as it can change everything.

For those wanted to download the movies, you can have a look in SilentRegrets.

I still have several other movies waiting on my watch list which i haven't had a chance to watch, but i guess that would have to wait a little bit longer as regular semester starts very soon, so i think i should hold on to that and prepare for next semester

Watching Sorcerer's Apprentice

Today, i watched another movie called Sorcerer's Apprentice where Nicholas Cage became one of the main actor. When i saw the poster, i think it would be a great movie, but apparently, the poster was a little over i guess. I still thinks Inception that i saw yesterday was still better than this movie.

Anyway, both are still good enough to be watched. More movies are coming in this week and next week, such as Salt (Angelina Jolie) and also the Last Air Blender. I'm looking forward to see those movies

Watching Inception

Today, i am watching Inception with my girlfriend at Cinema 21 (Amplaz) so that we can use one free ticket by using BCA card. It's been some time since i last watched a movie in Cinema 21 and here i am again.

Before i watched this movie, i had a doubt, since some people said it was a confusing movie and some people were bored of watching it, but after i finished watching it, i found it fascinating. The director has planned it very detail and smooth. The have thought about the time difference, timing, planning, and the risk as well. All of them are combined with special effect matrix-like and of course bomb, explotions, and sort things (it's Western movie after all and they are famous of creating explotions effects).

At first, i found it a little bit confusing, since it's kinda flashback movie, but after that, i finally get the idea and enjoy the movie until the end of it.

For those who still don't understand the levels of dream in Inception, take a look at the chart below and hopefully you get the idea

PHP 5.3.3 Released

After almost more than six months of development, finally the final PHP 5.3.3 and 5.2.14 has been released by PHP team. This release doesn't bring any security fixes, but there are bunch of new features and bug fixes which can be seen at the ChangeLog.

I'm now compiling it on my own desktop and soon my laptop will also follow

New Access Point

Yesterday, i bought a new wireless home router, D-Link DIR 600 so that i can have a better mobility access on my house. It was cheap enough with all the features that the device has. Actually i didn't plan to buy the device, but while i'm accompanying my colleague to buy UPS, i saw the device and since it was considered quite affordable, i decided to buy it.

This morning, i tried to set up the wireless network and under than five minutes, i managed to set it up. Most of the time spent of unpacking the device, removing the seal, unwrap the cables, and do the preparations. When it comes to the setup, i only need to define as DHCP and set the SSID and the WPA2 Keys and that's it. It started to work instantly.

I can work more mobile now

Final Test

Today, the students had to deal with the final exams which i have prepared for some time and right now, i'm on a process of marking it. The final results are still unknown, but there will be some students who failed to pass this subject as they didn't get enough score to pass.

Be strong and you still have another opportunities in regular semester which should start next month

Small Changes on Template

Last night, i tried to change the template used for this blog. I tried to use Template Designer, new feature offered by Blogspot to ease users to modify their design. I think it's very good, but they still need to make more templates because the offered templates are very limited.

I hope you enjoy the new template i have chosen. It has been modified manually in order to get a full width of the screen. The original template would only use about 70-80% of the screen and it's centered. So i adjust the width to take full width of the screen.

Let's hope Blogger team will add more templates in the future

phpBB 3.1 Feature Freeze

After a long development, future phpBB 3.1 that will be called Ascraeus is now on Feature Freeze phase, which will freeze the development of new feature and focusing on stability of the release before the final version will be released.

Below are the status of features and improvements in phpBB 3.1:

Merged:

• Coding Guideline Modifications RFC Ticket
• Autoloading & Class Naming Convention RFC Ticket
• Removal of subsilver2 RFC Ticket

Patch in progress:

• Improved Page Titles RFC Ticket
• Avatar improvements, Gravatar RFC Ticket
• Improved template engine RFC Ticket
• SQLite 3.0+ Support RFC Ticket
• Updated BBcode engine RFC
• Request Class RFC Ticket
• Switch to PHP timezone handling RFC Ticket
• Modular Cron RFC Ticket
• General Hook Architecture RFC Ticket
• Resume support for attachments / HTTP range support RFC Ticket
• Soft Delete RFC Ticket
• Enhanced Team Page RFC Ticket
• Improve User Pruning feature RFC Ticket
• Rename MSNM to WLM RFC Ticket
• Link global announcements to forumsRFC Ticket
• Simple message API RFC Ticket
• Attachments Management RFC Ticket
• MOD Installer RFC Ticket
• Cleaning up the ACP UI RFC Ticket
• No db storage of themes and stylesheets RFC Ticket

RFC only:

• Migrations (UMIL) RFC Ticket Data Providers RFC
• Changing IP banning to use ‘longest prefix matching’ RFC Ticket
• Ability to delete auto login keys RFC Ticket
• Authentication Plugin Refactoring, User Integration & OpenID RFC Ticket
• Session Backend Abstraction (memcache support) RFC Ticket
• Search Backend Refactoring RFC Ticket
• Pre-Compile Template Includes RFC
• Overridable imageset and theme paths for CDNs RFC

Damn Vulnerable Linux

Usually, people use Linux to have more secure operating system since it's more resistance to Virus/Worms attack, but not for DVL (Damn Vulnerable Linux). This Linux distribution is developed to be as vulnerable as possible, so that people can use this distribution to learn about security vulnerabilities, such as SQL Injection, Buffer Overflow, Reverse Code Engineering, Web Exploitation, and many more. It's unique Linux distribution actually.

Actually, one of Indonesian people have done this before. His name is I Made Sathyabudi Adnyana who created targeT Linux. It's based on Slackware which is famous of the stability. Taken from the official website:

targeT Linux is a linux distribution that same with the name is especially as hacking target. This linux distribution can run directly from CDROM as live CD or from USB disk as Live USB.

I'm planning to use this Linux distribution for my next CEH classes

One Busy Day

This is surely my busy day. I had three classes in the morning until evening and then i had a meeting with my future client until 8 PM. I arrived at home 8 PM and i still have to prepare for tomorrow's class and marking the first assignment of Operating System class

Luckily it's now over and i can go to sleep now

Adding Mandriva Repository

After OpenSUSE repository is completed, my next repository is Mandriva 2010.1. Right now, the process is still ongoing and i believe it should be finished by tomorrow.

Meanwhile, i'm busy preparing for tomorrow's classes. I have three classes tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, but after that, it should be over for this short semester

Update (20 July): It's not 100% finished, as the x86_64 architecture is still progressing and i think it would take another day to complete mirroring it as the i586 itself consumed about 22 GB

Adding OpenSUSE Repositories

Since OpenSUSE 11.3 has been released, i'm now adding OpenSUSE 11.3 Repositories into UKDW's Repo Server. It's still progressing, so please for a while while it's being mirrored. By the time it's finished, it will be accessible from this URL: http://repo.ukdw.ac.id/opensuse/

It will also be accessible from RSYNC service as well

Update (20:47): Sorry, i forgot to update this blog. Right now, the repository is up and it has finished syncronizing with upstream repository. Please enjoy the service. It's also available in rsync too

Chrome FastBall

Google is always innovating. They have built a flash-based game called Chrome FastBall and it's uploaded on YouTube. It's a challenge-based game where you should answer few questions on each tracks. It's very cool actually, but you must be quick enough if you want to beat the record (do a lot of practice to get better).

There was a little problem when Google announced it at first last month due to overwhelming antuasism from users around the world, but now it has been resolved and i can play it freely

Google Acquired Metaweb

Google announced that they have acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world (they called it entities and it was part of Freebase). I believe when Google can take advantage of entities developed by Metaweb, semantic web ideas can be one more step to reality as you can use more complex query such as "actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar", which is not applicable on current technology (even by Google).

Even though Google has done a lot of things in the past to enrich their search capabilities, such as searching for news, dates, events, images, videos, blogs, and many more (including becoming a calculator and converter for many metrics), they still can't do complex query which involves words that may be ambiguous or long query such as displayed above. With entities, which links all the related concept into one entity, this problem will be solved and it will enable users to have better results by using more human friendly (natural) keywords.

I'm looking forward to see the results of this acquisition

You can take what Metaweb is working for in a video below. It's from Metaweb itself.

Wine 1.2 Released

Even though it's one month late, but finally the final Wine 1.2 is released

This is a major release since 1.0 released two years ago. Since it's considered major, there are a lot of changes in this release. They are:

*** Core functionality

- Loading and running 64-bit Windows applications is now supported on
 x86-64 processors (only on Linux at this point).

- There are now two flavors of Wine prefixes, 32-bit and
 64-bit. 32-bit prefixes only support 32-bit applications, while
 64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The
 prefix flavor is set at prefix creation time and cannot be changed
 afterwards, since all the files and registry entries are in
 different locations. Backwards compatibility is ensured by
 considering all prefixes created with older Wine versions to be
 32-bit.

- WoW64 file system redirection is supported now. When running a
 32-bit application in a 64-bit prefix, accesses to the
 window/system32 directory are automatically redirected to
 windows/syswow64.

- WoW64 registry redirection is now supported in 64-bit prefixes. This
 allows both 32-bit and 64-bit applications to set platform-specific
 registry keys without stepping on each other.

- All the 16-bit support code has been moved to a set of independent
 16-bit modules. No 16-bit code is loaded or initialized when running
 a standard Win32 application, unless it starts making 16-bit calls.

- The mount manager now reports the actual UUID for disk devices that
 support it instead of a hard-coded one.

- Symbolic links are now supported in the registry.

- The C runtime libraries msvcr80, msvcr90 and msvcr100 used by recent
 Visual C++ versions are now partially implemented.

- Some functions now use a Microsoft-compatible function prologue when
 building with a recent enough gcc. This allows Steam overlays to
 work.


*** User interface

- There are new icons for all the built-in applications, as well as
 for the standard toolbars and images. The icons are based on the
 Tango set for a nicer integration with the native Unix desktop look.

- Animated cursors can now be loaded, though only the first frame of
 the animation is used as a static cursor.

- The mouse cursor is now updated correctly in applications that
 create windows from different threads, like Internet Explorer.

- The standard print and page setup dialogs are working much better
 now.

- There is now an application wizard control panel to manage installed
 applications.

- Rendering of bi-directional text is now supported reasonably
 well. There is also some support for Arabic text shaping.

- Many features of the RichEdit control are improved, particularly
 support for tables, URL detection, cursor positioning, scrollbar
 management, and support for windowless controls.

- Many common controls work better now, particularly the listview,
 calendar and tab controls.

- There is now a partial implementation of the Microsoft Text Services
 framework, which provides better input method support in modern
 applications.

- There is now a proper user interface for importing, exporting and
 managing cryptographic keys and certificates.

- Wine is now fully translated to French, German, Dutch, Italian,
 Portuguese, Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, and Korean. It
 has partial translations for another twenty languages.


*** Desktop integration

- The XDG standard for application startup notification is now
 implemented.

- The NET_WORKAREA property is now supported to let applications take
 into account the size of the Unix desktop task bars.

- File associations created by a Windows applications are now
 registered with the Unix desktop.

- Application icons are now set with the NET_WM_ICON hint, which
 enables alpha channel transparency under window managers that
 support it.

- Maximizing a window from the Unix window manager is now detected and
 the state is correctly reflected on the Windows application side.

- The XDG desktop screen saver is now launched when a Windows
 application makes a request to start the screen saver.

- Start Menu entries are now properly removed when an application is
 uninstalled.

- Copying and pasting images between Windows and Unix applications
 works more reliably now, and more image formats are supported.

- Launching an external Unix Web browser from a Windows application
 now works correctly.

- MSI files are now associated with Wine to enable launching them
 directly from the desktop.

- The virtual desktop window now switches to full-screen mode when its
 size matches that of the screen.

- The strange window management behavior used by Delphi-generated
 applications is better supported now.


*** Graphics

- Subpixel font rendering is now supported, which greatly improves
 text appearance on LCD screens. The subpixel configuration is
 derived from the system fontconfig and Xft settings.

- Icons with alpha channels are now properly blended in, for a much
 nicer appearance.

- Image lists now properly store the alpha channel of images and use
 it when displaying them.

- The windowscodecs dll has been added, with codecs for the JPEG, GIF,
 PNG, BMP, ICO, and TIFF image formats.

- Many functions are now implemented in GDIPlus. The gdiplus dll is
 now considered good enough to load the built-in version by default.

- Overlays are now supported in DirectDraw.

- Many more capabilities are now supported in the SANE scanner
 backend. This improves scanning support in Acrobat.


*** Audio

- The openal32 dll is now implemented, as a wrapper around the Unix
 OpenAL library.

- There is now an initial implementation of the mmdevapi dll (part of
 the new Vista sound architecture), using OpenAL for sound I/O.

- The msgsm32.acm GSM codec is now supported.

- The ALSA sound driver now works better with PulseAudio's ALSA
 emulation.

- Digital playback of audio CDs is now supported.


*** Internet and networking

- The HTTP protocol implementation has seen many improvements, in
 particular better handling of proxies and redirects, better cookie
 management, support for gzip encoding, fixes for chunked transfer
 mode, support for IPv6 addresses, and better certificate validation
 on secure connections.

- The Gecko HTML engine has been updated to a more recent upstream
 version. Many more HTML objects are now implemented.

- The RPC layer now properly supports server-side authentication and
 impersonation. The COM marshalling/unmarshalling is also more
 compatible. RPC is now supported over the HTTP protocol too.

- There is now an essentially complete implementation of the
 JavaScript language.

- The IRDA network protocol is now supported by the socket layer.

- The inetmib1 dll is now implemented, with support for the standard
 SNMP MIB tables.

- The inetcomm dll now implements the POP3 and SMTP protocols, as well
 as better MIME support.

- Extended mail providers are now better supported, particularly the
 native Outlook provider. Mail attachments are also supported now.

- Many undocumented functions in the shlwapi dll have been implemented
 for improved Internet Explorer support.


*** Direct3D

- FBOs are now used by default for off-screen rendering in Direct3D.

- Backbuffers larger/smaller than their associated window are now
 correctly stretched.

- A large portion of the d3dx9 dlls is now implemented, most notably
 the shader assembler, .x file support, functions for fonts, general
 3D math, mesh handling, and sprites. A start has been made with the
 texture and effect functions.

- Fog handling has improved a lot.

- Various YUV texture formats are now supported.

- wined3d contexts are now managed per-thread, and play nice both with
 other wined3d instances and opengl32 GL contexts. Contexts are
 checked for validity before being used (e.g. if the associated
 window is destroyed.)

- Point sprite handling has improved a lot.

- The shader source is now dumped on GLSL compile/link failures. This
 is mostly to help driver developers, like Mesa, with investigating
 GLSL bugs triggered by Wine.

- The graphics card detection code is improved, and many more graphics
 cards are now recognized.

- User clip planes are now supported in shaders. This allows proper
 water reflections in Half-Life 2.

- There is now an initial implementation of Direct3D 10, including the
 dxgi, d3d10core and d3d10 dlls.  Most of the work so far has gone
 into parsing d3d10 effects and SM4 shaders.

- Shadow samplers are now properly supported. This fixes shadows in
 StarCraft 2.

- There is now a shader based implementation of D3D fixed function
 fragment processing. This avoids some limitations of the previous
 OpenGL fixed function based approach.

- Partial updates of surfaces with compressed formats are now properly
 supported.

- Many new OpenGL extensions are now supported. These include:

  - EXT_provoking_vertex/ARB_provoking_vertex. This allows the
    correct vertex color to be used when flat shading is enabled, and
    helps Civilization IV in particular.

  - EXT_vertex_array_bgra/ARB_vertex_array_bgra. This allows for more
    efficient handling of BGRA (D3DCOLOR) data in the fixed function
    pipeline.

  - EXT_draw_buffers2. This enables independent color write masks
    when multiple (simultaneous) render targets are in use.

  - Various nVidia extensions to ARB vertex/fragment programs. These
    allow SM3 support with the ARB vertex/fragment program shader
    backend.

  - EXT_texture_compression_rgtc. This adds support for the ATI2N
    (also known as 3Dc) compressed texture format.

  - ARB_texture_rg. This allows for more efficient support of the
    R16F, G16R16F, R32F and G32R32F texture formats.

  - ARB_framebuffer_object. This is mostly the same as the existing
    support for EXT_framebuffer_object, but improves rendering with a
    depth/stencil buffer larger than the color buffer(s). It helps
    (among others) Splinter Cell,

  - ARB_sync. This adds support for multi-threaded / cross GL context
    event queries used by Dragon Age: Origins.

  - ARB_half_float_vertex. This adds support for 16-bit floating
    point vertex formats on cards that don't already support
    NV_half_float. It helps Supreme Commander.

- There is now a general framework for supporting variations/quirks in
 GL drivers.


*** Built-in applications

- The Wine debugger now displays a crash dialog to let the user know
 that a crash happened before dumping the backtrace information.

- The Wine debugger now uses the Dwarf exception unwinding data for
 more reliable backtraces.

- The file dialogs in built-in applications are now resizable.

- Regedit can now import from and export to files in Unicode format.

- Wineboot now displays a dialog while creating or updating the prefix
 directory to let the user know that something is happening, since
 the update can take some time, particularly with 64-bit prefixes.

- Text replacement is now implemented in Notepad.

- The print preview feature in Wordpad now works much better.

- Navigation in help files now works better in Winhelp. Many graphical
 glitches have also been fixed.

- The Winecfg dialogs have been tweaked so that the application is
 usable in a 640x480 desktop. The About panel has been redesigned
 with better graphics.

- The command-line parser in cmd.exe is more compatible now, which
 should enable more Windows batch files to execute correctly. There
 is also a regression test suite for it.

- Rpcss now implements a proper RPC endpoint mapper.


*** Build environment

- The Wine IDL compiler can now generate correct code for all the
 standard IDL files, including proper exception handling. A large
 number of COM proxies and servers are now automatically generated
 from their IDL definitions.

- The fake dll placeholders are now built at compile time, instead of
 being generated every time a Wine prefix is created. This makes it
 possible to install a placeholder for every supported dll, which
 should avoid many failures in installers that check dll versions.

- configure now supports the --disable-tests option to prevent
 building the test suite. This allows for faster compile times,
 particularly when bisecting a regression.

- The cross-compiled tests are now built against the Wine import
 libraries instead of the Mingw ones. The latter are not compatible
 enough for our needs.

- winegcc now handles resource files just like normal object files and
 links them into the final binary without requiring special build
 rules.

- winebuild and winegcc now fully support Solaris.

- Wine now builds properly on Cygwin, though some of the resulting
 binaries do not work correctly.

- Makefiles are now created as needed during the build process,
 instead of being all created together at configure time. This makes
 it unnecessary to run 'make depend' in most cases.

- winemaker now has better support for Visual C++ project files.


*** Miscellaneous

- The OLE storage implementation now supports transacted storage, with
 proper commits and rollbacks. This enables support for Microsoft
 Office documents containing macros.

- The MSI installer now supports patches, which enables the
 installation of service packs for many applications. Many more MSI
 standard actions are also supported now.

- The rsaenh dll now supports the SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512
 encryption algorithms, as well as CALG_SSL3_SHAMD5 hashing.

- OLE database objects are now implemented, which fixes the clipart
 functionality in Microsoft Office 2007.

- Copying and pasting OLE objects across applications works better now.

- Support for cryptographic signatures and certificates is improved,
 including support for certificate trust lists.

- The Task Scheduler service is now implemented.


*** Performance

- Bitmap stretching and alpha blending is now done through Xrender
 when possible, which avoids a time-consuming round-trip of the
 bitmap bits from the X server.

- Startup time for MSI installers that contain a large amount of
 strings is much improved.

- Setting the processor affinity for threads or processes is now
 supported, which improves multi-core performance for applications
 that take advantage of it.

- Loading large symbol tables in the Wine debugger is much faster
 now.

- FBO handling has improved significantly. Recently used FBO
 configurations are now cached, which is a major performance
 improvement.

- Loading shader constants is more efficient now. This improves
 performance for (among others) Half-Life 2, Counter Strike: Source,
 and Source Engine games in general.

- The performance of sRGB samples is improved, this particularly helps
 Source Engine games.


*** Platform-specific changes

- Joysticks POV switch and axis remapping are now better supported on
 Linux. Joysticks are now supported on Mac OS X too.

- The various DVD I/O controls are now implemented on Mac OS X.

- The network routing and statistics functions in iphlpapi are now
 implemented on Solaris and FreeBSD.

- Mach-O debugging symbols (the format used by Mac OS X) are now
 supported in the debugger.

- Event ports are now used on Solaris for improved wineserver
 performance.


*** New library dependencies

- The libgnutls library is now used for encryption and certificate
 validation in secur32.

- The libgsm library is now used for the GSM codec support.

- The libmpg123 library is now used for mp3 decoding (except on Mac OS
 X where CoreAudio functions are used instead).

- The libopenal library is now used for the openal32 dll
 implementation, as well as for the mmdevapi dll (Vista sound
 support).

- The libtiff library is now used for TIFF image decoding in the
 windowscodecs dll.

- The libv4l1 library is now used for video capture in DirectShow.


*** Backwards compatibility

- The wineshelllink helper script has been removed. All the menu and
 desktop integration is now handled by winemenubuilder.

- The deprecated wineprefixcreate script has been removed. Wine prefix
 directories are created automatically as needed.

- Old LinuxThreads setups are no longer supported. Wine now requires
 the modern NPTL threading that has been standard on Linux for many
 years now.

- The PBuffer option for off-screen rendering has been removed from
 Direct3D. This code was unmaintained, and offered little advantage
 over the "fbo" or "backbuffer" modes.

Singapore Flood

I found this video on my Echofon, it's very hilarious. It's talking about the flood that attacked Singapore few weeks ago. Mr Brown make a new lyrics based on FIFA's World Cup song and release it as a new The Wave Song

OpenSUSE 11.3 Released

OpenSUSE 11.3, the latest release of OpenSUSE has been released few hours ago and the DVD ISOs for i586 and x86_64 architecture are ready to be downloaded from UKDW ISO Server. It doesn't provide the rest of the ISOs, since these two are the main installation ISO needed for a full installation of OpenSUSE 11.3.

For quick highlight of this release, please visit product highlight. Enjoy the release

World Cup 2014 Logo

2010 World Cup in South Africa is now over with Spain as the champion, and FIFA has announced long before that the next FIFA World Cup will be held in Brasil. Some work has started to appear, such as the logo for the event.

I searched the Internet and here's the logo on the left side (i'm not sure it's final or not, but some says it's the final logo).

i think the original one is that there are three hands (probably to represents the Champion, runner up, and third place) which holds the 2014 trophy (the overall shape of the logo is almost like the World Cup trophy, don't you think?)

Don't you think it's kinda funny? It's almost the same as (doh) emoticon in Plurk

Back from River Hill

I'm back from River Hill, nice place where i spent one night there with my colleagues for faculty meeting. It was a nice place and we took some pictures where you can see it on the Facebook.

I was kinda feel dizzy on my way to go home, because i was sitting at the back of the bus, so i feel like i wanted to puke but unfortunately i didn't have to.

Right now, i wanted to take some rest first, as i have to prepare for tomorrow's class also. It's kinda a busy day here

Leaving Today

I will be leaving to Tawangmangu for two days (today and tomorrow) for work (meeting actually) and i don't know whether there will be Internet connection there, but i hope there is so that i can update this blog and also reply all of your incoming mail.

I really would like to post about the real venue here on Tawangmangu as you already looked at the site venue taken from a blog hosted on Blogspot on my previous post. I just want to make sure it's the same venue

Despicable Me

I have just returned from Empire XXI watching Despicable Me in 3D with my girlfriend and her niece. It was a very funny movie and it has a fascinating 3D effects, unlike Toy Story 3 which lacked of the 3D effects. Even though i'm actually very tired today, because i have three classes today and i lack of sleep due to watched the World Cup final between Spain and Dutch, i think it's worthed to see this movie today as i have to leave to Tawangmangu tomorrow.

This movie is all about a villain whose name is Gru and he wanted to become the world's best villain by stealing the moon and he met a rival called Vector who turned out to be the son of the bank owner in which Gru is trying to loan some money from. At the end, there were three children who could turned Gru's life into a good parents for them (they were orphaned kids who are being adopted by Gru). It's very touching and funny movie. I would recommend you to see this movie in 3D. Believe me, it's worthed to pay for the price in 3D rather than in normal mode.

The 3D effect is so real in this movie. I could see the ticket flying towards me when Gru was in the moon. I'm very pleased with the movie, since i was kinda disappointed with Toy Story 3. It supposed to give first experience, but it turned out to be very disappointing for most of the viewers i guess.

I would give this movie 9.5 out of 10

River Hill

On Tuesday, i will be leaving out of town to have a faculty meeting at River Hill. The venue is still considered new, so it will be our first trip there. They have a blog at Blogspot which shows some venues available on their place. It's sound fun

Below are some screenshots of the River Hill

Mandriva 2010 Spring Released

Today, Mandriva has announced the availability of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. It's like a major updates to the original Mandriva Linux 2010 release by the end of last year. As usuall, Mandriva comes with lots of goodies that has been cooked in the cooker tree while being developed. Here are some highlights of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring:

• a complete, quick-to-install system, comprising all the necessary drivers ;

• 'Smart Desktop', a unique technology, which offers dynamic access to all files by labelling them and grading photos, documents, emails and videos whilst safeguarding personal data through a customised approach. Ginkgo, the new graphical interface for managing data semantics, can create and explore the links between their personal data such as mails, documents, files, Web pages;

• Mandriva Directory Server (MDS), an easy-to-use LDAP directory management solution;

• tools to easily secure the system, parental control is easier than ever and can control the web sites and applications used by children ;
  compatibility with the latest (and oldest) hardware platforms, including netbooks ;
  a panel of applications embracing Office, varied educational software, multimedia …;

• numerous educational and scientific applications such as: Axiom (scientific computing), Jmol (a tool for visualizing molecules), Salome (a generic platform for pre- and post-processing for numerical simulation) ;

• the latest versions of leading Open Source applications: KDE 4.4.3, GNOME 2.30.1, Firefox 3.6.6, Xorg Server 1.7.7 ;
  a DVD drive ;
• a wide range of complementary applications in the Powerpack version: audio and video codecs, display with VMware, Adobe suite of drives ...

Very interesting huh?

Actually Mandriva is my first Linux distribution that has been installed on my computer back in 2002. I liked this distribution as it gives me very good experience of using Linux at that time. Everything goes very smooth which encourages me to study more about Linux and how it works back then. I even got a MVP access as i worked through Mandriva translations project to Indonesia until 2005. My first post on this blog was actually in 2004 and it was talking about Mandrake Linux 10.1 Beta 1.

Even though i switched to Slackware since 2005, i still admire how good Mandriva is for new Linux users. One of my student who took my operating system class installed previous Mandriva release and i asked his opinion about this distribution. He said it is a great one as every hardware he has are detected automatically by Mandriva even though it's not the latest version available since this version comes up today.

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring is available in three editions:

- Powerpack (the commercial edition, including exclusive commercial software, support, and services),

- One (a live CD which can also be installed to the system permanently) and,

- Free (an edition which contains only free / open source software).

One interesting news is that Mandriva only offer Torrents on his official pages, even though the ISOs are now spreading to public through public mirrors. I'm in a process of downloading some of the ISOs (yes, i'm not going to mirror all of the ISOs) into UKDW's ISO Server for faster local access in my campus.

Update (9:46 AM): The Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring ISO in form of CD and DVD for i586 are ready to be downloaded from the ISO Server above. The x86_64 ISO is still on progress and it will be ready in less than 3 hours. Please note that i will only provide the main ISOs and not all of the region-related ISOs.

Update (11 AM): The last remaining ISO (x86_64) is now ready for public consumption. Enjoy

The lists of ISOs that we will provide are:
Spring Dual (700 MB) MD5SUM
Spring i586 (4,3 GB) MD5SUM
Spring x86_64 (4,4 GB) MD5SUM

F-Secure Anti-Theft for Mobile

Yesterday, i installed F-Secure Anti-Theft for Mobil application using Nokia Ovi on my E71. I found this application interesting after reading it's description:

With F-Secure Anti-Theft for Mobile you can be sure that your personal and confidential information won ’t be misused by anyone. If you suspect your phone is missing you can remotely lock it or wipe the data so that your private text messages or pictures don’t end up in the wrong hands. You can also locate your phone or the person holding it remotely.

The application is free of charge if you only use the anti-theft feature, but if you wanted an anti-virus and firewall protection, you will have to buy the full version of mobile security which has 12-24 months period. Your bill will be charged using credit card.

Today, i tried to test this application by sending a text message using the format #LOCATE#<security_code>. This is the format that should be used to locate our phone in case it's being stolen by other people. In a few minutes, it will reply with a text message with an URL of Google Maps which spotted our mobile phone location. Very cool isn't it?

In case you want to lock your device remotely, use this format: #LOCK#<security_code> and if you want to wipe your data (in case you have sensitive data that you don't want other people to find out), use this format: #WIPE#<security_code>.

Here's a video on YouTube to show you how to find your stolen phone

Mid Test

Today is the last day before the students will face mid test next week. Actually there's still Monday, because the test will be conducted on Tuesday, but i will use Monday to do a full review of the materials so that they will be prepared for the exams.

It surely gives us pressures, both to the lecturers and also to the students because we have to do a daily classes and in one week we should have an exam. What's next is that we will go to continue our classes in Thursday and then by the end of next week, we should have our final test and in the next few days, a new semester will begin

Luckily, i have prepare all the questions for the mid test and final exams. All i need is to review them and send them to be printed

Another Member Leaving

One of our members is now leaving back to where they live currently. Andre is the guy. He's on his way back to US after staying in Indonesia for three weeks. It's been a great day with him around. We enjoyed how we laughed and play together.

Have a safe trip and enjoy your flight

PS: don't forget to make a new Facebook account when you got there

Farewell Party

Today is our last day with Mark and Andre as they are leaving back to their cities. Mark has already left to Jakarta at 7 PM tonight and Andre will go back to the states tomorrow morning. We couldn't have any farewell party together as Andre was having dinner with his family, so we could do small feast with Mark in Babarsari. We ate Nasi Uduk Pak Dimas. It was very delicious and also considered very cheap

We shall reunite again next year where Andre, Yohan, and hopefully all of our members could go back to Jogja in the same time and we would have a reunion in Kaliurang just like in the past