Google Earth 6

I didn't read any news about Google Earth 6 being released, but this morning, i accidentally visited Google Earth's website and downloaded the latest version Google Earth 6. I tried to install it on my old laptop running Ubuntu 10.10, but it failed.

I decided to build the .deb package using another package which was meant to build Google Earth. Unfortunately, even after i build the package, it would still failed. Luckily the solution is already in Launchpad. Another Ubuntu users responded and the solution is to install lsb-core first and then it would be fine. It took less than 24 hours to get the solutions

I haven't tried the solution yet, since Ubuntu is not my primary operating system. I only boot to Ubuntu when i have some spare time to play with old laptop. My primary operating system is Slackware

Last Week

This week will be the last week of this semester and starting next week, the students will face the final exam which will be held until third week in December before they can celebrate Christmas and end of year holidays. They will come back for the next semester in mid January.

Don't forget to keep studying for your exams and i wish for your success in your final exams

This morning, i lead a small workshop for Introduction to Internet for teachers in Bopkri Dua. It was a fun session and i enjoyed with as much as the participant. I'm looking forward for the next workshop, hopefully related with Linux and / or Open Source application

OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 RC 7

I don't know what takes Oracle so long to release the next major release of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0, but they have released their seventh RC release by now and the Release Notes is also available if you are curious about what will be included in the next OpenOffice.org 3.3.0.

This will be the first release of OpenOffice.org after some of their developers joined TDF and contribute to make LibreOffice better.

Super Berba

MU has just won a match with a big score today. It's like when MU crushed AS Roma in Champion League few years ago. It's 7-1 and Berbatov took five of them while Nani and Park Ji Sung got the rest of the goal. Super BERBA

It's a great match by MU and now they are in top of the league, waiting for Chelsea to play their game tomorrow. I hope they will slip and MU will take the top position in EPL for this week (and hopefully until the end of this season)

Here's the score sheet

GTK+3 vs HTML 5

The next GTK+3 will support HTML 5 and that means you can run GTK+3 apps in your browser. Very cool indeed. It has been explained on this blog post and you can see the video demonstrations below

For now, it only supports Firefox 4.0 (Beta), but it will work on any browser with websockets in the future.

Gtk3 vs HTML5 from Alexander Larsson on Vimeo.

KDE 4.6 Beta 1

The development release of the future KDE 4.6 has arrived with Beta 1 release just now. This brings a new excitement towards developers around the world, especially when some people are celebrating Thanksgiving holiday.

The beta release will be a good milestone for developers creating KDE apps to prepare themselves before the final version of KDE 4.6 will be released in January 2011 (perfect timing for a new year celebration).

KDE 4.6 will be another release of KDE which tries to move away from HAL and will communicate directly with udev, upower, and udisk. This will be a great achievement as more and more application started to move away from HAL, for example XOrg.

I'm not sure whether this release will be included in the next Slackware release (13.2), but i think Eric will have it ready in KTown in case it's not included in Slackware 13.2.

NTFS-3G Performance

For those who wanted to read/write data from/to NTFS partition from Linux, the best option you can get is by using NTFS-3G, developed by Tuxera. It has community edition which is free to use for public.

So far, i don't have any problem using it. I can read my data or update my data in Windows partition from Linux without any problem at all. The problem started to rise when i used a virtual machine which i placed in Windows partition due to bigger free space. Sometimes, it caused a bad performance reduction until i can't do anything. The system seems to locked up and when i saw the process CPU usage, it rise up to 100%, which means it took all of my CPU only for ntfs-3g process. This is the reason why it would locked up my system.

I'm hoping that future release of NTFS-3G will have a fix for this problem.

Smashing Book 2 is on the way

For your who likes reading about Web development, you mustn't miss the next Smashing Book 2 which will be launched in pre-order starting next January and it will be delivered starting February 2011.

Like in the previous original Smashing Book, this book is written by many people who are working in web design industry and they will enlighten you with the best material about Web.

I have bought the first edition and i'm looking forward for the second book of Smashing Book. It will cost $29.90 and will contain 360 pages long with hard package that covers it. I really like the design of this book.

This book is really perfect for reading. I would recommend you to buy it. Get the first edition first if you don't believe me.

Analyze Before Making Decision

I gave an assignment last week and i asked the students to do early survey on unit testing tools before they decide what to pick. I gave some restrictions that only one tool is allowed to be used in the same class, meaning that each group will have to pick a unique tool for their assignment.

I gave two weeks for the duration of the assignment and guess what? In less than 24 hours, i already got many submission about the tool they wanted to use. I wonder, do they really analyze the tool first? Do they read the documentation included? I though they did, but just few days before the deadline, i realized that my assumption was wrong. They didn't analyze it thoroughly. They finally came to me to ask for another tool due to problems that they should realize before picking up the tools.

Moral story of this: analyze things before making a decision, mostly when it's related to important decision. Take some time to see all possible conditions, including advantages/disadvantages. Hopefully you will not regret what you decide later on.

New phpBB Release 3.0.8

This morning, i also got a surprise from phpBB announcement mailing list saying that there is a new phpBB release which is a maintenance update for the previous 3.0.7-PL1, but it also contains one security fix which relates to BBCodes. The Changelog will list all changes (it contains a number of bug fixes and also improvements since last release) and it's recommended to be read before upgrading.

When i got this announcement, i grab the updated package and start upgrading Indonesian Linux Forum at 5.45 AM in the morning and the process was completed at 6.30 AM. I think not many people have accessed the board at that time, so 30 minutes of downtime will not affect too many people

Anyway, the forum is now back serving all of you and have a nice discussion on the forum

Updating LinuxMint Mirrors

I have missed LinuxMint 10 release date . Even though the repository site is ready to serve Linux Mint 10, but i haven't downloaded the ISOs yet, since i don't read the news when it's released back to it's release date. My apologize for that and i'm downloading the ISOs today. It will be finished probably at noon or evening, so you can start enjoying Linux Mint 10 codename Julia as soon as possible.

I have updated the instructions on the main page of the repository to reflect updates to Linux Mint updated repository. So far, i have only added the Main repository, since there's no KDE/LXDE, and other Linux Mint 10 releases. When they are released, i will update the main page again.

UKDW Nutz! 3.0

Finally, the third Nutz event has been held today in UKDW. This event was postponed due to Merapi eruption, but we decided to held it today and luckily the participant didn't drop too much (even though there were some participant who couldn't attend due to other reason, such as substitute classes).

Some member of Ubuntu Jogja and BlankOn developers were joining us as the speaker and it was a great event. We are planning to held next Nutz event with the Ubuntu Release Party next year on October. On that event, we would like to collaborate with other Linux communities and we would like to see your participations on that event. The format will be like Install Fezt, so you can bring your laptop and you can participate in Linux installation event (most likely users would like to try dual-booting Windows/Linux on their laptops).

Thanks to all of the crew that participate on this event and we are looking forward for next year event in UKDW

Watching Harry Potter 7

It's finally here, Harry Potter 7 Part 1 The Deathly Hallows is premiere today in Indonesia and i have bought the ticket for next Monday. Why Monday? Because it's cheaper to watch in Monday rather in Friday or in weekend (Saturday and Sunday). Some of my colleagues and students have watched this movie today and a lot of people have been very eager to watch this movie as some people said this is one of the best HP movies ever. It's so dramatic, funny, but as always in two part movies, the ending is far from over.

The second part will be released in May 2011, so it's about seven months after the first part is played.

GNOME 2.32.1 to be Last Release of GNOME 2.x

GNOME 2.32.1 has been released today by Luca Ferretti and it will be the last release of GNOME 2.x series as the development is now focusing on 3.0 release which should be out next year. I have been using GNOME in Ubuntu 10.10 and also in Fedora 14 on my virtual machine and so far, it has been a great release.

I can't wait for the next GNOME 3.0 even though i still opted to pick KDE if i have to choose KDE/GNOME as my favorite window manager

Since it's only a maintenance version, no new features are introduced in this release. Only bug fixes and translations updates are included.

UKDW Nutz Update

After being postponed due to Merapi eruption, finally we decided that UKDW Nutz! will be held next Saturday (November 20) in UKDW. I have been notified by the officials and we think the condition in Jogja is getting better and better and it's stable enough to held this event.

If you are located in Jogja and don't have any plan for this weekend, why don't you join us at UKDW and we can share together about Linux.

Echofon Support Linux Again

Few months ago (on August precisely), Echofon stopped support for Linux systems and some people (including me) was confused with this action and decided to find another Twitter client (which makes me turn to Choqok). It was good application and it also supports Identi.Ca account as well, so i can use it for two accounts in the same time.

This morning, i saw a changelog in Echofon for Firefox and it says thet they have supported back Linux on the latest release and also add support for the next Firefox 4 (which is still in Beta currently). This is a wonderful news and i'm installing it again, but i will not leave Choqok, since it's the default on my desktop at home and i'm happy with it since they released 1.0.0 Beta 4 which fixed the kwallet bug. I will install Echofon on my other machines, since it's integrated with Firefox, so i can check my Twitter while browsing the web using Firefox.

Thank you Echofon for bringing Linux support back to Echofon

New XOrg

In the next few days, LQ forum will be busy with lots of questions regarding new HAL-free XOrg which has been published on -Current updates today. Upgrading to newer XOrg is always exciting and also frustrating. You might end up with a broken X Server (i experienced this before and it forced me to keep XOrg packages out of the upgrade until i'm sure that everything will be OK and luckily, it was fine upgrade) or you can encounter some problems with graphics.

As in my case, i don't have any problem at all with the new XOrg. The upgrade process was smooth and every system i have are working normally up to now. I had a friend who have just had a problem with his Radeon VGA card. I'm not an experienced users, so i don't have any clue for it as for now. I hope his problem can be solved ASAP.

Even though it's challenging, i still think that -Current is so exciting. All the fun when those packages gets upgraded and new environment should be tested. This is all that makes playing with -Current is so fun.

Human Power

Once again, China has showed to the world that human power is beyond technology in the Asian Games opening ceremony in Guangzhou. I have just finished watching the event and it's extraordinary. More than thousands of people involved in the making of this event and what amazed me is the idea of all those spectacular show.

As always, China firstly showed the big and attractive fireworks and the followed with some water show which ressembles the city of water, Guangzhou, where this Asian Games is held. They also showed some videos about Shanghai Expo Center which has just come to an end by the end of last month and of course the new TV Tower in Shanghai was also shown (I have been there when i went to Shanghai last month).

Congratulations to China who have just done a marvelous job on holding this Asian Games and also Shanghai Expo which i think will be the biggest achievement of China this year. I'm looking forward to see your next achievement next year

Asian Games

After becoming a host for Olympic in 2008, China will host another sports event called Asian Games and today is the opening day. As always, China always presents a nice opening for everyone to enjoy. They would create such a splendid event just like what they did in the Bird Nest stadium two years ago. The Olympic opening was held in Beijing at that time, but for this Asian games, it will be held in Guangzhou.

For now, i'm downloading it from YouTube. Visit this page if you wanted to view them all (they have 11 parts).

From Garage to Showroom

In this article (English translation via Google Translate), it's said that most of family business in Indonesia were started from garage. Just name a few successfull companies, such as PT Kalbe Farma Tbk and PT Mustika Ratu Tbk. You can't imagine that they started the business from such a small and humble space, but they can manage it into a giant player in Indonesian market (some of them have already started to export their products to other countries).

Some big IT companies also were started by Garage. Microsoft and Apple was started at their own garage. Have a look on Pirates of Silicon Valley to see the rivalry of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs since they still in young age.

Here's another successful business that also started from garage: Garagedelparco. It's a buy/sell business focusing on car transactions. It started in 1978 in Valparaiso, but it has been revamped to the new modern compro auto usate, vendita auto usate, and auto usate milano business. They work in team to make sure that all of their clients gets what they wanted.

They have a full team composed of tester, consultant, trainer, support, and also sales which will help you to get the best options for what you need. Don't worry about the risk of getting a scam. They will ensure that what you get is what you expected in the beginning of the deal. They have been working in quality since 1978 and they provide you with many options about warranty that you can pick. If you need proof that they are professional, check their testimonial page. Those were people who have used their service before.

What i like from this site is that they give spesific information about the cars, such as car spesifications, installation options, and conditions of the car. Some sites that i visited only listed some basic information without giving any detail about other information that i think it's important for buyers to understand before they decided to buy the car. Here's an example of information about Audi S6 5.2 V10 QUATTRO AVANT TIPTRONIC.

Testing Fedora 14

Today, i installed Fedora 14 on my laptop under virtual machine (i used VMWare). I downloaded DVD version which has 3.3 GB of size and the installation took some time to complete. So far, Slackware is still the fastest one with less than 10 minutes to install and you can have a lot of software installed by default.

My first impression with Fedora is that it similar to Ubuntu in many ways, such as the default package selection (probably because i picked the Graphical Desktop option at installation phase. It would be different if i choose a developer option where it will install so many packages required for developers).

The first thing i do is to update the YUM repository and try to download all the updates on my campus repository. It has been finished for few days ago, so it's ready to be tested. At first, it failed to get the repodata files, and i tried to switch mirrors, but the real culprit is that it hasn't got any IP address. I forgot to run dhclient to get an IP Address. This is now on progress and i will have an updated Fedora later on.

So far, i'm still having a fun time with Fedora 14, because it shares most of the principal in Ubuntu. But still my favourite Linux distribution goes to Slackware.

Opera 11 is Coming

Opera is now working to make another big release, which will be Opera 11. There has been a beta release of Opera 11 Build 1060 and i'm pretty sure that it will be released this year. Their latest version is 10.63 and it's has been quite mature to compete with others like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (i always left IE behind).

I still don't see any release notes on the beta version of Opera, but i think it will be another big release by Opera team. I do hope they will also release an update for Opera Mini. It has been some time since they release an update for the product.

Back to Activities

After all activities has been stopped due to Merapi eruption since last Friday, tomorrow, all students and employees on my campus will go back to the normal activities. Even though we didn't predict that the situation in Jogja will become better tomorrow, but the estimation to come back to normal activities by tomorrow was a correct decision. We all hoped that the situation will come back to normal, but we are still unsure about that, since it's the nature and we can't negotiate with them.

Anyways, it's good to be back to normal activities. Some students might still be at their house because their parents forbid them to go back to Jogja for the meantime, but i think it's normal for parents to do that because they care for their son/daughter's safety.

Getting Better

Even though the Eruption hasn't stopped completely, i think the condition is getting better after the last big eruption few days ago. Ashes still covering most of Jogja and Magelang areas while affecting several others as well, but it's less than before. I can see it from my house's area. In the past, i had to work hard to clean up those ashes, but lately, only little efforts has to be made to clear all those ashes.

Meanwhile, there was an earthquake which has a magnitude of 5.6 that happened this evening. It lasted for about 20s and i think a lot of people were surprised about it, but luckily it doesn't create additional casualities. Probably it's the effect of Merapi eruption.

Be Careful With Words

Be careful with what you said. Other people might dislike what comes out of your mouth, especially when it's not based on evidence and only based on your personal judgement. I think Fenny Rose was the headline as of yesterday because of what she said in one of her program in RCTI, SILET.

She said something that caused people in Jogjakarta and probably also in other cities were so angry because it could cause more trauma to people who suffered from the Merapi eruption. She also mentioned that there will be a huge explosion without any hard evidence. Even the officials in Jogja never mentioned something like that before. How come she who doesn't know anything about the condition said something like that

After the show, many people posted so many bad comments on the TV station saying that they should apologize and the program should be suspended due to this action.

I hope Fenny and also the crew must learn from this and please don't play with people who have suffered. They do need information, but not frightening information just like what you have shown yesterday. Give them a good information and they will be pleased with it.
Don't play fire, especially when it's related to Merapi

Salute to Volunteers

During the Merapi tragedy, many volunteers are helping and most of them are from students who many college/campus in Jogja. They are working together to provide shelters and consumptions demand needed by people whom was evacuated during Merapi eruption which caused them to abandon their houses.

Even though it's just a voluntarily actions, but what they did up to now must be given an appraisal. They didn't do it for money (some of them have to spend money on their own to help others) or fame (no one list all of the volunteers), but they do it because they wanted to help each others.

Salute to them Keep up the good work

UKDW Nutz Postponed

We are supposed to held UKDW Nutz today, but since the latest condition in Merapi is not so good, we decided to postpone the event until further notice. For those who have planned to go to the event, please stay tune for information on this blog and also on other media.

Our campus is now being used for temporary shelter for evacuation process and all activities are off until next Wednesday (which can be extended if the situation persists).

This is something beyond our control and we don't know when will this tragedy is over.

Apache Will be Much More Speedy

After releasing page speed extension for Firefox and also WebP Project, Google is now releasing a new project called mod_pagespeed which can be used to fasten Apache's load time, thus improving overall performance. This will boost Apache's usage among developers and also system administrators in the future.

What's good about this module is that it works side by side with other developed Apache modules, such as mod_gzip and mod_deflate, so no overlap between them. This module will try to improve those module by running some filters which can be seen here.

I hope that these new features can be integrated as core modules in Apache's development tree, so that future Apache release will have this module included by default. At that time, many people will love Apache more

Fedora 14 ISOs

I have downloaded some of Fedora 14 ISOs and they are accessible from this URL: http://iso.ukdw.ac.id/fedora/. In this directory, you will find two new directories, called 14 and 14_64. As you can guess, 14_64 belongs to 64 bits system (x86_64).

Inside these directories, you will find the DVD ISOs and also KDE and GNOME Live CD ISOs. I decided not to download the other version of SPIN since it's not a common release. CD version will be coming up soon, but for now, enjoy the DVD version of Fedora 14

Updates (5 Nov 2010): All of Fedora ISOs are already completed. We have CD/DVD version with 32/64 bit systems. About the Fedora 14 repository, it's still on progress. Be patient as this is quite big with over 20000 packages to be synced

Massive Linux Kernel Benchmarking

Phoronix has finished doing a massive Linux Kernel benchmarking. It tried to benchmark since Linux Kernel 2.6.12, which is five years old and up to unreleased version of Linux Kernel 2.6.37 which has just entered stabilization phase after Linus released rc1 which also ends the merge window phase. In total, they tested around 26 Linux Kernel using several distros. Check the report on Phoronix.

I kinda dissapointed with the results, since in the last few release, there has been a major regression which reduced the Linux Kernel performance according to the benchmarking. I hope with further release, the performance will come back to normal again. People is not always for new features, but also increased performance as well

Fedora 14 Released

After being delayed for some time, finally the official release of Fedora 14 is now released to public. Right now, you will not be able to get it from second level mirror as the images are still mirroring, but you can download them from the FedoraProject and they will redirect you to the repository that is already ready to serve you.

Fedora is one of the most popular Linux distribution because of it's solid release and this has been a tradition since Red Hat era. At that time, the majority of Linux users would simply choose Red Hat instead of others, but since it has been replaced by Fedora, they just simply migrate to Fedora which inherits the tradition from Red Hat. You can see all of Fedora's new features on this page.

Congratulations to Fedora community on this great release

Merapi Erupted

Finally, Merapi mountain has started to erupt starting around 8 PM tonight. I hope this tragedy will come to an end as soon as possible. We should focus on rebuilding areas destroyed as soon as possible so that people can have their shelters back.

If you want to take a look on the latest condition about Merapi in JPEG format, please visit this page. If you want to find out the latest condition via on-air radio, visit this page.

No 1 Supercomputer

It's been some time since there is a change in the first rank of super computer list on TOP 500, but i think on November, there will be a new champion, called Tianhe-1, a supercomputer from China that will surpass Cray XT5 Jaguar, the current champion. To do this, the Tianhe-1A system covers a square kilometer, weights in at 155-tons and uses 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. It will have 98304 GB of RAM (around 96 TB). Can you imagine how much data can be saved without using any SWAP partition?

I think, with the big amount of funding for R&D, we will see many supercomputer from China will be on the TOP 500 list in the future.

One more thing, it runs on Linux