Enjoying Last Day in 2010

Today is the last day in 2010 and i hope we all can treasure this moment together as 2010 may have bring so many memories to us. We will think 2010 as our past history tomorrow and begin our journey in 2011 where there will be new challenges and opportunities lies beyond us.

At last, i want to say Happy New Year 2011 in advance to all of my blog readers:























Image taken from http://thephotographer4you.com/

Linux Migration

Sometimes, people is confused when is the right time to switch to Linux. At the end, they postponed the idea and it vanished as time flows.

PCWorld has posted an article called How You Know When It's Time to Switch to Linux. I think this article is worth to read for those who already have a plan to migrate to Linux recently. If you experienced about 3/5 reasons, then i guess it's really the time to switch to Linux.

Also, don't forget to read Top 5 Mistakes Made by Linux First-Timers. It really makes sense to have this mistakes at your early migration phases, but you should be prepared for that. This article will give you a hint about it. Try to avoid it and i believe the migration will succeed.

Russia Will Migrate to Open Source

Russia has made a big step after Prime Minister Vladimir Puttin has ordered government agencies there to migrate to open-source software by 2015. It will start by dropping Microsoft products and replacing it with a national open source operating system based on Linux. They will also start to use Open Source application on every federal agency.

By migrating to Open Source completely, Russia will have a big saving for their budget because it will free them for paying the licenses in every Microsoft products they bought.

How about Indonesia?

HSDS Ep 22 is Coming

This morning i browsed HSDS page again and i saw in the right column that the team are working on episode 23 and 24 of HSDS along with other project they are working right now. That means that HSDS ep 22 will be released soon

I contacted Zilly and she told me that indeed it will be released soon and she will send the link to me when it's ready. Big thanks to Zilly and H&E team for speeding up the work in HSDS project

Oh yeah, today i met another H&E member, TO (TubeObsessed). She is the editor in H&E team and we have a long discussion about Chinese/Korean/Taiwanese dramas on the Chatroll

New Plurk Hidden Emoticons

Well well, it seems that there are more hidden emoticons after Christmas day. I have updated the Yahoo/Plurk emoticons for Blogger script to add 7 more Plurk emoticons and they are :



More emoticons will be added whenever they are available. As usual, you can grab the latest code here and update your script on your browser.

Christmas Gift From H&E

Today i got a nice Christmas Gift from H&E (Heaven & Earth). What is H&E? It's an international fansubbing group who translate some Asian movies (Korean and Chinese) into English language and distribute them for their fans around the world.

Last November, i won one of their member's trick and treat quiz along with another contender, but it was expired since one month has passed and no gift were given. No problem for me as it was a very fun quiz and i enjoyed it so much, even though i never dreamt to win the quiz. I actually didn't get the correct answer, but Zilly still gives me the honor to become the VIP list.

So, what's the gift anyway? Well, it's not really an item, but a virtual item. It's a link to the latest H&E's latest release of Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre (episode 21). Why is it called a gift? Well, because i got it ahead before public link is posted in the future. Furthermore, i got it personally from Zilly who received my Christmas greetings via email. Thanks Zilly

I also realized that they are so friendly to their fans. I joined their chatroll and we had a very nice talk session with some of their regular members, like Zilly, Soysuva, and Sophia. Guess what? Most of them never met face in face to each other as well as they live in different countries . That kinda shocked me for a while, since i thought that fansub group were a local group that share the same interest. Only some of them have met each other in the past.

Oh well, thanks to Zilly, Soysuva, and Sophia for the nice chat session and H&E team for the HSDS early release.

I'm waiting for the next release of HSDS

Mandriva 2010.2 Released

Although it has been nearing 2011 and it's common for Mandriva to release their flagship product few months ahead, it doesn't mean that they abandon the 2010 release. They have just released a significant update to their Mandriva 2010 Spring release by releasing Mandriva 2010.2.

This update so many improvements that has been released on 2010, such as GNOME 2.30, KDE 4.4.3, and many more. There are 2,522 RPM packages that were officially updated and supported since the 2010.1 release.Since the update is so big, people who have just installed Mandriva 2010 Spring will have to download a massive updates. So that's why they decided to release 2010.2. People will have the latest version of Mandriva which is more up to date and secure by default.

For Indonesian mirror, i have downloaded the ISOs in UKDW ISO Server. It only contain DVD version of the free Mandriva version available for both 32/64 bit systems.

Family Reunion

As always, my family always held a family reunion every year. We usually held this on Christmas day because it's the day where most of our family members can join us back in Jogja. This year, everyone came back, except for my cousin who lived in Australia and also his brother who lives in Makassar right now.

We had lunch together at Mak Engking and then we watched Gulliver's Travel, a very funny story and then at the end of the day, we had dinner at Ikan Bakar Cianjur. It's a very pleasant day for all of us

Open Source Releases Nearing Christmas

There has been so many new Open Source releases nearing Christmas day. Let's just say it's a Christmas gift from them
Let's list some of them which are interesting for me:

• MySQL 5.5
  
• Oracle Virtual Box 4.0
• Mandriva 2010.2
• KDE 4.6 RC 1
• Digikam 1.7.0
• OpenSuSE 11.4 Milestone 5
• XOrg 7.6
• Wine 1.3.10
  

Do you have any interesting releases ? List them on comment area and i will add it if it's interesting enough

Blogger Emoticons Script Updated

I have updated my Yahoo/Plurk Emoticons for Blogger to add more Plurk hidden emoticons. In total, there are six new hidden emoticons. They are


Grab the script at it's usual place in Box.net. Don't forget that this script requires Greasemonkey extension for Firefox and it will only work if you use the old editor in Blogger. It doesn't work in newer editor and i don't have plan to support the new one.

Page Rank Back to 6

In the past, this blog has a page rank of 6 and then dropped to 5 due to changes in Google's Page Rank algorithm in 2007 and then it goes back to 6 again in 2008 and since 2008, it dropped to 3 (i don't know why). I didn't do something about it. I just keep posting and posting and that's it.

This morning, i found out that my blog's page rank is now 6 again Please don't ask me on how to achieve this, as the only thing i do to maintain this blog is by updating it regularly (i try to push myself to write daily). One thing i note is that there are some website that aggregate my blog and created a backlink to my blog which should increase incoming link from outside site. I believe that will increase my page rank as well.

Restoring Windows 7 Bootloader

One of my student came to my office this afternoon to ask me about restoring Windows bootloader on his friend's laptop. The laptop was dual-booted with Ubuntu and then the disaster came when he removed Ubuntu's partition without restoring the bootloader to Windows first. Since GRUB is unable to detect Linux's partition, it ended with a broken system.

I told him that the command i knew to restore Windows' bootloader is fdisk /mbr. He then inserted Windows 7 installation disk and ran the rescue command prompt, but i couldn't find it on where it supposed to be. I googled a bit and found out that the tool which does the same job has been changed into BootRec (probably Boot Recovery). It has several options, but the parameter i need to do the job is BootRec /FixMbr. After i execute this command, i restarted and voila.... it booted right to Windows 7 again

This command works on Windows Vista/7 and onwards

Secunia PSI 2.0 Released

After having quite a success story with Secunia PSI 1.0, Secunia is working on Secunia 2.0 and finally it has been released today. It brings you more sophisticated tool to ensure your computer is safe by any possible threat by giving you an automatic update feature, which will try to download the solution for every possible threat and you only need to confirm it to install the patch and your problem will be solved in less time.

I have been using Secunia 2.0 Beta to test it and so far, it's working great on my computer. I would highly recommend it to you if you are so concern of your computer's safety.

Here are the highlights of the Secunia 2.0:

• Auto Updating of third party programs
• New user interface
• Secunia PSI API for developers
• Integration with the Secunia CSI

For the detailed changes in Secunia PSI, please refer to their ChangeLog

One Day Trip

I had a one day trip today to Semarang. I went at 7.20 AM and since there was a construction project in Muntilan, the trip was delayed and i arrived in Semarang around 11 AM. My first route was my aunt's house since i have an order from my mother to deliver something to her, so i got to her house first. It's also a chance to see my two cousins in Semarang. It's been a while since i saw one of them (this is my first time seeing the younger one).

Next, we headed to our primary route on this trip and when we finished with it, we went to Ciputra Mall in order to have lunch and also looking for items. We left Semarang around 4.30 PM and we arrived in Jogja again around 8 PM since we had dinner in Magelang. Luckily, the heavy rain has stopped when we arrived, so we had no difficulties on our trip today

Indonesia Advance to Final

Finally Indonesia went into last stage of Suzuki Cup after beating Philiphines 1-0 (aggregate 2-0), both from Christian Gonzales. Both goals were spectacular, one from heading and the other was from a long-range kick outside the penalty area.

In the final, Indonesia will against Malaysia who beat the defending champion. I think Indonesia can beat Malaysia again just like in the preliminary group where Indonesia crushed Malaysia 5-1

Give a great end of the year present to all Indonesian people by winning this competition

Tracking KDE Bugs

These days, i have been busy tracking KDE bugs after i decided to upgrade to KDE 4.6 Beta 2 on my laptop. As stated before, it's still in Beta version and bugs are still lurking waiting to be fixed. So far, the overall performance is no difference with 4.5, new features are quite good enough, but still there are some annoying bugs.

As Eric updated his KDE packages in his KTown package, some bugs are resolved, but new problem arises, such as sound problem (due to disabled HAL on my test case), but soon i fixed it by installing phonon-vlc and phonon-mplayer packages from Eric's repository to add another backend besides xine and gstreamer. So far the solution works, but i'm still enabling HAL for now or else i won't enjoy a better battery monitor from guidance package (the battery monitor applet from KDE is giving less information). Some people reported that K3B is complaining if HAL is disabled. I haven't tried this since i have no need of burning at the moment, but it will be a good idea if it will be fixed in the final release.

Another bugs that has been squashed is the icon not working in panel. If i click on the icon, it won't launch any application where it supposed to do it. KDE developer fixed this problem in trunk so it should be on the next Beta or RC release.

Let's hope more and more bugs are squashed before they release the final version in January

Laziness Approaching

When closing to holidays, there's always a new disease coming up, laziness. Yes, i had this problem nowadays when i have to give markings to the exams done in these days. I have finished one of them, but i'm planning to do another marking tonight, but i think i will have to postpone until tomorrow due to laziness

There are deadlines i have to catch up also, so i must get over this problem as soon as possible and get back in the track in order to meet the schedules and then i can have quite a long holidays until next year

OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 Released

Shortly after MySQL 5.5 has been turned into GA (General Availability), Oracle is now releasing final release of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 with so many new features included. By looking at the new features, i can see why the development took so much time and they even had to release 8 RC release before they set the final go today.

The new features are spread into several categories, such as Productivity Enhancement, Usability and Interface, Developer Features and Extensibility, and Internationalization.

I think in the next following days, LibreOffice 3.3.0 will also be shipping to public. I'm still waiting for the final release before deciding which application should be installed on my computer. Both has been available in SlackBuilds project so it won't be a problem to create a Slackware packages for both packages.

In the meantime, Oracle also introduce Oracle Cloud Office, a Web and mobile office suite. It includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Based on Web open standards and the Open Document Format (ODF), Oracle Cloud Office enables Web 2.0-style collaboration and mobile document access and ensures compatibility with Microsoft Office file documents. Oracle Cloud Office is integrated with Oracle Open Office, which enables rich offline editing of complex presentation, text, and spreadsheet documents. Oracle Cloud Office Web-scale architecture can be used for on-premise, on-demand, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments.

I think it's their answer to Google Docs who have played in this area long before Oracle came up with this new product.

MySQL 5.5 Released

Oracle has finally released MySQL 5.5. to public after they released their first Beta public last year. I think it will be a great Christmas gift to everyone that is curious about the future of MySQL after Oracle took control of it from Sun Microsystems. Actually, Oracle is also working hard to make Oracle Virtual Box 4 released this year as they have released their third Beta this week (they have released 3 Betas in this month and it shows how serious they are with their Virtual Box).

The highlights of this major release are:

• InnoDB performance improvements
• Better instrumentation and diagnostics
• InnoDB recovery performance improvements
• Scalability improvements
• Semi-synchronous replication
• Improved Performance and Scale on Win32 and Win64

What surprises me is that the size of Windows installer (MSI) has grown up to 120 MB where Linux source code is only at 20 MB. I think they have integrated a lot of big changes in Windows as they said that they have improved MySQL's performance on Windows platform such as :

• Windows API calls for much of the I/O done inside MySQL (a community contribution, hat tip to Jeremiah Gowdy).
• Ability to build engines and other plugins as DLLs on Windows.
• Network support for auto-detecting the MAC address (a community contribution, hat tip to Chris Runyan).
• Much cleanup and simplifying of threading code.

At least, MySQL is still being developed and maintained for now. Let's have fun with MySQL 5.5

Final Presentation

Starting tomorrow until December 22, there will be a lot of final presentation session happening on my campus. The students who took a final project course will have to defend their thesis in front of 4 lecturers in order to pass the test.

Some of my students under my supervision are going to take parts also, so i will be quite busy this week and also next week.

Good luck to all of you

NVidia Driver Updates

NVidia has unveiled another Linux driver on their Linux driver page. This time, 260.19.29 is released under x86/IA32 and x86_64/AMD64/EM64T.

These are the highlights of the latest NVidia driver:

• Added support for the following GPUs:
• GeForce GTX 460 SE
• GeForce GTX 570
• Quadro 5000M
• NVS 300
• Fixed a bug that caused some OpenGL applications to become unresponsive for up to a minute on some GPUs when changing the resolution or refresh rate.
• Added support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro.
  See the "Stereo" X configuration documentation in the README for further details.
• Added a new X configuration option "3DVisionProConfigFile" to allow user provide a filename which NVIDIA X driver uses to store 3D Vision Pro configuration settings. See "Appendix B. X Config Options" in the README for more information.

MU is Back on Top

MU is back on top of the EPL after beating the visiting team Arsenal who had a bad performance at the match, reported by Soccernet. A goal by Korean's Park Ji Sung has cleared United's way to claim the top table again from Arsenal. Unfortunately, Rooney missed his penalty, otherwise, it would have been 2-0.

This records extends their winning records against Arsenal and marks them as the unbeaten team in EPL this season. Let's hope they will continue this trends until the end of the season and win the title once again.

Go Go Manchester United

Leaving to Solo

Tomorrow i will be leaving to Solo for campus meeting and also farewell party since our department will move to a new faculty next year along with Information System department. The other two department (architecture and product design) will have their own faculty. This will be our last meeting, so we should cherish it well.

Since it will be one day trip, i don't think there will be too many delays. I will be back on Wednesday around 3 PM. I should have plenty of time to reply all incoming emails, approve all pending queue in Indonesian Linux Forum, and many more.

Let's hope big changes in Slackware will get most of the bugs or out-of-date application gets fixed or upgrade

Garden Panic

For the last two days, i have been spending my day finishing Garden Panic, one of BigFishGames game. It's a simple, but challenging game. You own a strawberry field and there are a lot of animals who wanted to eat it and your task is to protect your field.

My girlfriend played this game first and i decided to start it also and i managed to overlap her and now i'm in the last level which i couldn't beat . I had completed all other levels with a Perfect state, but i'm totally lost in the last level.

Anyone has a solution for the last level?

Update (15 December 2010): I have completed the game, thanks to the video posted by someone who give a comment on this post. I will update the screenshot to reflect the changes in the game
Here's some screenshots

Stay Calm With Google Chrome OS

Google user interface designer, Glen Murphy has just demonstrated a video about how you can safely work with your data even if your laptop was damaged or stolen or broken since everything is saved on the Cloud by using Google Chrome OS.

On the videos, he demonstrated creating a documents, cropping an images, chatting with his friend and while doing so, some engineers took the laptop (it's an analogy of being stolen) and then break the laptop with nasty things until it's unrecoverable and then Glen gets a new laptop and he can continue on his last work without losing any data at all.

As usual, Google produce another interesting video and it's said that there were 25 laptops were broken in the making of the videos (quite expensive promotion ads), but it's worthed to see the results of the video.

Here's the video if you would like to see:

Knastik 2010 is Over

Today, finally we can held KNASTIK 2010 which has been postponed due to Merapi eruption last month. Although the participant has decreased due to schedule changes, we were still glad to have this event held because we have prepared this event for some time and it will be our annual event.

I woke up at 6 AM in the morning (and i just slept at 4.30 AM, so only 1.5 hours to rest) and t hen i went to my campus to do early preparation. I went back at home at 5.30 PM, so it's almost 12 hours in my campus.

Now i need some rest

Another Linux Improvement Patches Attempt

There's always room for improvement. I think that quotes also apply to Linux Kernel development. Every new kernel release always tries to bring new features, but behind all those new features, there's always an attempt to improve performance.

Several weeks ago, Phoronix wrote an interesting article about 200 lines of code which could improve desktop performance by automatically creating task groups per TTY. While this patch set has done a great job, another attempt has been made to further improve it.

This month, Andrea has updated his patch set against 2.6.37-rc1 and based on benchmarking done by Phoronix using Phoronix Test Suite, it does give an improvement compared to other kernels used on the test process. So, what's the idea behind this patch set?

Taken from Phoronix's article:

The Transparent Hugepage Support in the Linux kernel works by reducing the number of TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) entries that such applications need and at the same time increasing the cap that a TLB cache can provide.

For more information about THS, please have a look on article by LWN and also documentation in the Kernel.

I think this will be released in 2.6.37 or probably in 2.6.38 if it's too late for 2.6.37. I'm looking forward to see more improvements in the future

Another Linux Kernel Exploit

Dan Rosenberg has once again issued another PoC (Proof of Concept) about Linux Kernel Exploit for those running Linux Kernel older than 2.6.37. The PoC was sent to BugTraq and i saw it on LWN. It uses three vulnerabilities to get root, all of which were discovered by Nelson Elhage.

Dan said that he tested this exploit on Ubuntu 10.04 kernels, both x86 and x86-64, but i couldn't reproduce this exploit in Slackware-Current, custom kernel 2.6.36.1. Probably because the Slackware's kernel doesn't have Econet protocol enabled in the kernel which makes the process failed. It ended with a [*] Failed to open file descriptors error message.

Choqok 1.0 RC 1 Released

Choqok is getting closer to their final 1.0 release which will be released on December 26 this year by releasing their first Release Candidate (Choqok 1.0 RC 1, codename Huma). This RC brings new features as well as new plugins (there are a total of five plugins included on this release, OCS Plugin to support “Open Collaboration Services Activities API” (For opendesktop.org), IMStatus plugin to set your latest post to status message in IM clients (Kopete, Pidgin, Psi and Skype), Twitgoo image uploader, Mobypicture image uploader, and Posterous image uploader.

There are two new dependencies for Choqok: libAttica for OCS plugin and libIndicate-qt for Indicator notifies support. Since Attica has been included on Slackware, i don't have to compile for this package. As for libIndicate, i don't have any plan (for now) to use the new notifier system, since i'm quite satisified with the current notifier system which is integrated with KDE.

I have compiled this new package using the SlackBuild script and i don't have to make any changes at all, except for the version line to indicate changes in the package version.

Brain Games

I just came back from Surabaya for a few days. When i was in Surabaya, i managed to go to book store and when i was in Periplus, i saw an interesting book called The Little Book of Big Brain Games: 517 Ways to Stretch, Strengthen and Grow Your Brain, written by Ivan Moscovich, a well known designer who have made numerous game puzzle designs.

I bought this book because i think it's interesting to play with games which could strengthen our brain with FUN. The author focused on FUN factor as part of this book because if you are not enjoying it, then you will not get the maximum benefit of it.

Just have a look on the website and buy the book. I'm sure you will have a wonderful time to play with all the puzzles that Ivan has put on this book.

KDE 4.5.4 Released

KDE 4.5.4 has been released as part of monthly maintenance update before they will ship 4.6 release next January. As a maintenance update, 4.5.4 only brings translations update and also bug fixes, while leaving new features for the next 4.6 release.

This package has been included in Slackware-Current as of today as part of batch update. All other dependencies has been upgraded as well, but i was hoping that it would use Qt 4.7.1 instead of using svn version.

Most of Slackware mirrors will have their repositories updated by now. If not, please wait for next day.

Compromised ProFTPD

ProFTPD, one of the most popular FTP Server is known to be compromised in the source code level. The attacker has managed to slip a malicious code into the source code and it has been spreading world wide. For those who wanted to see the impact of a compromised package, please have a look on Pastebin. It's a nasty one indeed.

ProFTPD has announced this and one way to get the legitimate package is by comparing the MD5 hash or PGP Signature found on every ProFTPD package with the one found on this page. If it's different, then it means you get the modified source code. Redownload and reinstall the package with the proper one.

The modification was carried out on the 28th November and discovered and reverted on 1st December. Luckily, ProFTPD package in Slackware-Current is not affected. I have tested before i posted this blog post

Apple Store Indonesia

Finally, a new Apple Store Indonesia has been launched by Apple. I'm not a fan of Apple, but i'm still impressed with their move opening an official Apple Store for Indonesia. The price listed there are in Indonesian Rupiah (IDR), so people can start comparing the unofficial market price and the official price before they decided to buy Apple Products.

One thing that confuses me is the phone number listed on Apple Store Indonesia is still Singapore number (+65 instead of +62). Does this mean that the company is still running in Singapore?

Anyway, it's good to have an official store in Indonesia and i'm waiting for someone to send me a gift with my name carved on behind of Apple's product