Day 2: Riding Bajaj

Today is my first day of training in PPM building and i decided to take Bajaj. It's an old and traditional public transportation designed for a crowded city like Jakarta. It's very efficient way to reach the destination because it's so crowded here in Jakarta. You can go to some place which should be near but when you travel by car, it might take some time.

When i went back to the hotel, i took a modern version of bajaj which was more environmental friendly and the three of us (one of my colleague just got to Jakarta today) joined us as well. So we took one bajaj for three people . At first, i didn't believe that it would fit us, but it did. Well, it seems we are not that big

I think it's my first time riding a bajaj in my whole life. What an interesting experience

First Day : Lost Baggage

Today i went to other town using one of national airways and i had a bad experience again just like what i had in Singapore last year. I checked in early in the morning and finished all administrative without any problem.

When i arrived in destination city, i couldn't find my luggage even though all of the bags has been carried out. I reported to the lost and found office, and they couldn't find any bags left. They told me to wait for the next flight because they worried that my luggage was incorrectly passed on to other flight. I had a de ja vu feeling about this because i had the same experience while i was travelling to Singapore last year.

I finally wait for the next flight and when i accidentally saw other's flight luggage, i saw mine was one of them because i had put a unique ribbon on my bag to notify that it's mine. I grabbed my luggage and it seems that it was misplaced to Balikpapan and rounded back to Jakarta. Finally i don't have to write any missing report to lost and found and i got my lugagge back.

This should be a lesson for the airways, as there were so many people who had the same problem as i had today. They complained that their luggage was damaged and opened by some people and other reported missing luggage.

Let's hope it would never happened again when i travelled back to Jogja next Friday

Out of Town

I will be out of town (yes, again) for a week for a training somewhere outside Jogja and this time, it will be five days trip. I will be back again in Jogja around Friday evening.

As usual, my blog will be left without any updates at all since i may not be able to post anything, but i will try to update whenever i can find any Internet connection. Honestly, i'm so stress to spend a day without any Internet connection, but what can i do. It's part of my job to take this training so i can also enhance my skills.

New ISO Collections

Today, FreeBSD 8.2 and PC-BSD 8.2 are released almost in sync, so i'm adding it to UKDW's ISO Server. It's still on progress, so it will be available (hopefully) by tomorrow morning if there's no problem with the Internet connection.

FreeBSD is one of the most popular UNIX distribution based on BSD-family compared to others, such as OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD. Unfortunately, i haven't had time to try this UNIX distribution. I will try this once i got some time to play with and better Internet connection as FreeBSD are best known of it's ports and it requires a better Internet connection to have a comfortable system.

One thing i like about FreeBSD besides it's nice feature is the logo. It's almost the same with Manchester United's devil logo

Emojis are Now Included in UNICODE 6

If you like emojis, then be happy with this news: it's now part of Unicode 6 standard. According to H-Online, the new standard adds more than 2000 new symbols, including emojis. Emoji has been used in many applications, including Google's GMail and it's one of the most favourite features.

Last Week

This week will be my last week of teaching before mid test approaches. I will be leaving to Jakarta next week for training and i will be there around a week or so, so i have to substitute my next week class into next Friday.

I don't know whether i will be able to browse the Internet or not while i'm in Jakarta, but let's hope there will be a fast Internet connection while i am in Jakarta. Worst case, i may not be able to reply to your mail soon enough. I will try to prioritize important email first

The Document Foundation Challenge

The Document Foundation is now raising a donation event to legally form The Document Foundation in Germany which requires a minimum of 50,000 Euros.

Surprisingly, the number of donators keeps increasing each days, and today, with only 27 days left, they managed to get 76% or around 37900 EUROs out of 50000 EUROs needed. It's so amazing to see how people support The Document Foundation since they have managed to work on something big, vendor-independent, and of course legal to be used, modified, and distributed over the Internet by anyone. It's LibreOffice

I am confident that they will reach their goal before this week ends

New Cafetaria

Finally my campus opened the new cafetaria after being postponed for a long time. I tried it today with my colleagues, but since we didn't know which one is good and which one is not, i decided to pick one of them and luckily my choice was a correct one.

We had lunch for about 20-30 minutes and then we went back to our office to work again

SMS - Superb Mini Server

I visited Distrowatch today and i saw an interesting Linux distribution which is based on Slackware. It's called SMS - Superb Mini Server. It's a simple operating system designed for a server that is easy to manage and configure. It's console-based (since it's being used for server only), so all the administration will be done via web interface (they provide webmin) and of course console

They have just released the latest version 1.5.6 which is synced with the latest update on Slackware-Current per February 16. They are now using longterm kernel 2.6.35.11 along with many basic toolchain included in the Slackware-Current.

IMHO, this Linux distribution is a perfect one if you are looking for a Linux distribution which is based on Slackware to be used as a server as it has contain all the server-related packages you need:

• Apache version 2.2.17
• BIND version 9.7.2_P3
• Dovecot IMAP version 1.2.16
• ISC DHCPd version 4.2.0
• Fetchmail version 6.3.17+SSL+NLS
• HylaFAX+ Server version 5.5.0
• MySQL version 5.1.55
• OpenSLP version 1.2.1
• OpenVPN version 2.1.1
• OpenLDAP Server version 2.4.24
• ProFTPd version 1.3.3d
• Postfix version 2.8.0
• OpenSSH_5.8p1
• Samba version 3.5.6
• Sendmail version 8.14.4, config V10/Berkeley
• SpamAssassin version 3.3.1
• Sarg version 2.2.3.1
• Squid version 3.1.11
• DansGuardian 2.10.1.1
• VsFTPd version 2.3.2
• PPPD Dialing Server version 2.4.5
• CUPS Print Server version 1.4.6
• Netatalk Appletalk File/Print server 2.1.5
• UW-IMAP Server

You can choose to download the LiveCD first and then if you like it, you can download the Native CD which can be used to install the SMS distribution on your computer. You can also opt to download XOrg and KDE-related packages, which is included in a separate module. This way, you can have a KDE-based desktop environment using SMS

CEH v7

For those who seeks for new certification in security, i would recommend you to the new CEH v7 materials available only at EC-Council and it's partners. It's a result of several years of efforts by them and combining it with the latest update on security-related topics, including tools and utilities available to prepare yourself to become another Certified Ethical Hacker.

Activities in the Morning

I have just came back from bicycling in the morning by myself as part of my diet program . When i came across Malioboro, i saw there were three different activities but all of them are part of medical gymnastic. The first one was for old people, the second one was Tai Chi Chuan, an old Chinese-based martial arts which is now being used for health solution by many people around the world. The third one was a general dance where most of the participants were youngsters and mid-range people.

It's good to see them doing exercises in the morning to keep their body healthy. The same thing goes with me. I'm trying to reduce my weight in order to stay away from many diseases that can occurr to fatty (yes, i'm a little bit fat)

Chelsea Suffers Another Loss

While Chelsea is struggling to find their mood into winning their matches after they bought Fernando Torres few weeks ago, they suffered another loss on FA Cup just now, after losing from Everton from a penalty shootout. They lost 3-4 thanks to Philip Nevile, ex MU players who now plays for Everton.

I think they should learn from MU and Arsenal who didn't give away so much money to buy star player, but in the end they will be dissappointed with the performance. MU and Arsenal had their youth team and some of the graduates from the youth team will be a good candidate to be promoted to the senior team. You can monitor all the progress and most likely, you can get the players at no cost at all.

hjsplit for Linux

In the past, i have to use Wine in order to ran hjsplit to split/join files, since it's only available on Windows platform, but since November 21, 2010, hjsplit is also available to Linux platform

It's built using Free Pascal/Lazarus, but it has no dependencies to kylix libraries which is unmaintained anymore. It also has so many new features compared to the old version available in Windows such as:

• HJSplit is now able to generate MD5 checksums.
• You can now also specify 'Gigabytes' as units inside the split screen.
• 'Pause' button to the progress form.
• 'Cancel' button to the progress form. This allows you to cancel the current operation (split, join, compare or checksum). When pressing 'Cancel' HJSplit pauses and asks for confirmation.
• The progress display now also explicitly includes the current progress percentage (0% - 100%).
• When you cancel a split operation, the split files that were created during this operation will be deleted. This is to prevent an invalid set of split parts being left on your system.
• When you cancel a join operation, the joined file will be deleted. This is to prevent leaving an invalid joined file on your system.
• Support for very large files. HJSplit for Linux can now split and recombine files of over 100 Gigabytes.

All you need is download the files and extract them and run it and you will get something like this on your desktop:

Graduation

Congratulations to students who will have their graduation tomorrow. They have finally finished their study at university, but new challenges will start after you finished your bachelor study, so keep fighting for it guys/gals

For the first time, i will take part in the graduation tomorrow

Source or Binary Package?

Sometimes my students wondered why would i prefer to use Slackware and compile my own package from source if it's not provided by the upstream distribution maintainer instead of using binary packages which usually comes with a lot of precompiled binary like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Well, latest Distrowatch newsletter has finally gives a good explanation about the advantages (and of course disadvantages) of compiling source and using a binary package. I would recommend you to read it.

If you are looking for an optimized Linux distributions, i would suggest you to go for Gentoo, source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways. They don't have any binaries and all of their packages are compiled from source, thus it's way more optimized than any other Linux distributions.

Displaying Decimal Number in Shell Scripts

Have you ever wanted to display a decimal number on your shell scripts? Bash by default is not able to display any decimal number and only plays well with integers.

There's a solution for this, which is by using bc, a simple calculator which is mostly provided in any Linux distributions. Let's play a bit with bc.

In order to display a decimal number using bc, you will have to define a scale variable. Please have a look on bc's manual page for detail. Use this command on your terminal to try it: echo "scale=4; 3/4" | bc -l. It will give you an output of .7500

Here's a simple script for a demo:

#!/bin/bash

SCORE=0
AVERAGE=0
SUM=0
NUM=0

while true; do
  echo -n "Enter your score [0-100] ('q' for quit): "; 
  read SCORE;
  if (("$SCORE" < "0"))  || (("$SCORE" > "100")); then
    echo "Be serious.  Come'on, try again: "
  elif [ "$SCORE" == "q" ]; then
    echo -e "Average rating: \c"
    result=`echo "scale=4; $SUM/$NUM" | bc -l`
    echo "$result"
    break
  else
    SUM=$[$SUM + $SCORE]
    NUM=$[$NUM + 1]
  fi
done

Try running it:
./average.sh
Enter your score [0-100] ('q' for quit): 1
Enter your score [0-100] ('q' for quit): 5
Enter your score [0-100] ('q' for quit): 4
Enter your score [0-100] ('q' for quit): q
Average rating: 3.3333

Two More Emoticons Added

Two more hidden emoticons are being added into my Yahoo/Plurk Emoticons Script. They are and . I think they are added to celebrate Valentine and Chinese Valentine Day

Go get them!!!

Jayhawks No. 1?

The following is a guest post provided by Victor:

After the Ohio State Buckeyes lost over the weekend, the NCAA basketball odds makers knew that there would be a change in the rankings this weekend. What most people didn’t realize is that Kansas would be the top team in the country and not the Texas Longhorns.

Why is that such an oddity? Because the Longhorns defeated the Jayhawks in Kansas on their home court earlier this season.

For Texas, it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. They are 22-3 overall and 10-0 in the Big Ten. Many of their fans remember what happened to the team last time they reached the No. 1 ranking overall.

Last season, the Longhorns started the year 17-0 and then were ranked No. 1 as a result. They proceeded to lose 10 of their final 17 games and quickly exited the NCAA Tournament in the first round. Without a doubt, the players remember that and they know that continued steady performance is more important than ranking.

The Jayhawks received 14 of the 31 first-place votes while the Longhorns received 13, which ended up being the difference.

For Texas, their bigger focus should be the free throw shooting as they are ranked dead-last in the Big 12 with a 64.5 percentage. Considering their average margin of victory prior to their latest nine-point win over Baylor was 18 points per game, some improved free throw shooting would likely secure a long journey into the NCAA Tournament. If they can’t improve that, they might be exiting early once again – regardless of ranking.

Personal Blocklist Extension

Google is really maximizing their datacenter warehouses to provide better user experience while using Google Chrome browser by introducing a new Google Chrome Extension called Personal Blocklist.

What does it do? Basically it will enables users to block websites from Google's search result which doesn't fit to his search and this will be given as feedback or input to Google to refine their search results. In other words, Google is using their users feedback to improve their algorithm and search results. Clever thing right? . Every link on the search results will have an addition of link on the bottom which is added by the extension to block the site.

You can revoke the website you previously removed by clicking the Show link on the bottom of the search results and click on the unblock on the side of the link.

End of OpenID?

I remembered few years ago, there was a boom trend about OpenID that will soon replace password-based authentication because it can solve the single sign-on (SSO) problem so that users could have a single identity that they used with multiple web sites (more than 50000 websites are already supporting OpenID currently and many more to come after many big organization become a OpenID providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and many more).

However, lately OpenID trends keeps decreasing and LWN posted an article about The End of OpenID? based on an article posted by WebMonkey called OpenID: The Web’s Most Successful Failure. I will try to summarize what happen.

1. OpenID actually did solve the SSO problem without requiring users to create a new account whenever they wanted to use a service by a new website.
2. OpenID also gives you the same identity over the Internet by using only a single identity that works everywhere.
3. OpenID failed to deliver the same user experience due to different implementation by each vendor and websites because OpenID is not dependent to one organization.
4. Facebook Connect does the same job and they have done it much better and people like it. Facebook's large user base also became a key factor on Facebook Connect success story. They have around 600 millions users.
   

We will keep seeing OpenID, but it's popularity will decrease over time and Facebook Connect will keep going and going on as their user base are keep growing and growing. I think OpenID will have to do better than current condition in order to be left by the user. 37 Signals has a plan to drop OpenID support as of May 1. Will other follow? We will see.....

Happy Valentine Day

Happy Valentine Day

Valentine day is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions (Wikipedia).

Although some people don't celebrate this event, i still think this is a special moment for couples to celebrate their special moment together and full of roses, chocolates, gifts, and probably romantic dinner. I myself has celebrated this for years with my fiancee.

Plurk has prepared a special emoticons for this day as displayed on my previous post about updated Yahoo/Plurk Emoticons Script.

What A Trip

Yes, i'm back from other town doing something for a special day which is planned for later on this year. It was an amazing trip. I met many new people, new items, and new planning during this short trip. I also managed to see one of annual show held in Semarang which inspires me about something that i must do later on.

It's good to be back again in Jogja and i'm ready to work full time starting tomorrow. But for now, i have just finished upgrading to the latest update of Slackware-Current and also recompiled my kernel to enable Control Groups feature since it has been added in Slackware-Current as of today.

Time to get some

Out of Town

I will be leaving out of town as of today until next Sunday, so i may not be able to post anything on this blog during that time, but i will try to keep my Twitter and Plurk account updated since i can do it using mobile phone.

As of email messages, i will try to reply it when i have time and good Internet connection, but i can't promise you that, so don't expect me to reply to you ASAP

Hopefully i can give you good news when i came back in Sunday

Updated Yahoo/Plurk Emoticons Script

I have updated my Yahoo/Plurk emoticons for Blogger scripts to add several new funny emoticons such as :


I don't have any plan to add the ugly emoticons for now, so please don't ask me about adding it

Enabling UserDir on Fedora

I just tried to enable UserDir configuration on Fedora 14 and it seems that it's quite different with my configuration in Slackware. Well, it's a different distribution, so i guess it's quite normal to have this small difference.

In Slackware, all i need is to remove the hash mark in front of this line: Include /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-userdir.conf in /etc/http/httpd.conf and restart Apache and it will be done.

On Fedora, it's slightly a bit different. First, you have to edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and change this line: UserDir disabled into UserDir public_html.
Next, you have to uncomment all this section below the UserDir configuration (i added FollowSymLinks option on my case):

<Directory /home/*/public_html>
AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec FollowSymLinks
<Limit GET POST OPTIONS>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Limit>
<LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</LimitExcept>
</Directory>

I added index.php on DirectoryIndex as one of the entries because i will be running PHP scripts.

The last thing that you should do is setting the permission on the /home/username to 711 and /home/username/public_html/ to 755. That should do it. Restart your Apache by issuing /etc/init.d/httpd restart and you can start accessing your script at http://localhost/~username/

Installing Fedora Replacing Ubuntu

This morning, i tried to upgrade my Ubuntu installation to 11.04 Alpha 2. I know it's so damn risky, but i used my old laptop which is used for testing purposes with no important data in it, so i have nothing to lose. I decided to take the risk.

Actually the upgrade process went smooth. I can upgrade to 11.04 safely without any problem at all, except that my WiFI and NVidia driver are no longer working in 11.04. After rebooting, i tried to enable NVidia driver again and this is where the nightmare begins. After rebooting for the second time after enabling NVidia driver 96.xx series, my Ubuntu stuck at Ubuntu logo and it won't continue. I have tried to reboot for several tries, but it reached the same point all the time. I think it's because of the NVidia driver which probably incompatible.

So i decided to switch to Fedora 14 for some time. I had downloaded Fedora 14 and used it on virtualization only, so no real installation was done, so i guess this is a good chance to try Fedora 14 on a decent hardware (my laptop was bought in 2005). Right now, i'm in process of installing Fedora 14 on my laptop. Hope everything is OK without any problem

Safer Internet Day

February 8 is the Safer Internet Day, a special day to promote safer and moreresponsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.

We all know that Internet nowadays has been used by many people, including childrens. All materials are widely available on the Internet, including non-consumeable materials, such as porn, drugs, and many more. All of those are threats to childrens whom mostly don't understand about it. They will become a victim of those threats.

That's why Insafe promotes this event annually and it has been working since 2007 and we hope that they will keep promoting this event in the future years. In 2010 Safer Internet Day was celebrated through over 500 events in 65 countries all over the world.

The topic for 2011 is "our virtual lives" around the slogan " It's more than a game, it's your life". To help you with this year's topic, they have uploaded a short video about it

Flu Again

I actually have prepared myself to play basketball with my friends tonight, but it seems that i'm having a flu, so i decided to postpone it next week. I don't want to take the risk because i have a plenty of tight schedule this week and next week, so my health is the most important things.

I will try to make sure i can come next week

Debian 6.0 Released

One of the oldest Linux distribution Debian Linux has just released another major update to it's product: Debian Linux 6.0. Developed for about 24 months (yes, you saw that right, 2 years), finally it has been released by the team on February 6 2011.

Debian 6.0 includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments as well as all kinds of server applications. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:

* KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.4.5
* an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.30
* the Xfce 4.6 desktop environment
* LXDE 0.5.0
* X.Org 7.5
* OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
* GIMP 2.6.11
* Iceweasel 3.5.16 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
* Icedove 3.0.11 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
* PostgreSQL 8.4.6
* MySQL 5.1.49
* GNU Compiler Collection 4.4.5
* Linux 2.6.32
* Apache 2.2.16
* Samba 3.5.6
* Python 2.6.6, 2.5.5 and 3.1.3
* Perl 5.10.1
* PHP 5.3.3
* Asterisk 1.6.2.9
* Nagios 3.2.3
* Xen Hypervisor 4.0.1 (dom0 as well as domU support)
* OpenJDK 6b18
* Tomcat 6.0.18
* more than 29,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 15,000 source packages.

Get Debian right now

Building New Virtual Server

Few weeks ago, i built a new virtual server on top of one of my server in my campus. It was built using Slackware 13.1 on top of VirtualBox 4.0.2. So far, the performance is good and i have no problem with it.

Last Friday, we discussed about further usage of virtual server to support our education process. We can use the virtual server to host student's work or final project so that they can try it out without having to buy new hosting or domain and use internal resources.

I decided that we will go on with the idea, but i will wait until Slackware 13.2 is released before i start the new virtual server which should have better and optimized configuration compared to the first one. I actually built it for testing purposes, but it went well, so i used it for my class

For the next configuration, i have prepared some adjustment to make it more robust, configurable, efficient, and should be more up to date compared with the current one.

Chrome 9 Promoted to Stable Release

After a while, finally Google has officially promoted Google Chrome 9 to Stable Channel, meaning that it will superseeds Google Chrome 8. Right now, they have Chrome 10 and 11 on development channel, which is focused for integrating new features that will be applied in the next stable channel.

New features included in Google Chrome 9 are: WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store.

For you who wanted to test the new WebGL, try to visit this URL using Google Chrome 9. With WebGL in Chrome, you can experience rich 3D experiences right inside the browser with no need for additional software. I find it very interesting and i thought you might be too.

Chrome Web Store is only available for users living in US for now, but Google will soon release it worldwide. Stay tune for more updates about Chrome Web Store on Google Chrome's Blog.

Lastly, here's a short video about Chrome Web Store:

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year to all of you who reads this blog. I wish the best for you and your family throughout this year of Rabbit

It's been a wonderful year in 2010 and now, we have come to 2011 where new target is set, new hope is dreamt, and new visions are in our mind. New challenges awaits us and new opportunities are waiting for us. We should be ready for the new year no matter what happens. Time is ticking all the time.

Like always, i wanted to give my favorite quotes:

Yesterday is a History,
Tomorrow is a Mystery,
Today is a Gift; That's why it's called Present

Picture Credit: FeaturePics

Good Discussion

I had a good discussion with my students this morning about OAuth and SAML. Those two are the topic for their first assignment in one of my subject this semester. Even though i only give them one week of time to complete the assignment, they have done pretty well on it and i'm impressed.

I'm looking forward to see other groups performing with the same level as the group today. Go for it

Sweating Again

I haven't been doing exercises for a long time, but i really wanted to do it again after i watched my friend played basketball in my old basketball club court. It was fun playing basketball with my friends because it's a cooperation, interactive, and fast-paced sports. My body is getting fat and fatter lately for not doing any exercises

So, i decided to start a new one starting this month by doing a small exercises in the morning. I started today by having 2 KM non stop jogging. I know it's not that much, but my body needs to adapt the quick changes, so i couldn't take much in my first day. Always take one step at a time. We will see if i can add it to 2.5 KM in the next day and so on

Wow... it's really good to have this body sweating again. I haven't feel that for a long time