Be Prepared for iCloud

Apple is as always mysterious about their products and also events, but not this time. They have officially announce iCloud as their main attention on the next their annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WDC) that will be held June 6-10 in San Francisco Moscone West. The tickets has been sold out (as usual).

What's more interesting is that the current CEO, Steve Jobs will be the keynote speaker himself even though he's on leave for medical treatment. WDC will also focus on the new version of OS X 10.7 Lion, and the upcoming iOS 5. It should be interesting as usual. I'm waiting for Job's speech

Lots of Meeting

This week should be the last week for the students for their final exams, but that doesn't stop us to prepare for what happened in the future. We are working day by day to prepare for the graduation ceremony, new curicullum finalization, KNASTIK 2011, and many more (don't forget the marking too)

Life never stopped and so does education. Everything must roll on and progressing each day

Almost June

Two more days and we will shortly land on June, halfway to another new year, the year of 2012. I simply can't believe that we almost spent half a year since early this year and since then, there were a lot of things had happened, both good and bad things.

Time flows very fast, sometimes we don't even think about it. We aged every day, every minute, and every second. But something we have to value is our life. We are given a chance to life a wonderful life with all the people around us. Take a look on your neighbour and you will find a lot of people.

Thank you God for giving us a chance to enjoy our life everyday

Disconnect to Connect

We are gifted with so many technologies around us. We have lived in a digital era where all seems so easy and so much fun. Unfortunately, in this digital world, sometimes we are trapped inside the virtual world and neglect the environment around us. We forgot about our family, friends, colleagues, and also closest person in our heart.

I had this video on Youtube from one of Indonesian Slackware Community about Disconnect to Connect. It's an ad from DTAC Thailand TVC, but it reminds us about our real life. We shouldn't be focusing on our mobile phones all the time, but do remember that we have other people around us. It's a great ads and i'm sure you will love the ads.

Marking Again

It's May and it's exam time. My students got their computer security exam this morning and they have done their part. Now, it's my time to do my part, which is marking.

So far, i have finished 1/4 of all of the papers that i should evaluate. It's not an easy job to give marks, especially when you have to judge something. I hope i can finish all of the marking by the end of this week and i will have more free time starting next week

LinuxMint 11 Katya Released

Less than a month after Ubuntu 11.04 is released, LinuxMint 11.04 "Katya" which based on Ubuntu 11.04 is now officially released. Clem, the main lead of LinuxMint has posted the announcement, including the download link.

Here are some highlights of this release:

• One click install for multimedia codecs and extra applications
• The Software Manager
  • UI improvements
  • New splash screen
  • Fonts category
  • More accurate package information
  • More application icons by default
  • More accurate search by default
• The Update Manager
  • Performance boosts
  • Improved dependencies handling
  • Better changelog retrieval
  • UI improvements
• The Desktop Settings tool
  • “Desktop-agnostic”, detection and upcoming compatibility with other desktops
  • New setting for the fortunes in the terminal
• Artwork improvements
  • Backgrounds, overlay scrollbars, plymouth, Mint-X, search add-on.
• System improvements
  • new “apt download” command
  • Adobe flash plugins
• Changes in the software selection

More information about this release can be seen at the Release Notes.

I'm Back

After spending three days and two night at Surabaya, finally i'm home now. I had a great days in Surabaya along with my colleagues and also my business partner. I met a lot of people, gain new knowledge and also got a lot of new ideas for future work.

Today's schedule was a bit tight. We all had breakfast at the hotel around 8 AM and then we left to ITS a little bit early since it was quite far from our hotel. When we reached at ITS, we split into two groups, since me and Restyandito attended the ACAD CERT meeting while Bajuaji went to Secure Coding workshop instructed by two representative from JP-Cert. The workshop ended around 5 PM, while my meeting ended around 11.30 AM, so we left ITS without Bajuaji and went to pick up another business partner and have lunch and chit chat at Tunjungan Plaza 4.

We spent some time in Tunjungan Plaza until around 4 PM and then we split up, because we had to leave to the airport. Since the airport is far from TP, we left at around 4:15 PM, even though the flight was scheduled at 7 PM. We didn't want to take a risk. We arrived at the airport around 5 PM, which was 2 hours ahead of schedule. There we met our friends from AVNet. They were also going back to Jakarta today, but their flight was earlier than us.

Before we departed, we had dinner together and then our flight departed around 7:15 PM and we landed in Jogja one hour later. I slept during the flight since i didn't get enough sleep yesterday. I slept at 3:30 AM this morning and i only had 2,5 hours of sleep since yesterday.

I think it's time to stop and go get some sleep now

Fedora 15 is Released

After two weeks of delays, finally the final version of Fedora 15 is now officially released. It has a lot of new features that might interest you, for developer, end users, or system administrator. Here are the highlight of Fedora 15 taken from the announcement:

==== For desktop users ====

A universe of new features for end users:

* GNOME 3 desktop environment -- GNOME 3 is the next generation of
GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new
and modern desktop that has been designed for today's users and
technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include
GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive
upstream participation from Red Hat developers and Fedora volunteers,
and GNOME 3 is tightly integrated in Fedora 15. GNOME Shell, the new
user interface of GNOME 3, is polished, robust and extensible, and
several GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME tweak tool are available
in the Fedora software repository.

* Btrfs filesystem -- Btrfs, the next generation filesystem is being
developed with upstream participation of Red Hat developers, Oracle
and many others. Btrfs is now available as a menu item in the
installer (only for non-live images. live images support just Ext4)
and does not require passing a special option to the installer as in
the previous releases. Btrfs availability has moved up a notch as a
incremental step towards the goal of Btrfs as the default filesystem
in the next release of Fedora. The btrfsck program for performing
filesystem checks is under active development upstream with
participation from Fedora but the one included in this release is
still limited and hence users are highly recommended to maintain
backups when using this filesystem (backups are a good idea anyway!).

* Indic typing booster -- Indic typing booster is a predictive input
method for the ibus platform. It suggests complete words based on
partial input, and users can simply select a word from the suggestion
list and improve their typing speed and accuracy.

* Better crash reporting -- ABRT, a crash reporting tool in Fedora,
can now perform a part of crash processing remotely, on a Fedora
Project server. Remote coredump retracing avoids users having to
download a large amount of debug information and leads to better
quality reports. The retrace server can generate good backtraces with
a much higher success rate than local retracing.

* Redesigned SELinux troubleshooter -- SELinux troubleshooter is a
graphical tool that watches and analyses log files and automatically
provides solutions to common issues. In this release, this tool has
been redesigned to be simpler but provide more solutions at the same
time.

* Higher compression in live images -- Live images in this release
use XZ compression instead of gzip as in older releases, making them
smaller (about 10%) to download or providing more space for
applications to be made available by default. Thanks to Bruno Wolff
III, Fedora community volunteer, for integrating this functionality in
Fedora Live CD tools.

* Better power management -- Fedora 15 includes a redesigned and
better version of powertop and newer versions of tuned and pm-utils
for better power management. The tuned package contains a daemon that
tunes system settings dynamically to balance between power consumption
and performance. It also performs various kernel tunings according to
selected profile. The new version of tuned brings several bug fixes,
improvements and profiles updates for better efficiency.

* LibreOffice productivity suite -- LibreOffice is a community-driven
and developed free and open source personal productivity suite which
is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document
Foundation. It is a fork of OpenOffice.org with a diverse community
of contributors including developers from Red Hat, Novell and many
volunteers. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice in this
release.

* Firefox 4 web browser -- A new major version of this popular browser
from the Mozilla non-profit foundation is part of this release.
Firefox 4 features JavaScript execution speeds up to six times faster
than the previous version, new capabilities such as Firefox Sync,
native support for the patent unencumbered WebM multimedia format,
HTML5 technologies and a completely revised user interface.

* KDE plasma workspaces 4.6 and Xfce 4.8 desktop environments --
Fedora 15 includes new major versions of these alternative desktop
environments. Fedora also provides dedicated KDE Plasma Workspaces
and Xfce installable live images that include these desktop
environments by default.

* Sugar .92 learning platform -- Sugar is a desktop environment
originally designed for the OLPC project which has now evolved into a
learning platform developed by the non-profit Sugar Labs foundation.
This version provides major usability improvements for the first login
screen and the control panel, as well as new features such as support
for 3G networks.

==== For developers ====

For developers there are all sorts of additional goodies:

* Robotics Suite -- Fedora 15 now includes the Robotics Suite, a
collection of packages that provides a usable out-of-the-box robotics
development and simulation environment. This ever-growing suite
features up-to-date robotics frameworks, simulation environments,
utility libraries, and device support, and consolidates them into an
easy-to-install package group. Refer to
https://rmattes.blogspot.com/2011/05/fedora-15-robotics-s... for
more details.

* GCC 4.6 -- GCC 4.6 is the system default compiler in Fedora 15 and
all the relevant packages have been rebuilt in Fedora 15 using it.
Developers can realize compiled code improvements and use the newly
added features, such as improved C++0x support, support for the Go
language, REAL*16 support in Fortran and many other improvements.

* GDB 7.3 -- This new GDB release 7.3 together with Archer and Fedora
extensions improves the debugging experience on Fedora by making the
debugger more powerful. The majority of these features were written by
Red Hat engineers, thus benefiting all gdb users. New features for the
Fedora 15 release include support for breakpoints at SystemTap markers
(probes), support for using labels in the program's source, OpenCL
language debugging support, thread debugging of core dumps and Python
scripting improvements. Numerous important packages within Fedora are
pre-built with SystemTap static markers, and these can now be used as
the target for breakpoints in gdb.

* Programming language updates -- Python 3.2: The system Python 3
stack has been upgraded to 3.2 (the system Python 2 stack remains at
2.7), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes
refer to https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.2.html. OCaml 3.12:
OCaml 3.12 is a major revision of the OCaml programming language, the
camlp4 macro language, libraries, and CDuce for XML processing. Rails
3.0.5: Rails 3 is a large update to the Ruby on Rails web framework.
It brings many new features such as a polished routing API, new
activemailer and activerecord APIs, and many more new enhancements.

* Maven 3 -- Maven 3.0 offers better stability and performance
compared to previous versions and a lot of work under the hood to
simplify writing Maven plugins and further improve performance by
building projects in parallel. Refer to
https://maven.apache.org/docs/3.0/release-notes.html for more
information. Fedora still provides maven2 package to support
backward compatibility where needed.

==== For system administrators ====

And don't think we forgot the system administrators:

* systemd system and session manager -- systemd is a system and
session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts.
systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket
and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting
of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports
snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and
automount points and implements a powerful transactional
dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in
replacement for sysvinit. A related change is /var/run and /var/lock
are mounted from tmpfs and results in a simpler, more faster and
robust boot-up scheme and aligns to the default configuration of
several other distributions.

* Dynamic firewall -- Dynamic firewall makes it possible to change
firewall settings without the need to restart the firewall and makes
persistent connections possible. This is for example very useful for
services, that need to add additional firewall rules including
virtualization (libvirtd) and VPN(openvpn). With the static firewall
model these rules are lost if the firewall gets modified or restarted.
The firewall daemon (firewalld) holds the current configuration
internally and is able to modify the firewall without the need to
recreate the complete firewall configuration; it is also able to
restore the configuration in a service restart and reload case.
Another use case for the dynamic firewall mode is printer discovery.
For this the discovery program will be started locally that sends out
a broadcast message. It will most likely get an answer from an unknown
address (the new printer). This answer will be filtered by the
firewall, because the answer is not related to the broadcast and the
port of the program that was sending out the message is dynamic and
therefore a fixed rule can not be created for this. It also has a
D-BUS interface to allow clients or services to request firewall
changes. firewall-cmd (part of firewalld package) is a very simple
yet powerful user space alternative to the iptables command: for
instance, firewall-cmd --enable --service=samba --timeout=10 opens
the appropriate ports for Samba for only ten seconds. Since the
current implementation is a proof of concept, in this release, it is
available in the Fedora software repository but not installed by
default. The plan is to make it the default firewall solution in the
next release.

* BoxGrinder appliance creator -- BoxGrinder is a set of free and
open source tools used for building appliances (images/virtual
machines) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2). BoxGrinder
creates appliances from simple plain text appliance definition files.

* Spice integration in Virt Manager -- With Fedora 15, virt-manager
has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution
for interaction with virtualized desktops. It is now possible to
create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the
command line, easily taking advantage of all the Spice enhancements
directly from virt-manager. Spice provides better performance and
additional functionality (such as copy/paste between guest and host)
compared to using VNC. Thanks to the spice-gtk library, a new client
can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection
bindings.

* Consistent network device naming -- Servers often have multiple
Ethernet ports, either embedded on the motherboard, or on add-in PCI
cards. Linux has traditionally named these ports ethX, but there has
been no correlation of the ethX names to the chassis labels - the ethX
names are non-deterministic. Starting in Fedora 15, Ethernet ports
will have a new naming scheme corresponding to physical locations,
rather than ethX. By changing the naming convention, system
administrators will no longer have to guess at the ethX to physical
port mapping, or invoke workarounds on each system to rename them into
some "sane" order. This feature is enabled on all physical systems
that expose network port naming information in SMBIOS 2.6 or later.

* Setuid removal -- Fedora 15 removes setuid in several applications
and instead specifically assigns the capabilities required by each
application to improve security by reducing the impact of any
potential vulnerabilities in these applications.

* Improved support for encrypted home directory -- Fedora 15 brings
in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem
for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to
automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory
when a user logs in.

* RPM 4.9.0 package manager -- RPM 4.9.0 brings a number of immediate
benefits to Fedora including the pluggable dependency generator,
built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package
ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements and many
bugfixes. More details at https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.9.0,

* Tryton ERP system -- Tryton is a three-tier general-purpose
application platform and basis for an ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) system. Currently, the main modules available for Tryton
cover accounting, invoicing, sale management, purchase management,
analytic accounting and inventory management

Day Two at Surabaya

Today i had a busy schedule. I left the hotel in the morning at 8 AM because i had to had breakfast and then i went to Novotel Hotel using a cab to attend the Information Security Seminar and Workshop along with my colleagues. I arrived at the hotel around 8:30 AM.

The event was a bit delayed and it was started around 9:30 AM. The first session was from miss Tintin Hadijanto country representative for EC-Council, followed by Mr. Misaki Kubo, representative from JP Cert, a lecturer from ITS (I forgot his name and there was no information on the website as well), and lastly was Mr. Salahudin vice president from ID-SIRTII representing Eko Indrajit who couldn't attend this event.

After the seminar, we had lunch at the swimming pool side and have a chat with some colleagues from SGU. I had a lot of inspiration after the discussion which could be implemented in our campus. After the seminar, actually i had no intention to continue with the drill test of incident handling, but me and my colleague decided to go with it since the other colleague were interested on it. In fact, it was an interesting session, but the fun was kinda distracted with a slow server that was being used to distribute the material and lab hands on.

After the last session, we had a dinner at Tunjungan Plaza 4 with our friends from AVNET. We had dinner at Hachi Hachi and also ate Ice Cream . We went back to our hotel around 9:30 PM and had a chat before some of us went to bed and i write this blog post.

Well, tomorrow will be my last day. Let's hope the meeting will go smooth and we will get the benefit of the meeting.

First Day in Surabaya

Today is my first day in Surabaya. Actually, this is my first time going to Surabaya using plane. Usually i took a train to get there. Since it's office duty, i decided to take a plane. I left at 3 PM (delayed a bit untill 3.20 PM) and i reached Surabaya one hour later at 4:25 PM. We took a cab to get to the hotel and check in.

Next, we had shower and we were picked up by one of our alumni to have dinner together with the other alumni which already waited for us at DCost. There were about 8 people at today's event, but it was fun. Photos will be added later when i have returned home since i don't bring any cable to transfer the photos to the computer.

There's nothing interesting at day 1, but i am really excited to see my friends and also other alumni that came to the event even though they were only notified via Facebook and also in short time. I really appreciate their time and efforts.

Leaving to Surabaya

Today, i'm leaving for Surabaya for three days. I'm attending ACAD CERT meeting along with an Information Security seminar in Novotel and ITS. As always, i'm trying to try my best to reply all your emails, but i can't give you any guarantee that i will reply it as fast as usual, since it depends on the Internet connection availability there.

Besides attending those meeting and seminar, i'm also planning to held UKDW Alumni gathering with my colleagues. Since we have a lot of Alumni spread across the nation, including Surabaya, this kind of event is held every year. This year, we held it on three cities, Jakarta, Medan, and Balikpapan. Surabaya is actually not planned, but since we got there, we will just do it at once

Surabaya, here i come

ODF as Indonesian Standard

Finally, ODF is now approved as a standard in Indonesia for office suite format. That means all government documentation should be available in ODF format soon

Hopefully, this is not only a temporary action, but should be followed with real implementation from the government to totally support this standard implemented nationwide. Probably starting with migration to applications that fully supports ODF, like OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, KOffice, and AbiWords. Microsoft Office is not ODF-compliance, so it's not recommended for now

Trying SCIM

If you need an application which can be used under Linux that can help you type Chinese/Japanese/Korean language, SCIM is probably the application that you are looking for. It gives you a solution to write asian language that is not based on regular alphabetic. I just tried enabling SCIM on Slackware and the result was magnificent. I can write many Chinese words now

Moving to Another Room

Since my room is about to be renovated, i have to move to another room for a while. Since i'm also leaving next week, that means i only have this week to move all my stuffs to the new room. One thing i considered important is the availability of Internet connection, since i can't work without having Internet connection.

This afternoon, my mother cleaned up the new room and when i got home, i started by moving my computer to the new room. After all of them were moved and setup, i had to make another change again, and that was re-wiring the line to the modem. Since my room was in the back and the new room is in the front, i had to make a new line for the modem from the splitter device. Once the re-wiring was done, i can have my Internet connection back. In fact, i'm writing this post on the new room.

The new room is smaller than my original room. It's so crowded here since so many items were brought in. I had to endure it for the next 1-2 months

Fedora 15 is GOLD

Fedora 15 is now marked as GOLD release, meaning that it has been completed for development phase and ready for deployment to the public. The developers are now working to make the ISO and distribute them to public mirrors and make sure that they are ready to distribute the new release.

They will publicly announce the availability next Tuesday, May 24. By that time, all public mirrors will have the ISOs and repository ready. This will be a great release of Fedora 15, even though i don't use it in my primary desktop/laptop. I use Fedora only in my old laptop since it's working great and i don't have any complaints at all with it. It supports all of my hardware completely Let's hope the same goes with Fedora 15.

Since i'am leaving for Surabaya next week, UKDW ISO Server might have a delay on the ISOs availability. You can wait or you can go to other mirror servers if you can't wait

Linux Kernel 2.6.39 Released

Linus has just announced the availability of the Final release of Linux Kernel 2.6.39. It was a bit delayed, but finally Linus decided to release it anyway. The reason for the delay was his hesitation since he's leaving for LinuxCon in Japan and these two weeks are one of the most interesting phase in Linux Kernel development: The Merge Window.

Take a look on an article in H-Online about new features in Linux Kernel 2.6.39, since KernelNewbies entry is not yet ready at this moment. It will be released in one or two days in the future, so stay tune

Updating Fedora

It's been a while since i updated my Fedora on my old laptop. Today, there was someone who asked about configuring Fedora for UKDW Repository since he tried the method i wrote, but it didn't work, so i give it a try on my laptop which is running Fedora. In fact, i modified the information a little bit and it worked.

As always, reading the official documentation really helps

Update (19 May 2011): Fedora repository in UKDW Server is now removed due to Fedora's mechanism on Repository usage. Not every public mirror can be used by users unless they have signed for an official repository and the public URL is added into their metalink file for the list of repositories. This is not the case for UKDW's Fedora repository, so i decided to delete the repository.

Second Virtual Server

I built a virtual server on top of VirtualBox last year with some hope that the students can take advantage of it if they need a LAMP server for a spesific subject related to web development. I didn't really think about it because at first, i only wanted to try the headless installation article that i saw on one of ID-Slackware's member blog post. The server was up and running up to now and it has been used on several course, including for final project as well.

Since Slackware 13.37 has been released, i wanted to build another virtual server using the new Slackware 13.37, so this morning, i decided to make a new one. It's up and running now and it has almost the exact configuration as the first one, except that i make it more up to date for the applications and libraries installed on it.I also allocate more space on it, so that it could be occupied by more and more students project.

One note about this new installation is that it's the first time i used XFS as the default filesystem for all of the partition (except for swap). I heard a lot of article and benchmarking said that XFS is a nice FS for server, so i wanted to try this one, so i used it as the default. For now, i can't see the results yet, as there are no projects or loads, but there will be soon enough.

If you are curious about the server, you can take a look the spec here.

PSN Restored

After 26 days of being offline, finally Sony has restored it's PSN and Qriocity services on several countries, mostly in US and in Europe. They have also upgraded their firmware and forced users to change their passwords as one of their anticipation of being hacked again.

I do hope Sony and other companies learn from this mistake and they should think security on top of their services. Don't just think security is an addon. It should be part of the system

Please welcome back PSN and congratulations to Sony

Perl 5.14 Released

A new stable release for Perl has been released. It's not yet Perl 6, but the developer has added so many features that will also be available in the future Perl 6. Some new features that are highlight of this release are:

• Unicode 6.0 support, along with many, many improvements to our
  Unicode-related features


• Improved support for IPv6


• Significantly easier autoconfiguration of the CPAN client


• A new /r flag which makes s/// substitutions non-destructive


• New regular expression flags to control whether matched strings should be treated as ASCII or Unicode


• New "package Foo { }" syntax


• Uses less memory and CPU than previous releases

For complete new features and changes on this release, please have a look on PerlDelta.

After this release, the developers aren't stopping. They have created a roadmap towards future Perl 5.16:

We will release Perl 5.14.1 in approximately one month. This
patch release will include corrections for any significant issues
discovered in this release but will not include new features or
any incompatible changes.

Perl 5.16 will be released in the spring of 2012. If you'd like to help
shape Perl 5's future, please join us on the perl5-porters mailing list.

MU Won EPL Title

The title went to Chelsea last year, but this year, the title was brought back to the champion, Manchester United following a draw against Blackburn Rovers, thanks to a penalty by Wayne Rooney after Javier Hernandez was brought down by Paul Robbinson.

The trophy will be given at their last match next week in Old Trafford as FA didn't bring the trophy this week. It will be a pleasant party since all of the MU fans can celebrate the party at their home base, Old Trafford, one of the best stadium in England and probably in the world.

AdSense Account Suspended

Just know, i visited my blog and i wondered, why does the Google AdSense is not showing on my blog? I checked my Monetize tab on Blogger and it says it was suspended . I never put anything on my web and now suddenly it was suspended by Google

I have asked them to review my account and hopefully they will reinstate my AdSense account. I don't really have much money there, but it's been so hard collecting them cent by cent for years and now they are gone in just an instant

This is almost the same problem i had with PayPal few months ago. There was an invalid activity on my account thus my account was suspended. The reason was because someone hacked into other people's account and send the money to me so it was like a scapegoat

Let's hope Google really being generous to reinstate my AdSense account back to me

New Curriculum

Starting next semester, we are enrolling new curriculum for all of our students. As always, new curriculum means there will be some adjustment for the students, so for that reason, we held a socialization event this morning for each class.

Since i was a supervisor for class 2010, i attended this morning and give some brief information about why it's neccessary for the changes and also how it will be applied. Luckily my class is a new class, so they were not affected much by the new system.

We really worked hard to make sure that the students gets the benefit of it and not the way around. Trust me... We are making the best choice for you guys

Installing BackTrack 5

I have some time this morning, so i decided to try the new BackTrack 5 on top of VirtualBox. The installation is pretty straightforward and it's less confusing than Ubuntu even though it uses the same base (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS).

After i logged in to the desktop using the Live CD ISO (I picked the KDE version), there's only a single desktop shortcut, which is a shortcut to install BT 5 on hard drive.

I had problems when installing Ubuntu, mostly when setting the timezone since it tries to connect to the time server and it usually not responding for some time before it become active again. This doesn't happen on BackTrack 5. The longest part is when the installer stopped at 99% saying "Almost finished copying files...". I think they are still doing background process and it tried to connect to the Internet.

Once this is done, i should have BackTrack 5 installed.

If you would like to install Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, it would be a good idea to disable your network card prior installing if you don't have a good Internet connection. It will make your installation much much faster and you can configure your network card after the installation is done. This way, you won't stuck at installing phase

Amarok 2.4.1 Released

Amarok team has released a new version of Amarok: Amarok 2.4.1 "Resolution". This is a stable release, so it should be safe to upgrade to this version.

Here's the full changelist from the announcement page:

Features

• Remote NFS & SMB/CIFS collections now work! (BR 249760, BR 232976, BR 171213, BR 187692)
• New "Preview" feature for the Organize Collection dialog. Patch by Maximilian Güntner .
• String filtering in the albums applet.
• Ability to change text alignment in the lyrics applet.
• gpodder.net Service, a Podcast Directory displaying the most used Tags from gpodder.net & the top Podcasts of these Tags

Changes

• The podcast directory service is now based on incremental parsing of OPML without caching in the database.
• Plugins can now be optionally enabled in the config dialog.
• Script selector is moved from the menubar to the config dialog.
• Now all changes to Preset Formats in Organize Collection dialog get saved on close, doesn't matter If dialog was accepted or rejected.
• Added "Update Preset" button to Organize Collection dialog, which updates currently choosen scheme.
• Renewed FilterEditor dialog.
• Changed tokens syntax in FileNameLayoutDialog (TagGuesser, OrginizeCollection dialogs) now tokens wrapped in percent signs (%token% instead of %token).
• Added ability to guess tags from whole track path. (TagGuesser dialog)
• Use KDirWatch to watch changes to collection.
• Do always store track rating as tags in files. Patch by Alan Ezusti . (BR 259117)
• Added missing tooltip for animation settings. Patch by Bhargav Mangipudi . (BR 248690)

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash on saving playlist on ineligible device. (BR 266899)
• Fixed Photos applet crash on track metadata change. (BR 265395)
• Fixed crash on local collection search. (BR 270949)
• Fixed crash during iPod track removal. (BR 253088)
• Relative paths support for XSPF playlists. (BR 264147)
• Fixed incorrect handling of "Various Artists" node by Collection Browser, now selection of this node returns "Various Artists" tracks instead of whole collection. (BR: 263255, BR: 269717)
• Fixed song scrobbling if It was paused. (BR 267477)
• Screen escape characters in MusicBrainz request string. (BR 269455)
• Fixed detection of iPod devices.
• Fixed crash when the lyrics applet was removed and re-added while a track was playing and the user pressed "ESC".
• Fixed cached lyrics were not displayed if no lyrics script was running.
• Fixed lyrics changes in the TagDialog were not "synchronized" to the lyrics applet.
• Fixed reporting of playback status for MPRIS (both versions). (BR 268282)
• Fixed translation issue in MagnatuneSignupDialog. Patch by Burkhard Lueck (lueck@hube-lueck.de) (BR: 239019)
• Fixed crash on loading unsupported format playlist. (BR: 265378)
• Ask delete confirmation for all contents of folder at once instead of each individually. Affects "Saved Playlists" and "Podcasts" (BR 246117)
• Fixed unreadable text in lyrics applet in kde 4.6. (BR 265311)
• Fixed tag dialog crash when sorting by genre and then changing tags.
• Fixed track's statistics update in case of StopAfterCurrent playback mode (prevent double statistics change). (BR 265654)
• Delete .mood files when tracks got removed from collection via Collection view context menu, and move them to new destination during Organize Collection process. (BR 261629)
• Fixed "Configure Amarok..." disappearing in tray menu. (BR 258226)
• Fixed crash when quitting Amarok. (BR 253676, BR 257407)
• Fixed empty folders removal after collection organization. (BR 190881)
• Fixed crash when trying to load cover for track/album without artist. (BR 263256)
• Fixed linking on Solaris 11 (and others?). (BR 264112)
• Fixed temporary podcast download filenames that were to long by using MD5 hash instead. Thanks to Frank Steinmetzger for the patch. (BR 264813)
• Fixed issue with absentee toolbar on clear run (without config files). (BR 259615)
• Fixed CD copying functionality. (BR 264050)
• Fixed CUE tracks playback order. (BR 263237)
• Prevent crash on exit when using Phonon-VLC.
• Fixed crash in the queue editor when trying to show already removed items of the playlist. (BR 263308)
• Fixed Mute button. (BR 253098)
• Fixed issue with Organize collection, which made amarok remove newly copied tracks. (BR 263301)
• Fixed wrong "Configure amarok" action position in tray icon popup menu. (BR 263330)
• Fixed minor inconsistency in the Collection view. Patch by Bhargav Mangipudi . (BR 260973)
• Fixed potential crash with the Similar Artists applet. Thanks to Tuomas Nurmi for the patch. (BR 263145)
• Fixed 'Scale Font' option in OSD options for OSD preview widget. (BR 254029)
• Fixed issue with playlist tooltips that was shown independetly from "Show tooltip" option. (BR 263121)
• Fixed issues with multifiles cuesheet, when all tracks get metadata of last track in cuesheet, and each file defined in sheet gets all tracks of this sheet. (BR 262668) (BR 209341)
• Fixed crash when trying to download a full size cover and the server redirects the request. (BR 262902)
• Fixed issue when breadcrumbs stayed not updated after service insert/remove. (BR 262780)
• Fixed issue with TagDialog that make metadata fields stay editable if multiple streams opened. (BR 177400)
• Fixed missing equals-sign ('=') in filter string of bookmarks. (BR 245759)

BackTrack 5 Released

The developer of BackTrack Linux has high commitment on BackTrack Linux 5 release schedule. They released it on time according to the schedule described on their roadmap.

This version is built based on Ubuntu Lucid LTS (10.04). It uses a different kernel though. They are using the latest Linux Kernel 2.6.38, patched with all relevant wireless injection patches. Fully open source and GPL compliant.

You can start downloading it now, but it's only available on Torrents only (for now). Perhaps they don't want to have their system gets banged by huge amount of request since this Linux distribution is highly anticipated by many users.

Update (08:35 PM): All of them are now complete. Enjoy BackTrack 5

Linux Kernel 2.6.38.6

The latest -Stable kernel has been raised again after Greg released a new version : 2.6.38.6. This is a maintenance update, so no new feature are included, only bug fixes and minor changes. Even though Greg urges users to upgrade to this version, it's wiser to look at the ChangeLog to decide whether you really need to upgrade to this version or not.

Personally, i don't really see any important updates in this release, so if you have no problem with your current kernel (2.6.38.x series), you can stay with it until 2.6.39 comes up in probably a week or two

19th Title Next Week?

Manchester United has just won a big match against Chelsea 2-1 in Old Trafford. It's the same score when Chelsea beat MU at their home, but the situation is different. It was a crutial time in the race for the title as this season only has 2 matches left and both of them are the best candidate for the champion after Arsenal was down 3-1 to Stoke C.

It was Javier Hernandez who scored the first goal under 1 minute and then followed by Nemanja Vidic to get United's second goal. 2-0 lead stays remain until half time. Lampard scored a surprising goal with his left foot, but that couldn't help Chelsea to get more goals out of United's net until the end of the second half.

It's a bit disappointing that Rooney didn't get more goals since he got so many chances, but eventually it was blocked by Alex and denied by other Chelsea players.

I can't wait to see United win the champion title next week and then they can start focusing on Champion league against Barcelona in Wembley Stadium.

It's another proof that EPL is one of the most attracting and most competitive league around the world. In Italy, AC Milan has sealed the title race already and in Germany, they already had their champion last week. In Spain, the champion is 99% locked by Barcelona and only a miracle could stop them to regain their title back again, but not in EPL. Not until next week we can see the champion, but with this big win, i'm sure 99.99% it will belong to United again and for the 19th title to beat Liverpool's record

iOS 4.3.3 Untethered JB

iOS 4.3.3 has been out for some time and it's ready to be jailbreaked after some developers has released an update for their products which can be used to jailbreak the latest iOS released by Apple.

Here are some links which can be used to jailbreak your Apple products using iOS 4.3.3 according to the tool's name:
PwnAgeTools
Sn0wBreeze
Ultrasn0w
Redsn0w

iPad 2 Enthusiasm

iPad 2 is very popular around the globe, even in China where most of the electronic products can be faked there. Yesterday, Apple officially released iPad 2 in China and guess what? It was sold out in just 4 hours. As you can see, iPad 2 demands were very high in China and also around the globe.

There is an example how iPad 2 future customer were queueing up for iPad 2 outside Apple Store

KDE 4.6.3 Released

The third series of KDE monthly update is now available at public KDE mirrors. This update is a maintenance updates, meaning no new feature introduced and only focusing on bug fixes and translation updates.

The 4.6.3 release is dedicated in memory of the young daughter of KDE developer Daniel Nicoletti who tragically passed away after a car crash last month.

The ChangeLog is not really interesting, but for those who needs a stable update, this version might be the right choice for you, since it's safe to upgrade to this version.

BackTrack Linux Underway

One of the most well-known Linux distribution for penetration testing: BackTrack Linux is under heavy testing and it's being prepared to be launched in the next five days. It will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS edition and it will have (finally) support for 32/64 bit architecture.

It will have a version number of 5 and codename of "Revolution" and what's more interesting is that it will support KDE 4, Gnome and Fluxbox Desktop Environment (DE) and they will also release ISO for each DE, so users can choose as they like. The previous version only comes with KDE 3. The menu structure will be reorganized so that it doesn't have any difference no matter what DE you used. It will also come with a full source code in the repository just like what you can get in Ubuntu Linux repositories.

As usual, it will be equipped with an extensive list of penetration testing tools which is selected carefully to ensure that it stays up to date and proven to be useful for penetration testing session, both in real live or in simulation (for example in CEH classroom session). I'm not really sure if they will come in VMWare Image or not, but looking at the past releases, i'm sure they will release it in VMWare as well.

MU Advanced to Champion League Final

MU crushed Schalke 04 with a big score 4 - 1 at Old Trafford after a goal from Valencia, Darren Gibson, and a double from Anderson

They playes perfectly even though only three senior players were played by Sir Alex Fergusson in order to make the rest of the squad fresh when they meet with Chelsea this weekend for the title race of EPL. The EPL title might be decided by this battle and it's so crusial so that Sir Alex had to rotate the players cleverly and he did it perfectly.

If you miss the match, you can always watch it in YouTube

Ubuntu 11.10 Repository

Even though Ubuntu 11.04 has just been released few days ago, it doesn't mean that Ubuntu developer stopped working at the next release. In fact, they have started to work on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). Their work can be seen by the availability of Oneiric repository at Ubuntu mirror site.

For now, the repository is not yet completed, as it's just few days since the stable release, but some work has been available, for example the inclusion of Linux Kernel 2.6.39-rc5 and probably newer GCC 4.6 and many more.

Remember that Ubuntu 11.10 is not yet suitable for daily usage. They haven't release Alpha version yet, so it's just a rough version, updated daily to improve the overal system of Ubuntu.

Testing Ubuntu 11.04

Ubuntu 11.04 has been released the same day as Slackware 13.37 and it brings a major upgrade to Ubuntu system in general with the inclusion of Unity replacing the standard GNOME desktop. I was so curious about Unity which for some people caused so much headache and painful configuration in many areas and for the rest saying this is a worthed upgrade.

Later on today, i will try installing Ubuntu 11.04 on a virtual machine (using Virtual Box) in my workstation (running Slackware 13.37) and see what will be my first impression about Ubuntu 11.04. So far, i'm pleased with Ubuntu 10.10 since it was so stable and well maintained. Let's see if this impression can continue in 11.04?

Some people said that xx.04 release is not so stable since in most cases, Canonical introduces big changes to the Ubuntu (like this Unity thing), but i am about to see if it's true or not in the next few hours. It's still 5:10 AM here, so i won't be testing anything for now

(Update: 10:48 AM): I have installed Ubuntu on top of Virtual Box and sadly, it's like the others. It was kinda dissapointing. The installer stucked at time zone selection until i disabled my network adapter. It seems the installer were downloading something from Internet and it took all the resources.

I couldn't test unity since the hardware acceleration is not present in my system. I didn't know that Unity requires 3D acceleration to be present
Some applications are not responding at first, but after i install Ubuntu 11.04 updates (there are around 49 MB of updates with just few days of updates, can you believe that?), it works normally again. It's a sign of an untested applications before release. This is contrary to Slackware installation on my machine. Everything worked as intended.

I guess i wouldn't recommend Ubuntu 11.04 for now. Stay with 10.10 for now and upgrade when 11.10 is released in the next five months if it's considered stable. Most likely Unity will become more mature and the base system will be much more stable than current version.

HBO Go

HBO has officially released HBO GO for iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch (3/4 Gen), iPad, and iPad 2. It's the new streaming service from HBO®. You can watch over 1,400 of your favorite HBO shows, including HBO original programming, hit movies, sports, comedy and much more—now available on iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch! What's more is that it's delivered for free

But then at the end of the information, i saw this message

HBO GO® is only accessible in the US. Minimum 3G connection is required for viewing on mobile devices. Some restrictions may apply for mobile devices.

What?????? US only?

Food for Thought

Last month, National Geographic magazine talked about world population that touched 7 billion people. It was huge amount and it could create so many problems if we don't think of a solution. The world is getting crowded and lots of things to take care, such as food, place to live, energy supply, and many more.

This month, NGM showed a stunning number abou food for thought. In 2009, we have killed around 52 billion chickens, 2,6 billions of ducks, 1.3 billions of pigs, 1.1 billions of rabbits, 633 millions of turkeys, 518 million of sheep, 398 millions of goats, 293 million of cows, 24 million of water buffalo, and 1.7 million of camels worldwide. Can you think of the growing number in recent and future years? It would be very huge with more and more people living in this tiny earth.

One solution to preserve those animals and keeping it from extinction is to start a new habbit of being a vegetarian. You can start your new habbit by reading all information about vegetarian at PETA's Vegetarian Starter Kit.

It would be a good idea if we can spread this good habbit in our own environment and let it spread like a parasit.