How To Eject Your Flash Drive

If you ever happened to attempt to eject your flash drive or external hard drive on Windows system, but failed with an error message of "the device 'generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. try stopping the device again later", then there's a process which still "holds" the file or the drive inside.

In Linux, you can use lsof command (short for List of Open File) to see which process holds the file and we can just use the kill command to terminate the process. The same situation is not the same in Windows where Task Manager doesn't give us any ability to see this kind of information.

In order to fix those error, you can use UnLocker or Process Explorer to find out who's process is still holding the drive and you can terminate it in order to make it releaseable from the system.

Last Episodes

Today, the last episodes of Man of Honors will be released to public and the subtitle will follow few days later. It's been a great time watching this KDrama, even my wife liked it too and she became more addicted than i'm on this case.

Thanks to KBS for airing this great KDrama. I'm looking forward for another great KDrama next year.

RC6 Disabled Again

RC6, the power-saving feature that should be one of the promising feature in the next Linux Kernel has (again) been switched off by default (you can turn it manually though) after the developer find it quite unstable on his machine and saying that it's not ready for prime time. RC6 is capable of saving power for mobile (and desktop) systems by allowing the integrated graphics processor to rest in a lower power-state, while at the same time is capable of boosting OpenGL performance (Taken from Phoronix).

The commit by Keith Packard has been approved by Linus and merged into Linux Kernel 3.2. If you prefer to enable this feature on your machine, pass i915.i916_enable_rc6=1 as a kernel command-line parameter.

iOS 5.0.1 Untethered Jailbreak

Finally, the wait is over. The long awaited iOS 5 untethered jailbreak has finally been released by the Chronic Dev team. I have just performed an upgrade to iOS 5.0.1 on my iPad and after that, i performed an untethered jailbreak, thanks to pod2g's work on this exploit which enables users (like me) to enjoy a fully untethered jailbreak on iDevices (except for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S).

It's working flawlessly and it runs smoother even though i had some problems while performing it (most of it because of my lack of understanding, so basically it's my fault), but that has been sorted out and now, i'm running on iOS 5.0.1.

For those who wanted to perform an upgrade to iOS 5.0.1, please visit FreakGeeks for more information about this. Don't forget to always BACK UP your data before performing any of these actions mentioned on the article. Your loss is not theirs or my fault :)

MU is On Fire

Manchester United may not start this season with a good performance, but they has started their engine during this December and got a big win lately. Even more, they performed clean sheet to close their goal difference gap to their rival, Manchester City who become the dark horse this season.

Last night, they out performed wigan with 5-0 match at Old Trafford and week before, they crushed the home team Fulham with the same goal. What a game for sir Alex Fergusson's team.


Let's hope they can be like this for the rest of this season and win the title once again....

Viva Manchester United

KDrama Suggestion

Lately, i have been watching Man of Honor as the only KDrama i followed. In the past, i usually followed 2-3 KDramas per week, but due to busy schedule this semester, i don't have time to watch too much dramas.

Man of Honors is a good KDrama (in my opinion) and it has 24 episodes in total. I would recommend it to all of you KDrama lovers if you haven't watch it yet. Right now, it's their last week, thus the last two episodes are coming this week as it will end their show.

I would like to ask for next KDrama suggestion from all of you. Do you have any suggestion for any KDramas that i should watch for next year? It could be a future KDrama or an airing KDramas as well.

Merry Christmas

Happy holidays everyone... I just want to say Merry Christmas to all of my blog readers wherever you are. Let this joy can be shared to everyone and hopefully you have a great christmas with your family.....

Christmas Eve

Today is Christmas Eve and i celebrated it with my wife by going to the Church at 4 PM and take the first Liturgy that started at 5 PM and ended around 7 PM. As always, this church is always crowded during Christmas Eve and also Easter event.

After that, we went to Amplaz to have dinner with my mother in law and also her aunt. I'm so exhausted right now and i wanted to go to sleep. This is probably the first time i don't celebrate Christmas at midnight and send SMS to my girlfriend because now she has become my wife, i can replace it with a big hug and kiss LOL.....

New Son

I would like to congrats my cousin, Ivan who has just become a dad few hours ago since his wife has given birth to Reuel Alexander Dossugi, their first kid in Australia. I believe this is their biggest Christmas present ever.


We may never meet again until next year, but i'm looking forward to see your son soon (when he's big enough to fly back to Indonesia)

Last Working Day This Year

Today is my last working day on 2011 and starting tomorrow, i will enjoy my holiday with my wife and also my family until next year.

I wanted to inform you that my Plurk emoticon is no longer working as Blogger has removed some of their toolbar in the old editor, meaning that it won't show any more emoticons from Plurk or Yahoo!, so i think it's better to upgrade to the new editor to get the latest version of the WYSIWYG editor from Blogger and good bye to those lovely emoticons. I will miss you.....

Honestly, i don't really like the new editor. I can't preview my post live just like the old one, but hopefully Blogger team will fix this in the future *finger-crossed*

LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session

LibreOffice community is now preparing for the major release of LibreOffice 3.5.0 which will be released next year. For that event, they wanted to make sure that every bug has been fixed before it reached the users. For that reason, they will held a Bug Hunting Session which will be started at December 28 and 29, live from five different continents around the globe.

What can you do? You can help them by downloading the pre-release of LibreOffice from their download page, and then start using it and report any problem you encountered during normal usage. Every information you posted will be a valuable report to the developer to diagnose and fix the problem.

For those who are curious about what will the next major release be, you can visit LibreOffice 3.5.0 Release Note (in Draft).

Regular Classes Done

I'm done with the marking for the regular classes and today, the final exam for the dual degree program started, so my next assignment will be marking those final exams.

The students were only 4 and 9, so it won't take much of my time actually. On the other hands, i have a deadline to catch up tomorrow, so i think it's better to prioritize the deadline first and then i can do the marking later on.

After that, i'm free until next year and i can't wait for the holidays..... yeah.. i need them badly since i had a very busy schedule this semester....

One More Class

Today, my last class has had their final exam and i have finished marking 3 out of 4 classes and that means i'm one step closer to my freedom which should be tomorrow when i have completed all of the markings and send it to the other lecturer to mark (there are two lecturers in charge of this class).

Next will be on IDDIT programs where the exams will start by tomorrow and the day after. I think i won't have problems marking this as there will be only 4 students for BIS 304 class and 9 students for BIS 202 class. I can finish them all in less than 1 hour i guess

Mystery Case Files 8: Escape from Ravenhearst

The latest Mystery Case Files, MCF 8 : Escape From Ravenhearst is now released to public. It's been a while since the previous version of MCF was released few years ago, and it's getting bigger and better in terms of quality, but also it requires higher specifications for the hardware.

It's now up to 1,4 GB in size, so get ready to be stunned by the amazing adventure of MCF

MU is Back

After having bad performance for the last few matches, finally MU gained some momentum by beating QPR in their away match. I think this is a crutial match since they are now in the top of the EPL table for now, giving pressures to Manchester City who will play against Arsenal. City will be on top again if they could held draw or win agains Arsenal.

In the past, MU will be dominating EPL after the boxing day (26 December), so on January, their engine has warmed up and start . Hopefully this season ends with a good result, which is the EPL champion again, for 20th time

Windows 8 Password in Cloud

We all know that Windows 8 will be cloud-dominated. It tries to mimic Google Chrome OS in most of their system architecture. One thing that interest me after reading the news from H-Online is that Windows 8 will store user's password in the cloud as well.

If it's going to be implemented, then there will be some problem. Some countries (like mine) are not ready to have cloud-based OS since the underlying Internet infrastructure isn't ready yet. The rate for having a stable and mid-fast Internet connection is way to high compared to other countries. The quality level of the connection itself is not as high as others.

Another reason why it would have big problems is in the cloud itself. How many people willing to store their password outside their own computers and leave it on a public server when anyone can access (and attack) ? I think that idea might have to be carefully thinked before being implemented. It's not too late to revise those good ideas. At least give alternatives for the users to store their password locally.

Cheating

Today, there was an exam of software engineering and based from the report i got from the supervisor of the exam, they identified some of the students cheated and based from that report, i gave them E as the lowest grade ever without marking their exam.

Some of them complained to me via SMS and Facebook and tell me that there was miscommunication between them and the supervisor. For me, it was just a self-defence mechanism to protect themselves without looking at the rules at examination room. It's stated that you are not allowed to borrow items from your friends, not allowed to talk to your friends. I think those rules are crystal clear for all students around the globe. Failed to do so means you are dealing with all the grades you got for 1 semester.

Anyway, i'm still giving them hope for an open discussion next Monday. Hopefully by then we can get the final answer

Qt 4.8 Released

Nokia has announced the next major release of Qt 4.8 libraries to all platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac). This release incorporated a lot of new improvements and also bringing it closer to Qt 5 which will be released next year.

Here are some highlights that you can expect from Qt 4.8:

• The Qt Platform Abstraction (the outcome of the lighthouse project) provides you with a clean abstraction layer that makes it easier to port QtGui to new windowing systems.
• Qt Quick improvements Qt 4.8 speeds up Qt Quick UI design and app development with ready-made components and features such as Right-To-Left support, Support for split-screen virtual keyboard as well as a pinch area to provide a declarative API for handling touch input.
• Qt WebKit 2.2.1. The Qt 4.8 release features an updated version of QtWebKit from the WebKit project, including a wide range of improvements to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies.
• Threaded Open GL in Qt 4.8 makes it much easier, and more thread safe, to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently (and avoid the main thread being blocked while the GPU is doing its thing)
• Multithreaded HTTP HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. This should make application guis smoother, as networking will no longer use the main event loop.
• Optimized file system access. Better I/O performance, achieved by reducing the number of system calls performed for I/O and by better use of cached data, when available

So, what are you waiting for? Go Get Them

Mass Rename Script

I need to convert bunch of files which has the same patterns and i need to do it quick, so i just created a simple bash script to help me out

#!/bin/bash

LS=`ls *`
for FILE in $LS
do
 name=`ls $FILE | cut -d . -f1`
 name1=`ls $FILE | cut -d . -f3`
 name2=`ls $FILE | cut -d . -f4`
 mv $FILE "$name.$name1.$name2"
done

So, if i have a filename with a.xxx.01.avi and i wanted to remove the xxx part, i only need to execute the script and every file with that pattern will be changed to a.01.avi.

Simple huh? BASH

Watching Breaking Dawn Part 1

Finally i had watched the first part of Breaking Dawn, a movie that was made based on Stephanie Meyer's novel. Honestly, i haven't read the novel, so i didn't know the real plot from the original novel.

The movie was a continuation from the previous movie, Eclipse that aired in 2010 and this is the last movie of The Twilight Saga series. This movie is now split into two parts (just like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). The second part will be airing next year, so it's the closing of all that happened during this few years.

I must say, the movie was great, but at some point, it showed inappropriate content, mostly at the end of movie when Bella was trying to give birth to her daughter. For those who would like to bring their kids to watch this, be prepared since you will see a lot of blood on this movie

Movies to Watch

There two movies that i would like to see with my wife and they are The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and also Happy Feet 2. I have seen their previous movies and it was interesting to follow, so i decided to watch them by this week. We will start by watching Breaking Dawn first by tomorrow and we will decide when to watch Happy Feet 2 few days later.

I need to release my stress due to busy schedule even when i have no classes left. My days in the office was filled with presentation (i have lots of presentations today) and discussion for final thesis. By the end of this week, i should be busy with marking the grades for my classes final exam because i have to submit the grades as soon as possible so i won't be disturbed at January

Kungfu Panda : Legends of Awesomeness

Kungfu Panda has been a great movie after their two box office movie, Kungfu Panda and Kungfu Panda 2. After this two big hits, there has been some short movie about Kungfu Panda, which was Kungfu Panda Secret of Five and Kungfu Panda Holidays Special, but none of them were TV shows, so here's the big news.

Kungfu Panda is now airing as TV shows and it's known as Kungfu Panda : Legends of Awesomeness. This show is part of Nickelodeon and it was supposed to be aired last year, but for some reason it's being pushed until last September.

For the first season, there will be 26 episodes and hopefully they will continue to the next season

Review: Heimdal Security Agent

For those who have seen Thor, you might recognize Heimdal, which was described as the guardian for the Asgard. He watched for any attacks that might threaten Asgard and plays important role to prevent that. Heimdal Security Agent, a product developed by CSIS Security Group A/S named after a Norse god which has the same name (Heimdal in Thor was probably taken from this story as well). But this product is helping users to prevent attack to their confidential data such as credit cards, social security number, emails, computer data, etc.

As i said before, Heimdal Security Agent is divided into two types, free and commercial. The free model allows home users to install this application and you will get basic protection, but it's more than enough. The commercial edition has two more category: pro and corporate. For more detail about the differences between these two version including the pricing, please check their Features. Currently, this product only support Windows client, but they are working to support Mac OS X as well in the future (i really hope they will support Linux users as well though ). You can get the latest version by visiting this page or if you wanted to skip registration, you can go to this page instead.

Heimdal Security Agent requires .NET Framework 4.0 to be installed on your computer, but if you don't have it yet, don't worry. It will download it automatically (around 50 MB). The process went straightforward and it's safe to assume that all users will have no problem installing this application. This is the only requirement to install Heimdal Security Agent, so don't worry too much. This application is very responsive and it loads so fast, faster than Secunia PSI in my computer (please let me know if i'm wrong about this).


This is what i get after i installed Heimdal Security Agent and it has finished scanning my computer for any vulnerabilities. Everything was conducted automatically so most users don't really need to worry about it , except when there's a notification saying that your system is very vulnerable (that's the point when you should say )

Heimdal Security Agent is able to download the updated version automatically (you can disable it or give an exception if you prefer to stay on current version), so users can let this powerful tool to work and solve your problem.

When i entered the PRO license, i unlocked two tabs that were previously locked: Malware and Modules. This should give users more protection to malware threats and also secure DNS to prevent DNS spoofing or any other identity-related threats.

Having this tool combined with Secunia PSI is a must and it won't conflict to each other. Two tools are better than one and hopefully it can give user better protection.

As i said before, i still have 9 licenses left for a PRO version of Heimdal Security Agent. This was generously granted by their Head of Operations after reading my previous post on January this year. So, if you want to have those licenses, please send me an email and please let me know the reason why you need to have the PRO license instead of using the free users. I'm expecting from Corporate users, but home users that has high interests on security can also apply for this license.

Update (1 June, 2012, 04:44 PM): Here's the list of people who managed to get the pro licenses from me:

• Espen Thunold, Infosec Professional from Norway
• Maurice 
• Lars Risager 
• Francisco Jacob
• Bintang Mahesaputra Wanda  
• Rob A. Schmidt
• John H Gamborg 
• Tom Birch Hansen  
• Fred de Vries 

Congratulations to those who have got the professional licenses and Fred is the last person who got it. I have no more pro licenses to give away.

Coming Soon: Heimdal Security Agent Review

Early this year, i wrote about Heimdal Security Agent which was developed CSIS Security Group and it was offered in freemium model, meaning that it has two licenses: free model for home users and premium model for corporate users. This tool can be used to measure your security defenses by comparing application versions installed on your computer with the latest one that vendor has provided. This is one simple way to make sure that you have the up-to-date system and prevent unwanted condition happening on your computer.

Few days ago, one of their executive contacted me and offered me premium licenses if i wanted to make a review about their products and i agreed to it. He has sent me 10 licenses instead of 5 which he agreed before, so i'm obligated to post a review about this product, but not on this post, as i'm still using Linux at the moment and Heimdal doesn't support Linux currently (hopefully they will be able to get support for Linux as soon as possible).

I will try spending my time on Windows later and when i do, i will make a review of this product, start by using the free model and then i will try to use the premium model which should give me more benefit compared to the free model. Since i'll be using 1 license, there will be 9 licenses left to be shared and the CSIS executive has agreed to give this licenses for anyone i picked.

I don't know how many people might be interested with this offer, but here's the deal. If you want to get a pro license for Heimdal Security Agent, please send me an email along with your reason why you should be given a premium license. I am expecting from corporate users who will send me those emails, even though i may not reject from home users as well. I may not give the license as soon as i receive the mail, but i will pick 9 of them and publish it along when my post is completed

iOS 5 Untethered Jailbreak

Freakgeeks has reported that @pod2g has managed to do a full untethered jailbreak on iOS5 and he has posted a video on Youtube demonstrating it on his iPod Touch 3rd Generation

It's all getting more interested and soon we will have a complete untethered jailbreak

CNET Controversy

CNET's Download.com has been known for years and they built a good reputation in the past, but a simple mistake could ruin it. Gordon Lyon or more popularly known as Fyodor (the author of NMap) sent a post on seclist complaining that CNET is now repackaged his package with another installer which will install additional toolbar application when user accepted them during installation. The additional toolbar will change your computer's setting and it can be considered as a trojan for some anti virus.

Sean Murphy, the vice president and GM of CNET posted an apology statement and willing to fix this, but there has been some doubt from some people because there might be a specific deal to include these application within other popular open source applications such as NMap and VLC.

If you don't trust them yet, it would be better to get the application straight from the author's website and not from CNET Also make sure to check the checksum through MD5 or SHA1 values (if provided).

KDE Announcement

KDE has released two announcement at the same time, the release of a maintenance version of KDE 4.7.4, which should be the last KDE 4.7.x branch and also KDE 4.8.0 Beta 2, which marks for another milestone towards the final release of KDE 4.8.0 next January.

Packagers should now focusing on building KDE 4.8.0, so please be patient if KDE packages in your distribution may not came as fast as they used too. Besides, it only gives translations updates and bug fixes only

Opera 11.60 Released

Opera has released a new version of it's product, Opera 11.60. This new version has a new codename: tunny and it uses Opera Presto 2.10 rendering engine which should bring improvements in many aspect, mostly the rendering process.

With this release, Opera also managed to add more support on new Web technologies standards, such as HTML 5, CSS 3 and 4,ECMA Script 5.1, XMLHttpRequest, and GeoLocation.

See the ChangeLog for more detail information about this new release

Too Much Emoticons

Plurk lately allows their users to add custom emoticons as long as it doesn't exceed their maximum dimensions which is quite small. This, for some people are good news because they don't have to search for Karma (that's their scoring points) in order to get more emoticons. In the other hand, it makes an old users (like i do) are getting uninterested anymore with Plurk, since we got our emoticons by raising our Karma and we maintained it so hard.

Karma's increment decreases over time and to reach 100 from 95 took about 6 months itself (i counted it based on the average of 0.01 increment every four hours). It was really so painful to get Karma 100. Even after we reached 100, we still have to plurk regularly or it will drop quite big.

Right now, Plurk has unlimited Karma points and i had frozen my Karma point at 100.00 so that i don't have to worry about dropping my Karma point again.

Upgraded Bandwdith

Lately, my Internet connection is much faster than normal condition. I recently found out that my ISP is generously upgrading my bandwidth with same rate. I can download much faster at this point and hopefully this promotions last for a long time (hopefully permanent)

I know it's way less than any broadband in big countries, but for me, it's more than enough

Rethinking About Captcha

CAPTCHA has been used on many systems to prevent automated registration or process into a system. This technique was originally designed to prevent bot or spammers to do further actions that are easily be done by humans.

There are a lot of variations of CAPTCHA, but lately, their efectiveness has been dropped since there has been many research of CAPTCHA model and some researchers are able to break through the mechanisms by analyzing the image and they have a good system that could have accuracy above 90%. More over, there has been a lot of paid services on the Internet that sells these codes, so it's up to the site owners to think more whether this solution is still effective or not.

As users, we should also rethink about how CAPTCHA can be evolved in order to make bots still unable to go through, but in the meantime still makes the human comfortable with the challenges that are constructed against them. I believe many scientiest should came up with more bright ideas in the future

Managing Digital Book

I have heard about Calibre for some time, but i just installed it (Thanks to Eric Hameleers for providing this package in Slackware) and feel the power of this application. It handles my ebook perfectly, because it can download the metadata about the book from the Internet. I can see reviews/ratings from other users collected at Amazon or any other online book store. This way, i can see whether this book is good enough to read.

If you have other devices, you can export the PDFs you have to the format used in your device. Calibre also provide on the fly connectivity by using Stanza for iOS-based devices. I can read my collection at my desktop via my iPad. That means i don't have to waste my free space on my iPad and i can use it for other apps or files.

This application is updated every week and it was developed by a guy name Kovid Goyal since 2009. Right now, it has been used in over 200 countries around the world, a real proof that this application deserves to be selected as the tool to manage your digital files.

Life to Enjoy

Tomorrow will be my last class of this semester and after that, my focus will be on grading and also marking the assignments and also the final exam which will be conducted starting next week. Luckily, my exam will be held around 16 of December and the last exam will be on 21 of December, meaning that i have plenty of time to make the questions.

The problem is that i will have shorter time to mark the assignment or probably i will just do it after my end of year holiday and that will be on January . Sorry folks, i have a life to enjoy