Washing Bottles

I just washed all the bottles and baby equipments with my wife and then we put it on a big sterilizers and let it work for 35 minutes before we will take it and put it on our luggage.

As the expected day is approaching, many things should be considered and i have to make sure everything works under control. Some are still on progress and they are not done yet, but hopefully they can be finished by tomorrow.

Advanced Multi-Monitor Handling in KDE

According to Dan Vrátil and Alex Fiestas, KDE will have an advanced multi-monitor handling that should works without too much intervention. They are now working to collect all possibilities that could happened with multi-monitor environments.

The promising tool will land in KDE soon and if it's implemented, it will have the similar experience like in Windows environments (and probably even less complicated). In short, it will make working with multi-monitor so much easier.

Here's a video showing the current work

Merry Christmas 2012

Best wishes from Willy and Family

Time to Upgrade?

If you are PHP users and you like to follow the latest release of PHP, then you should know by now that PHP 5.5.0 will drop support for Windows XP and 2003. That means, the minimum version of Windows supported are Vista, 7, 8, and 2008.

I still have one desktop that are still XP-based that i used at my house. It has been working well for me and i never upgraded nor reinstall it ever since i installed for the first time. In short, XP works. But then i realized that XP will no longer be supported by Microsoft and so does major vendors soon since it's being too old (it has been 11 years since Microsoft released it on 2001).

Well, probably i will have to upgrade to Windows 7 someday, but we will see for the next 6 months to do so. By the end of next semester, we will see if upgrade is needed for me to keep working with Windows XP.

WiFI Problem Fixed

I wrote about WiFI problem few days ago and today, i'm happy to tell you that the problem has been resolved. I don't know what makes it malfuctioning, because the problem doesn't exist in my newer laptop.

The solution is simple, i just copied my wicd configuration files from mynew laptop to the old laptop and restart the wicd client. Voila... Both of my WiFI are now visible and i can connect to both of them now

Journey to Solo

I just came back from one day trip to Solo because my cousin's grand mother passed away few days ago. I went there with my mother and we left Jogja around 2.30 PM and we got there around 5 PM due to bad traffic jam that happened since we were in Jogja.

We stayed there for about 2 hours before we left and travelled back to Jogja. The trip to Jogja was much more smoother becuase there were no sand truck and only busses.

These few days, i lack of good sleep due to many things to do...

Now, most of my todos are done, i think i can get a better sleep tonight

Last Working Day

Today is the last working day in my office as starting next Monday, it will be a Christmas and New Year holiday packed together so it will be a long holiday for me.

Even though it's my last working day, i'm still busy with other work and also i have lots to prepare for my first daughter. It will be a busy days for me in the end of this year :)

PHP Stable Releases

PHP Development Team has just released PHP 5.4.10 and PHP 5.3.20 that are marked as the latest stable release. Here are the changelog for PHP 5.4.10 which mostly are also applies to 5.3.20:

• Core:
• Fixed bug #63635 (Segfault in gc_collect_cycles).
• Fixed bug #63512 (parse_ini_file() with INI_SCANNER_RAW removes quotes from value).
• Fixed bug #63468 (wrong called method as callback with inheritance).
• Fixed bug #63451 (config.guess file does not have AIX 7 defined, shared objects are not created).
• Fixed bug #61557 (Crasher in tt-rss backend.php).
• Fixed bug #61272 (ob_start callback gets passed empty string).

• Date:
• Fixed bug #63666 (Poor date() performance).
• Fixed bug #63435 (Datetime::format('u') sometimes wrong by 1 microsecond).

• Imap:
• Fixed bug #63126 (DISABLE_AUTHENTICATOR ignores array).

• Json:
• Fixed bug #63588 (use php_next_utf8_char and remove duplicate implementation).

• MySQLi:
• Fixed bug #63361 (missing header).

• MySQLnd:
• Fixed bug #63398 (Segfault when polling closed link).

• Fileinfo:
• Fixed bug #63590 (Different results in TS and NTS under Windows).

• FPM:
• Fixed bug #63581 Possible null dereference and buffer overflow.

• Pdo_sqlite:
• Fixed bug #63149 getColumnMeta should return the table name when system SQLite used.

• Apache2 Handler SAPI:
• Enabled Apache 2.4 configure option for Windows.

• Reflection:
• Fixed bug #63614 (Fatal error on Reflection).

• SOAP:
• Fixed bug #63271 (SOAP wsdl cache is not enabled after initial requests).

• Sockets:
• Fixed bug #49341 (Add SO_REUSEPORT support for socket_set_option()).

Monster Life Completed

Few days ago i downloaded the updated Monster Life and today, i have completed the new Circus campaign, thanks to the unfixed glitch on the app itself. The bug itself is hard to fix IMHO due to the nature of the game flow. It does give a side effect for me, but that's easy to solve and it's not a big deal for me as i can leave that side effect.

I must admit that Monster Life is so addicting game, so if you wish to play it, you will spend most of your time on this game.

Last Working Week

Next week will be my last working week before we will have a long holiday until next year. My last working week will be filled with marking the exams and assignments. I still have 1 regular course exam and 2 exams for IDDIT courses and 2 assignments to mark for next week.

Hopefully i can finish it by next week and i will have plenty of time to rest before my first daughter is born by the end of this year :)

Amarok 2.7 Beta Released

AmaroK team has released the first Beta for the upcoming AmaroK 2.7. The new major version will have two new features :

• Preliminary version of the Nepomuk Collection plug-in
• Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm

Unfortunately there are no visible ChangeLog until the final release which will be on near Christmas.


I have tested this application using Slackware's KDE SlackBuild and so far, i found no major problem. It's just working as it used to be. Please note that AmaroK 2.7 will require new optional packages such as libmygpo-qt and libofa.

Longest Colloquium Ever

Today is probably the longest Colloquium session i ever attended. The session took more than 7.5 hours to complete to assess 21 students. My previous record was 4-5 hours. The other group who assessed 20 students completed within 4 hours.

The session was so interesting, but unfortunately, some of the students were not prepared for the presentation, so as the results, almost half of the students on my group's proposal were not approved and they will have to re-submit it for next week.

I think i need a break on Saturday from any major activities.....

CDW Cloud Collaboration

No one works alone nowadays. They need collaboration and also communication to other people to make things faster and better in terms of quality. With the current exponential growth of users and also demanding users, requirements for heavy computing and also speedy access to information is no longer optional. It has become a mandatory requirements.

Having a cloud system that unifies communications and collaboration capabilities is really a great assets to any companies because it allows them to work more productive while maintaining their quality level. CDW Cloud Collaboration is an efficient way to use the power of the cloud to effectively deliver collaboration applications to your staff. It provides access anywhere, any time, on any device! It can be your smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks and you can access it around the globe 24/7.

Why CDW, you might ask. CDW has a long tradition of working in Unified Communication or in hosting collaboration tools. It has deployed more than 4,000 Cisco Unified Communication in the last decade and it has it's hosting the service at its own Tier III-IV facility on a  485,000-square-foot data center. It has a fully redundant system, offering four nines of uptime, perfect solution for any kind of organization. You certainly don't want to have a downtime on your system while you are running your business and a four nines of uptime gives you that warranty. With more than 50 Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts, you won't get any problem finding any support suppose you find any problems or if you want to expand your organization to a higher level.

By using CDW Cloud Collaboration, you can build a variety of applications and systems that encompasses IM (instant messaging), VoIP, Video/Audio Conferencing, Presence technology, Unified Messaging, Data Sharing, Social Media, and Single Number Search.

Check out their CDW’s Solutions blog for up to date information about their services. You will find that CDW is not only working in the networking area, but it also has a wide range of IT solutions for every business size. With the slogan of expert’s who get IT, i'm sure CDW is the perfect solution for you.

Here's a short video showing how CDW can help you running your business:

CDW is a current advertiser on my blog.  All opinions are mine.

Linux Kernel 3.7, VMWare Workstation and NVidia Driver

I have just built Linux Kernel 3.7 and it's now running on my desktop and also my workstation at the office. On my desktop, i have to make sure that the new Linux Kernel doesn't break with two things: NVidia Driver and VMWare Workstation. Well, it seems that both are simply broken in the Linux Kernel 3.7. BUT, there's a simple solution for both problem.

VMWare Workstation:
run this command:
ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.7/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h /usr/src/linux-3.7/include/linux/version.h
vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

NVidia Driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-304.64:
Download patch
gzip -d patch_nvidia_304_60.run_for_3.7
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-304.64-custom.run

If you are running the latest NVidia Driver 310.19, you don't need to apply any patches at all. It's already compatible with the latest Linux Kernel 3.7.

Here's the output in my desktop:
Linux desktop 3.7.0-smp #1 SMP Wed Dec 12 07:03:05 WIT 2012 i686 Pentium(R) Dual-Core  CPU E5300 @ 2.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

WiFI connection at Home

I have a strange problem about WiFI connection at my house. I have set up 2 WiFIs and both are working properly with my devices (nOkia E71, iPad 1 and New iPad 3) and my laptop (slackware). The problem is with my old laptop (ArchLinux) which can't connect to the access point even though i have set the correct passphrase.

Strange thing is that when i installed the ArchLinux for the first time, during installation i ran wifi-menu eth1 and it worked. When the base packages has been installed, it didn't work anymore. I have set the wpa_supplicant configuration correctly, but still no luck. I will try to compare with my Slackware laptop later since they use the same tool to connect, which is wicd.

Back to ArchLinux

For some time, i have been an ArchLinux user, but that didn't last long due to migration to the new /usr which broke my system and i decided to switch back to Slackware on my old laptop. Last week, i decided to try ArchLinux again and i used the latest ArchLinux ISO which contains the latest update for the core packages. As always, the rest of the packages can be downloaded from their repository using pacman tool.

Unlike Slackware, for me, installing ArchLinux requires another computer so that i can have a look on the ArchLinux Guide. Without the guide, i didn't think i will be able to complete the installation process smoothly. At the end, the installation process was successful, and ArchLinux is now installed on my old laptop.

I'm in the middle of configuring my laptop so that i can use this laptop to work,  but as you might know, ArchLinux's base package is SO minimum and you have to download a lot of packages if you want to have a complete desktop, such as KDE or GNOME. This is the main problem for me :)
Besides downloading, manual configuration is still needed to perform additional steps and again, without the Wiki, sometimes finding what to do is not trivial task.

I think Slackware still the best Linux distribution out there for me. Even though it has the same concept of installation phases using cli, but at the end, i could be more productive since i don't have to spend too much time configuring my system.

No Post Lately

It's been a while since my last blog post. In the last few days, my wife was hospitalized and i had to take care of her in the hospital, so i didn't have time to write any blog post. Besides that, my nephew used my work room, so my time with my computer is now limited.

I just want to tell you that my wife is now has been discharged and she can come home with me. She's fine now and so does our baby. We are expecting the baby to come out by the end of this month, so it's very critical time for us lately. There are so many things to prepare...

Arch Linux on old laptop

Today i format my old laptop which has Slackware installed on it and i tried to install Arch Linux for the second time. I used to install Arch Linux in the past on the same laptop, but i moved back to Slackware after a while.

I want to test Arch Linux after they fully migrated to systemd and it was proven that systemd does makes it boot faster, but it also requires old users to learn again since it uses different concept of managing services. Unfortunately some applications still refer to the old rc.conf while the file is no longer exist in a new installation.

What i like from Arch Linux is their documentation. They are helpful so that even advanced users find it very useful. I wish that other Linux distribution can have such a great documentation project like Arch Linux

No More Interesting KDrama

After my last KDrama series: Mr. Nice Guy, i still haven't found any good KDrama again. I have downloaded I Miss You, but never had a chance to watch it for now as i'm still busy with my other schedule.

Well, it seems that KDrama is no longer interesting for me (for now) until all my errands are done....

ArchLinux 2012.12.01

ArchLinux has released a monthly update to their ArchLinux Installer and this month update will use Linux Kernel 3.6.8, arch-install-scripts 9 with an improved fstab generator, and systemd 196 along with other core updates.

Since most of the packages is now has been fully updated to work with systemd, i gues it's worth to try this nice Linux distribution as well. It will not replace Slackware as my main OS, but it would be a nice way to learn Linux in a different point of view.

As you know, ArchLinux is a rolling release Linux distribution, meaning that it normally updates by itself and there are no official release like other Linux distribution. Once you set up your machine, you can upgrade to the latest one by running pacman -Syu regularly (once a day for the most efficient).

I'm downloading ArchLinux tonight and hopefully i can test it by next week.

Another Great Comeback

Manchester United has performed another great comeback from a hard match against Reading and took home 3 points and secured the top position of the EPL table. Wayne Rooney finally scored again and this time, he scored twice to bring 3-4 win over Reading. Van Persie scored the last goal to ensure MU's win on minute 34. It was really a hard first half and MU's defence line was really tested by Reading's player.


Meanwhile, their rivals were facing a hard time getting three points. Arsenal and Chelsea were beaten, and City got a draw on their last match.

Jordan is Back!!

I'm not talking about Michael Jordan, but i'm talking about Jordan, my nephew who's coming back to Jogja along with his mother, my sister whom is on office trip to Jogja. He will stay here for some time before he go back to Jakarta again.

It seems that he completely forgot about me. Well, no wonder, since kids below 2 years usually do not remember people very well. They will know people around them around 2 years old and since then, they will be able to understand and memorize what happenned to his/her environment.

2 Upgrades

Today, i got two upgrade from two different organization. First was Speedy, my Internet provider that i used since few years ago. I got an upgrade from 512 Kbps to 1024 Kbps without no additional cost at all. It seems they are performing a mass upgrade after they upgraded their overall infrastructure to increase bandwidth to their users.

The second upgrade was from Google Apps team. Two weeks ago i requested to upgrade my account to Google Apps Education Edition and i got a confirmation this morning from their support team. I had to give some details about the organization, which i did this morning and when i got home tonight, i had a reply from them saying that they granted my request. Thank you Google :)

Almost End of Semester

Next week is the last week of this semester and also for this year. In two weeks, the students will face their final exam and then they will have a not so long holidays until next January.

This means a big task is waiting for the lecturers: creating exam questions, marking, and evaluating all the progress throughout this semester. I have started some of the exam questions and i will continue to finish it by this week, so i can do other things next week.

By December, i will be quite busy as i have to prepare a lot of things for my first baby and December is just few days left.....

Ekiga 4.0.0 Gets Released

A new major version of Ekiga has been released. The NEWS file has all the big changes since previous version and it's HUGE. One good news for you: SBo project has a SlackBuild for previous release (3.9.90) which can be used to compile Ekiga 4.0.0. All you need to do is to compile it's dependencies and probably update to the latest version of ptlib 2.10.9 and opal 3.10.9 before compiling Ekiga 4.0.0.

I have completed building Ekiga 4.0.0 on my desktop and it's working fine here. Anyone wanted to chat via VoIP? :)

Oppa Christmas Style

Early gift for Christmas with Oppa Gangnam Style parody: Perth Christmas Light 2012:

I think this is the best Gangnam Style Parody i have ever seen on YouTube. No wonder Psy's video has beaten Bibber's video to be the number 1 most-viewed video on YouTube.

Linux Kernel 3.7 Coming Up

Well, it's last week of November and if nothing goes wrong this week, i believe Linus will just release Linux Kernel 3.7 and open the merge window for the next two weeks. He then will have plenty of time to get new features gets merged for the upcoming Linux Kernel which will be released in around late February or early March.

A lot of interesting new features are already in pending queue to be merged for Linux Kernel 3.8 and they have been discussed by Phoronix, such as:

• Improved Intel Haswell and Intel Valley display support 
• DMA-BUF V4L2
• HDMI CEC kernel support
• Much improved Nouveau driver
• VMWare Virtualization drivers
• Samsung F2FS File System
• KVM Virtualization support for ARM
• Many more

Many of these new features has been prepared for some time because the merge window is so close with the end of the year, so it's expected that some developers will take their holiday, so i'm guessing they will send a pull request on the LKML as soon as Linus released the Linux Kernel 3.7.

Installing SSHblock

My adventure with my new server continues. This morning, i tried to set up SSHblock which can be used to block users who are abusing the SSH protocol and tried to brute force and gained access to the server.

It's really simple to configure SSHblock since the installation script has done it for you and all you have to do is read the instructions and or warning that came out and fix that and re-run the script again. Even though the script couldn't find the path used in Slackware, but it seems that it will finally place the rc scripts to /etc/rc.d/, which is the correct place in Slackware. That's awesome.

Since it's a PERL scripts, it requires other CPAN module. SSHblock only requires SWATCH to be installed, but SWATCH itself requires 4 modules to be installed:

• Date::Calc
• Date::Parse
• Date::Manip
• File::Tail

Don't forget to install iptables as well since it will be used to block the IP addresses who tried to enter our server.

Working on HTTPS

I tried to enable HTTPS connection on my server today and since this is my first time, i would like to find some reference about this. Unfortunately, most of the reference out there is not updated for the latest Apache 2.4, so some commands and paths are no longer available or working on Apache 2.4 available on Slackware 14.0.

By mixing some tutorial in many places, and some trial and errors, i'm able to finish this simple configuration at no time. For future reference, i'm making my own documentation on this problem, but i will not post it in the short time. You can wait for the tutorial on my SlackBlogs someday (probably on December).

PHP New Releases: 5.4.9 and 5.3.19

PHP team has released two branches of PHP 5.4.x and 5.3.x which includes bug fixes for over 15 bugs since last month. Unfortunately, although the download page has a link to the mirror site, it seems that at this moment, most of the mirror site hasn't catch up with this update and most of the mirror site used will point to a not found page.

I finally decided to use their GIT repository to get faster access to the release as i can clone their repository and match it to the version i have by using the git checkout <branch-name> and compile a newer version even if it's not yet released, as long as it has been tagged.

The ChangeLog for PHP 5.4.9 and 5.3.19 is already updated though.

Power Management Regression?

Recently, i noticed that on my laptop, it didn't last as long as it used to be. I think this happened after i upgraded to Linux Kernel 3.6.x. Previously, i was using Linux Kernel 3.5.4 and it was fine and it could last for 8-9 hours, but now, it only last for at maximum of 5 hours.

Perhaps there was a regression on the Linux Kernel or perhaps i didn't reconfigure my laptop-mode package after i upgraded to the latest version? Well, i need to sort this problem out when i have time. Now is not the time unfortunately :(

Linux Mint 14 Nadia Released

Clem has finally released Linux Mint 14 codename Nadia, one month after their base distribution (Ubuntu Linux) released. As always, Linux Mint comes with several flavors, Mate and Cinnamon and KDE and XFCE will come up next month.

Several new features has been integrated on this release, such as :

• MATE 1.4
• Cinnamon 1.6
• More Themeable MDM
• Better Software Manager with it's own apt client replacing aptdaemon
• MintStick replaces USB-ImageWriter
• More art improvements

Mozilla Firefox 17 Released

Mozilla Firefox 17 has been released by Mozilla team. After reading a news that Mozilla is releasing their update for Android apps, i realized that a desktop version should not be that far from the release and i am right.

They have placed the binaries and source code into their FTP Server, while waiting for mirror sites to catch up and they will announce it to public in the next 24-48 hours at maximum.

Firefox 17 for Android also working for older ARMv6 processor architecture, while previously, it only supported hardware with an ARMv7 CPU.This should make Firefox 17 be compatible with more devices around since there are still a lot of devices that are still using ARMv6.

This version dropped support for Mac OS X 10.5, adds New Markup panel in the Page Inspector, adding sandbox protection for iframes, implementing SVG FillPaint and StrokePaint, and a new Click-to-play blocklisting to prevent vulnerable plugin versions from running without the user's permission.

Congratulations to Mozilla on this release and we are looking forward to Firefox 18 :)

PHP 5.5 Development

PHP 5.5.0 is the next major release of PHP and the first Alpha version has been announced to public on PHP's website. There are several interesting things with this major version. Let's look at the new features:

• support for Generators,
• a new password hashing API,
• support for finally in try/catch blocks
• support for list() in foreach,
• constant array/string dereferencing,
• ext/intl improvement.

This version will also drop support to Windows XP and Windows 2003 which are quite old already and they have been supported for a long time by PHP team. Dropping this two Windows release might release some burden on the developers to test in the old version of Windows.

If you want to test this version out, see the ChangeLog and get the source code here and Windows binary here.

VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 with Linux Kernel 3.7

We might have another good news for those who works with VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player. I found another person, Robert Gadsdon who are testing VMWare Workstation on newer Linux Kernel.

He mentioned that VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 is working with Linux Kernel 3.7-rc without needing any new patches, BUT standard VMware (re)compile/install script vmware-modconfig still doesn’t find the ‘relocated’ version.h in the 3.7 series kernels. He also posted the solution to this problem by creating a symlink from the old location:

ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.7-rc6/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h \
/usr/src/linux-3.7-rc6/include/linux/version.h

This should be a good news to all Linux users who also VMWare users.

Breaking Dawn

Today, i watched Breaking Dawn part 2 with my wife in XXI and i was so lucky to have the tickets without waiting the long queue line because i bought them using MTIX facility. I took the first show at 12.15 PM.

At first, i thought this movie was for everyone, but after i watched some of them, i realized that this movie is definitely not for kids or even teenagers. It's more suitable for adults as there were so much violence, brutality, and some inappropriate scenes that should be seen by adults, even though it wasn't so explicit.

For parents who would love to watch this movie, please do not bring your kids to watch this movie.

Writing blogpost from iPad

For some time, i have wanted to write blog post using my iPad, but i never got the touch since using the mobile version of Blogger doesn't give me the best experience of utilizing my iPad. It seems that it's not working at all.

The biggest problem for me is picking the labels and also setting the date and time of publication. When using my iPad, the side window always closed all the time. It took some time to be able to set the labels and time.

Today, i just read Mashable's tweet about new app from Google for Blogger which includes support for iPad. I was so excited to try it and here i am, writing a blogpost using Blogger apps from Google from my iPad.

Thank you Google for supporting iPad on version 2.0

New Release of Cgit

Cgit, a popular front-end to git, another popular source code management tool has finally released a new version after a long period of inactive, due to disappearance of the former maintainer, Lars Hjemli.

Another developer, Jason A. Donenfeld who has been contributing to this project decided to release a new version of Cgit (0.9.1) since he found a security problem on the previous release of cgit and it has been fixed on his branch, but not in the main branch of cgit. He said that if Lars came back, he will let Lars take the ownership back again and he will continue to work on Cgit as well.

IE 10 Release Preview

Microsoft is announcing Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for it's customer and users who have been installing Windows 7 or 8 can try this product on their computers. Please note that if you use Windows 7, you need to install Service Pack 1 prior installing this product.

Unfortunately, even though it's still a release preview, the above website doesn't contain any detailed information about IE 10, except for Fast, Easy, and Safer. A little bit of technical features are good for publications.

From other site, it was revealed that IE 10 will have better support for HTML5 and CSS 3, better security, new browsing experience if used with touch screen (probably targetting Windows 8 users), and performance improvements.

This is a release preview, so don't expect to get a very stable release. Things might change in the future, so there's no fixed feature at this point.

BlackBerry OS 10?

Some people believed that BlackBerry OS 10 will die prematurely due to long delays and lack of innovation from RIM's developers. Well, in my opinion, this could happen in reality, since RIM is now planning to release BlackBerry OS 10 next January, while Android and iOS are moving ahead with their development.

I think RIM must work on something amazing to keep up with other vendors who deliver something out of the box, not just depending on one technology only (such as BBM in RIM's case). BBM is no longer a powerful concept since many other service are available and can replace BBM, such as iMessage and WhatsApp.

If they don't react fast and do something during this year, i believe they will have a much heavier challenge next year where Android and iOS will keep dominating the phone market.

Roadmap to Linux Kernel 3.7

Linus has just released Linux Kernel 3.7-RC5, which means we might have Linux Kernel 3.7 gets released before the end of this year. Usually, Linus released a new RC once a week, so if we have like RC-7 or even worse RC-8, we will still make it on December.

But that would create some schedule changes on the merge window of Linux Kernel 3.8, since usually by the end of the year, most of the Linux Kernel developers are on holidays and since the merge window is only two weeks, i think most of the big changes are going to be pushed early of  the merge window, assuming the merge window is opened on first week of December.

Finished The Mark of Athena

I have just finished reading Percy Jackson: Heroes of Olympus book 3: The Mark of Athena and i was suprised that Rick Riordan is planning to have two more books on this series which will be released in 2013 and 2014. The forth book is called The House of Hades and it will be released around October 2013 and the fifth book will be released on Fall 2014, but Rick hasn't released the title yet.

It was another great novel about Roman and Greek mythologies by Riordan following the successful Percy Jackson series which is now has been brought to movies. The second movie will be released next year

Wedding Party in Klaten

I have just returned from attending my colleague's wedding party in Klaten. It was held in a good date, 10-11-2012, a very rare date. No wonder there were so many wedding parties held today.

The trip to Klaten was so bad. It's very crowded and i got stucked for some time so we came a little bit late at the location. Plus, we didn't get the best place for parking because they ran out of space, so we had to find another parking area near the mosque.

In the middle of the event, rain started to drop and it was raining so hard. I was worried because i brought my wife with me. Luckily, the rain stopped just before we went back.

Around 8.40 PM, we decided to leave because we had to go back to Jogja, so we left the area and go back to our parking area and travel back to Jogja. The trip only took about 15-20 minutes, because the road was so empty, not so many cars around.

Congratulations to Lukas and Shintia for your marriage :)

VMWare and Recent Linux Kernel

I must say that i'm impressed how VMWare worked up their products to be compatible with recent Linux kernel releases and it doesn't make their users searched for patches in the wild just to make it work under Linux.

Yesterday, i removed my old installation of VMWare Workstation 8.0.4 and decided to try on VMWare Workstation 9.0.1, the latest maintenance release from VMWare that should be compatible with Linux Kernel 3.5. On my surprise, this version is also working well with the recent version Linux Kernel 3.6.x (i used 3.6.6) and it doesn't need any patches at all. It simply work out of the box.

Good job to VMWare :)

Fedora 18 Slipped (Again)

According to Go/NoGo status meeting, Fedora 18 will be delayed once again and this time, it will be two weeks delays instead of the usual one week. Because of this delay, the final release of Fedora 18 will be on January 2013 instead in December 2012. This means, we won't be able to see Fedora 18 shipping this year.

The good point about this delay is that Fedora people can do more testing on preparing the Secure Boot mechanism which should be first implemented in Fedora. Let's just hope it goes well as planned or else people will be quite disappointed by Fedora's decision about it.

VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 Released

VMWare has released a bugfix release for VMWare Workstation and VMWare Player. There are two new features added on this release:

• Support for Ubuntu 12.10 as a host and guest.
• Solaris 11 has been added to guest OS list.

Meanwhile, a list of bug fixed on this release are also staggering:

• When powering on a virtual machine with Binary Translation on a SMEP-capable CPU, Workstation no longer causes the host to reset. If you run Windows 8 hosts on IvyBridge processors, VMware strongly recommends that you update your installation of Workstation.
• Several security vulnerabilities have been addressed, including updating third party libraries.
• The Workstation plug-in for Visual Studio has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2012.
• For host systems with more than 4GB of memory, Workstation will use more of the available memory to run virtual machines.
• The ability to mount a .vmdk file as a drive by right-clicking the file in File Explorer has been restored.
• Streaming a virtual machines has been fixed.
• Occasionally, certain elements in the Windows 8 user interface were incorrectly displayed. This has been fixed.
• After disconnecting certain USB devices from a virtual machine, Workstation would prevent devices from being reconnected without restarting the virtual machine. A more comprehensive error handling code has been added to prevent this problem from occurring.
• To improve application startup performance, the data being collected as part of the optional User Experience Improvement Program will no longer be aggregated on every launch of Workstation.
• Remotely retrieving the IP address of an Ubuntu virtual machine with an IPv6 address assigned failed unless an IPv4 address was also assigned to the virtual machine. This no longer occures.
• With IPv6 disabled on the host, the Linux version of Workstation is now able to share virtual machines.
• When you import an OVA file of a virtual machine running the Datacenter version of Windows Server, the network adapter failed to be configured correctly. This is now fixed.
• Closing Workstation in the middle of a cut and paste operation no longer causes the Workstation user interface to crash.
• After unsharing a virtual machine configured to use client-side devices, you can now reconfigure the device settings to use local devices.
• Easy Install on the Linux version of Workstation now recognize all compatible operating systems.
• The VMware monitor has been updated to work with Linux kernel 3.5.
• On the Linux version of Workstation, entering a permanent license key after using an evaluation key now removes the days remaining evaluation indicator.
• The network adapter configuration screen now correctly preserves the Custom network settings.
• You can now remove a Network if network settings changes are pending.
• The Use physical drive radio button for a floppy device was disabled when connecting to a shared virtual machine or remote virtual machine a on host without a physical floppy device. This is now fixed.
• Animated cursors are now displayed correctly in a virtual machine.

I will download the Linux version as well, but i may not going to test it on my primary machine as i still need the stabilitity of VMWare for my class at work.

KDE 4.9.3 Released

KDE has released a monthly update KDE 4.9.3 which focused on bug fixing and translations updates. The list of bug fixed is quite big, 86 and several key components that gets the most update are Kate editor and Kontact email and groupware client. For detailed information about those bug fixes, please head on to their bug tracker.

There's one bug that were found out after the package has been released and that is qyoto won't be build against cmake 2.8.10 (Bug 309652), but there's a suggested patch for  this bug report, even though it's not yet committed to the repository.

Expect KDE packages for Slackware soon enough from Eric Hameleers

Linux Kernel 3.6.6 Released

Greg has released several stable Linux Kernel releases while he was in LinuxConf. One of them (3.6.x branch) contains an important fix about EXT4 corruption bug which caused a chaos in Open Source world. No worries, since the bug can only be triggered by some use of uncommon options and it's only intended for developers.

I have upgraded my kernel to Linux Kernel 3.6.6 on my desktop and workstation and i'm planning to do so with my laptop tomorrow as well.

Watching Skyfall

We (me and my wife) decided to have some refreshing together to Amplaz to buy some items for daily needs. While in there, we looked at the theather and we saw the queue was so long, so we didn't have a thought of going to watch a movie. After finishing our shopping, we were going to have lunch there, but then we saw the queue line has dropped compared with in the morning, so i took a chance to see whether i could get tickets to Skyfall.

Lucky me, there were still some tickets left for 3 PM show, so i puchased it with my credit card because we could have 50% discount. So finally we did watch Skyfall even though it was unplanned at the beginning.

I don't want to give spoilers, since the movie is quite new, so i'll just stop here :)

Condition Dropped

I was unable to write a blog post yesterday because i had to go to the hospital at night. My condition dropped and the doctor even suggested me to be hospitalized, but i refused it. I prefer to have a lab check first and decide what to do next.

My schedule this semester is so tight and i guess it started during the mid test where i went abroad and then when i came back, i marked the student's exam and then preparing all of the daily stuffs again. It consumes a lot of energy and when my condition is not very fit, i still forced it to give a lecture in the class yesterday.

So, since last night, after seeing the doctor, i went to bed early because i do need a total rest, since the day before, i couldn't sleep at all and that worsen my condition. This morning, i'm feeling better after having a better sleep, even though i still woke up every few hours. It's not the best sleep condition though.

Less Release, Less Quality?

Ubuntu is now planning to change how it works with quality assurance process for next Ubuntu release: 13.04. They plan to create a more streamlined, continuous development for future versions of Ubuntu Linux, but they removed the alpha releases and will have one Beta release only prior the final release.

In most Software Engineering terms, Alpha is intended for private testing conducted by the team, while the Beta is more like a public testing. While i can agree that they removed the Alpha release since they can do it in their daily jobs and also by the use of automated testing, but what i can't understand is that they will have only 1 Beta release and no RC releases at all?

Beta release is the first public release. This means, that ordinary users will have their first chance to taste what will next Ubuntu release would be prior deciding whether to upgrade or stick with the current version. With the habbit of introducing new and big changes on every releases, Ubuntu is taking a big risk (IMHO) for Ubuntu 13.04. Less release means less feedback from the users and you know what happened when you can't satisfy your users? They will leave and pick another distributions that works better.

By the way, Ubuntu is now dropped to third popular distro based on Distrowatch's HPD index. The second position is now taken by Mageia, while the top position still LinuxMint. I think by the time Ubuntu 13.04 gets released, they might be overlapped by Fedora.

Precise Repository Resynched

One of my student mentioned me on Twitter that Precise Repository (Ubuntu 12.04) is missing from UKDW Repository. I checked my configuration and i just realized that i accidentally edit the wrong release version. I was supposed to remove Oneiric since i have completed Quantal synching, but i deleted Precise.

Since i have a policy of supporting N and N-1 release, i had to resync all of the Precise repository from scratch. So far, i have completed backports, proposed, security, and updates branch. What's left is the main precise branch which is the biggest one. I think i still have to wait for 2-3 days to complete this process if there's no obstacle in the middle of the process.

Free Download of Cross Over for 24 hours

For those who are using Windows application in Linux platform, you might have known about CrossOver. It's the commercial software created by CodeWeavers, Inc based on the Wine project which is open source.

After successfully running Lame Duck challenge back in 2008, they are back with another giveaway by giving a free, fully functional copy of either CrossOver Mac or CrossOver Linux. Each copy comes complete with 12 months of support and product upgrades.

All you have to do is to visit CodeWeavers’ Flock The Vote promotional web site and download the application starting Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, beginning at 00:00 Central Time (-5 GMT). This offer will continue for 24 hours, from 00:00 to 23:59, Oct. 31, 2012.

No Need to Panic on EXT4

There is no need to panic if you are using EXT4 and you are afraid of data corruption bug that does exist in several Linux Kernel releases. The bug reported can only be triggered by some special combination of options that are spesifically designed for developers since it's not yet fully tested and it's not enabled by default.

You can rest assured that this bug only happened on single user (the original reporter) and not affecting other people. You can read the detailed article in The H.

Anyway, the bug is now fixed in Linux Kernel 3.6.4 which was released yesterday by Greg.

Linux Kernel 3.6.4

I accidentally checked on Kernel.org and found out that Linux Kernel 3.6.4 has been released by Greg. I downloaded this source and compiled it both on my desktop and workstation and now, i'm ready to test this shiny Linux Kernel release.

I'm still using Linux Kernel 3.6 for now and even though .4 didn't brings fixes for EXT4 corruption bug that was introduced in Linux Kernel 3.6.2 and still exists in 3.6.3, i think it's about time to upgrade to this stable release and hopefully it really stable for production machines.

Luckily, i don't have to worry about NVidia and VMWare patches, since it's not a major upgrade and things should work out of the box with those two products.

There's only one way to find out: reboot :)

Back to Normal Activities

Starting tomorrow, everything will be back to normal activities again as the mid test week has finally over and we will continue with the second half semester until the end of this year. There will be six weeks in total plus two weeks of final test which will be conducted in mid December.

I have marked all the exams and all i have to do now is to distribute the results back to the students. It's so good to have all the work completed and having a nice vacation in these two weeks of time. I don't think there will be a good chance like this anymore in December as i will be busy preparing my first baby. Wish me and my family for our first baby :)

Defragmenting 2 TB HD

Yesterday i talked about performing a maintenance of my Windows and of the actions i performed since yesterday was defragmenting my hard drive, including my 2 TB external hard drive this morning and guess what? The process hasn't ended until i posted this blog post. It's still on 37% and it has been running for almost half day already. I know the risk of doing this, but it has been defragmented so badly, so i need to take care of it before it's getting worse.

Since most of the contents are big files, i'm hoping that when those files are moved, they will be continuous and the process can be completed successfully and it will be faster in access performance.

Maintenance on Windows System

It's been some time since i defragged my Windows XP system. These system has been used since few years ago and even though it's deteriorating, it's still usable for me as i don't tend to install/remove many applications on this system. I used this machine mainly to backup and setup my iOS-based devices, since there isn't iTunes in Linux system.

Since we have a long holiday this week due to national holiday, i'm planning to start a maintainance process for my Windows XP. I have clean up some spaces by using the Disk Cleanup utility and now, i'm defragging all of my partitions one by one. Since it will take some time to complete, i will just leave it while i'm sleeping and it should be completed by tomorrow morning.

Performing a maintenance process regularly will ensure that your system stays in good performance for daily usage. This is not only for Windows system, but for all distributions.

Added Quantal Repository and Removed Oneiric

Finally, after battling for one week, finally the Quantal Quetzal repository is now completed and operational. Since i have a two release policy, this will also deleted the 11.04 (Oneiric Oncelot) repository on my server to save some space.

Why did it took so long to complete the repository? Well, it doesn't have a privilege of high dedicated bandwidth to download the repository. The bandwidth is shared with the other users in the campus, so in will be fast enough at night and during office hour, the connection will be slower than usual. I have also limited to 32 and 64 bit version only which should be downloaded, not all of them. I have also preffered to download the binary packages only, excluding the source since it can reduce the size of one release to nearly half of the total space needed.

Welcome Quantal and thank you Oneiric. It's time to let you go from this server.....

Seven Habbits Training

Starting from today until tomorrow, i will be on Seven Habbits training which is taken from Stephen Covey's Seven Habbits of JHighly Effective People book. I completed the first day and i still have one home work which i think i will make it by tomorrow morning as i'm tempted to sleep for now.

It's been a tiring day for me, but at least i got something in return. I got some new knowledge about improving myself (i have read most of the book's content and it's already included in the Project Management's course which i taught nearly every semester), but i also got a great news about my first baby which is expected in late December or early January. It will be a baby girl :)

Marking Time

After resting last night, i woke up this morning to start a new activity in the office and some of the test results has been distributed to my office room since yesterday, so i took it home and start working on it.

I have completed one of two exams with some help from my wife. I still have two exams left, but since one of them was conducted this evening, so i will take it next Monday as i have two days workshop starting tomorrow and the day after while on Friday, it's national holiday, so i'm off.

The result is quite expected and i'm happy with it. Since this is a course for early year students, i'm expecting a strong start with strong motivation to pursuit their target in the end of their study and this is just the beginning of it.

Arrived Back in Jogja

I have returned from my long journey from Malaysia and also Jakarta for the last seven days. It's been a wonderful journey and it would be a perfect one, except that i had some problems with the airport staffs, both in KLIA and also in Jakarta. That's the only complaints i had during my trip.

Anyway, everything is fine and i'm glad we can safely arrived at home and get some rest. We really do need it right now, so i won't write more and get some sleep right now.

Raining in Alor street

We were having dinner in Jalan Alor, the famous place to find a lot of Chinese food and then suddenly the rain started to drop and it was a little bit of chaos when the waiter was preparing for the pole and the big umbrella. Just few seconds and the umbrella was set up and everything back to normal again. People keep talking again just like there was no rain at all.

Working With iPad

One of my student sent me a message via Facebook last night and asked me whether i have uploaded one of the material for mid test exam. I was shocked at that moment because i totally forgot to upload  it just before i'm leaving.

Since i had no access to my desktop at home because i switched it off, my option would be my workstation at the office which is still running. Luckily, i still left my TeamViewer session running on this machine, so i can remote my workstation from my iPad to convert the material to PDF format and then and upload them after logging in to the machine using iSSH application. That was so exciting, but really interesting to see many things can be done by iPad. Thanks to it, i can still be able to work remotely.

Linux Kernel 3.7 is Shapping Up

Linus Torvalds has released Linux Kernel 3.7 RC 1, which means he has closed the merge window for Linux Kernel 3.7. This also means that there are no new features will be added in the future until 3.7 gets finalized around December.

Linux Kernel 3.7 will have a 64 bit ARM support and thus enabling ARM developers to build the kernel using the same kernel source code. Many other new and interesting new features has been well written in The H. Let's hope that Linux can release this version just before the end of this year as a Christmas gift.

One Week Trip

Starting today until next week, i will be considered "offline" from Internet (unless there's a proper Internet connection) since i will be having a short vacation with my family. I'm not really sure that i can find a good Internet connection on the place where i will be going, but if they do, i will probably focusing on replying email.

I don't think there will be something surprising next week, but suppose there is, i may be late of knowing it and pardon me if i don't write it on my blog :)

Linux Kernel 3.6.2 Released

Greg has just released Linux Kernel 3.6.2 along with other stable kernel releases that he maintained (3.0.46, 3.4.14, 3.5.7). He also noted that for Linux Kernel 3.5.x branch, Linux Kernel 3.5.7 is the last release and he didn't plan to make another release and suggest people to move on to Linux Kernel 3.6.

I remembered that when Slackware 14.0 was still in development, some people suggest that Slackware should use Linux Kernel 3.5.x as their base kernel, but Patrick decided to stay with Linux Kernel 3.2.x and somehow his intuition has been proven to be correct. Linux Kernel 3.5.x is no longer supported by upstream developers, so if there's a serious problem in the kernel, Pat would have to upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.6 to get this problem fixed or he would have to apply patches to the Linux Kernel package, something that he rarely do. He wanted to make the package in Slackware bit-to-bit identical with the upstream source.

Somehow, i will skip this version and i will be watching and waiting for Linux Kernel 3.6.3 instead since when i watched the ChangeLog, i didn't see interesting bug fixes.

Online Cryptool

For those who are learning on Cryptography, you can try the online version of CrypTool. It has a lot of content that can be used to learn more about cryptography, including Ciphers (classic, stream, block, symmetric, asymmetric, etc), Coding methods (ASCII, Bacon, Base64, Code39, Huffman, Morse), Analysis Tool (Autocorrelation, Frequency analysis, n-gram analysis), and several highlights that are related to Cryptography in overall.

If you prefer to have a multiplatform application, you can try to use JCrypTool.

Last Day

Today is my last day of working for this half semester since next week, the students will have their mid test exam for the next two weeks. I have prepared the exam questions last week, so i can take some rest for this weekend.

I will be travelling for one full week starting next Monday and as always, i can't guarantee that i will be available online during that time. I will try my best to reply your messages, but please be patient if you don't get replies as fast as it used to be. I need some refreshing time as well. This semester schedule is even busier than last semester since i have a new position as well, so i have more work to do at my office.

Get Firefox 16.0.1

Firefox 16 was pulled by Mozilla after they discovered that it contains one nasty vulnerabilities that allows remote users to expose user's web history and activities. They said that it would release an update within one day and they really do that by releasing Firefox 16.0.1 in their FTP Server.

If you are patience enough, just wait for the automatic update mechanism to get the update for you, but if you can't wait, just get the latest binary and install it on your machine.

HTTPS Everywhere 3.0

It's been some time since EFF released HTTP Everywhere extension for Firefox, but now they just released HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 which adds more than 1500 new sites compared to previous release. You can also download the Alpha version for Google Chrome.

EFF is expecting that HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 will encrypt "at least a hundred billion page views in the next year, and trillions of individual HTTP requests". What a big target that is, but i'm pretty sure it can be achieved since more and more people are getting more aware of security awareness, mostly data security.

Firefox 16 Released

Mozilla Firefox 16 has been released (official announcement will be published within 1x24 hours) in the FTP Server. I have downloaded this version and i'm using it to write this post.

Here are some of the highlights of Firefox 16:

• Preliminary VoiceOver support on MacOS X
• WebApp support
• Two more localization added (Acholi and Kazakh)
• Improvement on Incremental Garbage Collection
• New developer toolbar
• CSS3 Animations, Transitions, Transforms, and Gradients unprefixed
• MD5 no longer supported in hash algorithm used for digital signature
• Opus Codec supported by default

Budget Planning

Since i was appointed as the head of DWTC unit, i had to prepare for budgetting for the next period and i have to give the presentation tomorrow noon with the president of the university. I realized that i didn't have much time preparing it since i was just appointed last week and i had exactly 1 week to prepare all those numbers while i had to learn the new environments, new staffs, new work culture, etc.

Wish me luck for tomorrow's presentation and i could use your support for me :)

GTKPod and Anjuta?

Since i have found my iPod yesterday, i wanted to manage the library collection again, but i'm not going to reboot to Windows just to manage my old iPod. Instead, i'm going to use GTKPod, which is an iPod Manager application that runs on Linux.

The problem is that current release of gtkpod has included Anjuta as their dependency and Anjuta itself has quite a lot of dependencies. One of them is newer vte (0.29 and newer). I tried to upgrade to newer vte without any problem, but it seems that after doing more testing, i found out that it broke the Terminal in XFCE.

After spending almost half a day of debugging, finally i came to a conclusion that newer vte can be installed alongside with older vte, but with a different name, namely vte3. The problem solved and now i can build gtkpod and manage my iPod once again.

Reviving Old iPod

When i unpack my case which i stored in another room, i found my old iPod (1st Gen) which is still clean without any scratch on the body and it's still working, but it ran out of battery because i left it for almost one year. It was moved to another room when my room was prepared for my wedding last year. Then i completely forgot about it.

Since it's unpacked, all i need to do is to clean up the earphone first and then i can try to listen to the songs again. Some people said that 1st Gen iPod has the best quality in terms of sound quality since it doesn't have too many features in it, so Apple was focusing on the sound quality.

LibreOffice Templates

Just short information for those who are using LibreOffice: You can get a lot of templates for LibreOffice from their template-center. You can also get some user-contributed extensions that can be used to enhance your LibreOffice experience.

Some of the old extensions has been integrated inside the main package of LibreOffice because a lot of people are using it and the developer found it quite handy.

Learning SboPKG

Today, i decided to learn more about SboPKG, another automation tool for managing packages for Slackware that comes from SlackBuilds project. It's a handy tool since it can sync your repository with SlackBuilds and decide what to do with your current packages.

You can perform an upgrade to the latest version available in SlackBuilds by adding the queue and process them. You can also remove outdated source which is no longer available on SlackBuilds so that you don't have orphaned or unmaintained packages upstream. It can also perform automated build for you so that you can do something else while it tries to build the packages for you.

With all those features, no wonder many people likes to use this tool on their system. Since i managed my own packages in SlackHacks repository sometimes, they are not tracked by SboPKG and that's fine since usually my packages in SlackHacks are newer than in SlackBuilds.

New Position in UKDW

Today is my first day of visiting my new office since i was appointed as head of Duta Wacana Training Center. I visited my new office to meet with the staffs and discuss about the budget planning that i have to enter next week. Some of the volunteers have known me in the past, so i didn't have any problem with them.

During the first week, i wanted to know more about this unit since this is my first time entering the office and i don't know what happened inside this unit. It may take some time before i can understand all things that happened inside this unit and hopefully it won't take that long :)

Mayan Tee Shirt

Slackware Store has released two new products in their catalog along with Slackware 14.0 Pre Orders. They are the new Mayan Tee Shirt and new Polo Shirt with a pocket. I told this news to Indonesian Slackware Community and asked them whether they wanted to support Slackware Linux by purchasing this items and the responds were overwhealming.

I agreed to be the coordinator and i limit the first batch to be 15 people only due to the limit of my credit card and also to avoid huge package that will resulted to a huge tax as well. This morning, i have ordered via Slackware Store and the ordered has been confirmed. Let's just wait until they came back to me and confirmed my purchases.

When this items arrived, this will be my fourth items that i collected from Slackware Store. Previously, i have bought Slackware 13.37 T-Shirt Limited Edition, Slackware Black T-Shirt, and Serious Slackware T-Shirt. Someday, i will have a complete set of Slackware T-Shirt and Shirt on my shelf.

Thanks to Indonesian Slackware Community members for their support to Slackware Linux Project.

Linux Kernel 3.6 Released

After 7 RC releases, finally Linus decided to release Linux Kernel 3.6 and start the merge window for Linux Kernel 3.7. For those who wanted to know what are the interesting features on this version, just head to KernelNewbies. Here are the highlights:

1. Btrfs: subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diff, cross-subvolume file clones
   1. Subvolume quotas and quota groups
   2. Snapshot diffs, aka "send/receive"
   3. Cross-subvolume file clones
2. Suspend to disk and memory at the same time
3. Support for SMBv2 protocol
4. TCP Fast Open (client side)
5. Bufferbloat fight: TCP small queues
6. Safe swap over NFS/NBD
7. ext4: better quota support
8. PCIe D3cold power state support
9. VFIO: bare-metal safe access to devices from userspace drivers

Go get the source right now and start your engine!!!

New Mirror Project: Slackware ARM

I'm going to maintain another Slackware-based project on my campus server and that is Slackware ARM or it was known as ArmedSlack.

Slackware ARM includes all of the improvements in Slackware x86, and in addition some of the ARM specific highlights are:

• All packages rebuilt for the baseline architecture of ARMv5te (from v4te) 
• Support for two new platforms:

• The TrimSlice Pro (NVidia Tegra CPU)
• The Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is an interesting devices and many universities and research center are now starting to adopt this new devices because it's cheap, but still usable for creating scalable system for complex and high computation need or even for people to hack their devices to run several systems.

Right now, i'm in the middle of rsyncing and hopefully it will be completed when i wake up tomorrow morning. I will announce the URL later on when it's completed and i have set up the rsync service properly.

New Slackware Tee Shirt

Slackware 14.0 has been released this morning and what's cool is that the Slackware Store has bring in two new products along with this release. They are New Slackware 14.0 Tee Shirt and New Slackware Polo Shirt with a pocket

Interested? Visit Slackware Store and order it right now. Your purchases can help Slackware Linux Project keep releasing further releases in the future.

WhatsApp Not Updating

For the last few days, i didn't get any updates from my WhatsApp. At first, i thought no one send me any messages, but i was wrong. It was WhatsApp's fault for not able to connect and receive/send any messages at all.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem? I have a fully working WiFI connection at my house and i set the application to use WiFI as first priority instead of going with cellular. It worked in the past, but apparently not in the latest version.

GNOME 3.6 Released

Following several releases, finally the final version of GNOME 3.6 has been released. This is a good news to many GNOME users around the world since they have been expecting this release for some time. KDE has been progressing well so far with KDE 4.9.x and they are now working on KDE 4.10 before going to jump to KDE 5 next year.

GStreamer 1.0 has also been released and it will be likely combined with GNOME 3.6 to provide better multimedia experience to users. I have compiled GStreamer 1.0 package and all of it's plugin in my SlackHacks repository.

iPad 3

I just bought the new iPad today. The first thing i do after setting it up is to jailbreak it so that i can customize it as i like, which is something impossible to do when it's still in the official mode. Thanks to Absinthe, the jailbreak process is easier than ever. All i need is to run the application and then plug the iPad to my computer using USB cable and press the Jailbreak button. They will do the rest.

It's all done now and i wanted to install some applications that i have installed on my previous iPad 1. I guess i will take this weekend to prepare for this new iPad.

Sourceforge Compromised

Just now, i got from PHPMyAdmin's lead developer, Marc Delisle:

Hi,
the PMASA-2012-5 security advisory has been published on
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/security/PMASA-2012-5.php .

In short, a SourceForge.net mirror server was compromised, leading to
the distribution of a doctored phpMyAdmin kit containing a backdoor.

phpMyAdmin-3.5.2.2-all-

languages.zip fetched from this mirror server is
known to be affected. To our knowledge only one mirror is affected,
which appears to be taken offline already. All other SourceForge.net
mirrors are unaffected.

phpMyAdmin security team

For those who are hosting their packages on SourceForge, please check your packages against the checksums and PGP signature (if there are any).

Thanks to Tencent Security Response Center who notifies Marc about this issue.

Clearing CheckList

The list of packages that are in SlackBuilds's CheckList is now getting shorter each day. With so many dedicated people are working to clear this list, the progress is amazing.

Big thanks to Ponce, Robby, and David who tracked and fixed most of the packages and merged them back to the SlackBuilds's GIT master so that it will be used when Slackware 14.0 is released and the new branch will be introduced.

Highway

I just came back from attending my cousin's wedding party in Semarang. It was 2.5 hours of driving from Semarang. Usually it took at minimum of 3 hours to reach Jogja, but thanks to the new highway, i can cut the travelling time to 30 minutes, just like before it gets crowded like today.

There will be more highware in the future, as the development of highway that connects Semarang and Solo are still in progress. If that's completed, we should be able to get there in shorter time.

Leaving to Semarang

I'm leaving to Semarang this morning to attend my cousin's wedding party tomorrow, so i won't be available until tomorrow night when i will be home again.

As always, i will be slow on replying email messages on my account or any other social sites (Facebook, Twitter, and Plurk).

NVIDIA Optimus Support on Linux

There's a good news about NVidia's support on Optimus for Linux, but unfortunately the demo ended with a crash. There's still hope, but don't expect a stable release soon.

Taken from Phoronix :

Maarten Lankhorst talked at XDC2012 about the ongoing open-source work for supporting NVIDIA Optimus technology on the Linux desktop.

Lankhorst covered the DMA-BUF, X.Org Server, DDX drivers, and RandR component changes being done by him, David Airlie, and others for supporting this multi/hybrid GPU technology that has been notorious under Linux. Maarten is currently employed by Canonical and they are hoping to have some early support in place for Ubuntu 12.10.

As covered in previous Phoronix articles, most of the mainline support is now in place with X.Org Server 1.13, the mainline Radeon / Nouveau / Intel DDX drivers, etc. However, more polished support should come in X.Org Server 1.14 for seamlessly switching between GPUs. Maarten is also still working on synchronization / fence support.

A demo of the primitive DRM PRIME / Optimus support was attempted from an Intel/NVIDIA laptop by Maarten, but it ended up crashing.

iOS 6 Closed Many Vulnerabilities

With iOS 6, Apple want to fight back against the jailbreakers. It's reported that iOS 6 has closed numerous security vulnerabilities found on previous version. Among these fixed vulnerabilities, there might be some vulnerabilities used by the jailbreakers to exploit iOS and able to bypass it's system to deploy the jailbreak.

Jailbreakers has said to stay away from iOS 6 unless you know the risk. While some has reported that a tethered jailbreak has already being done in iOS 6, most people will definitely wait for untethered jailbreak and that will not come in short time.

We will have to wait until the official announcement from the jailbreakears :)

Qt is now owned by Digia

Digia has finally finished the acquisition process of Qt from Nokia and now has the responsibility for Qt activities including product development and commercial and open source licensing. The website for Qt is now http://qt.digia.com.

This will ensure the future of Qt 5 and also KDE 5 which will be based on Qt 5. Some workers are enjoying this transition since they now have a company to pay for them, but some people (around 60) that used to work for Nokia in Brisbane, Australia is not that lucky.  Last month, Nokia shut down their office in Brisbane which was in charge of some Qt development and right now, they are jobless (some might already find another job currently). Hopefully they could find a better company that will hire them and use their wonderful skills and they can still contribute to Qt.

GNOME Hell

Now i know why Slackware removed GNOME in the past. Maintaining GNOME packages requires a lot of efforts, since new packages will most likely add new dependencies and it keeps growing and growing on each release.

I tried to compile Anjuta which uses some of the GNOME libraries and the list of requirement is tremendous. That doesn't count the dependencies of the Anjuta's dependencies package. So, if being counted in total, i must install and configure like 15 packages. Geez....

Probably i should call this GNOME Hell instead :)

Linux Kernel 3.5.4 Released

Greg has released Linux Kernel 3.5.4, the latest stable release for Linux Kernel 3.5 branch. As always, people are recommended to upgrade to this version as this fixed a lot of problems spotted during the development of Linux Kernel 3.6 and it's backported to Linux Kernel 3.5.x.

There are tons of fixes that has been merged on this release. Architectures, drivers, file systems, networking, sounds, and memory management. Every one of them gets a piece of updates that should make it even better than before.

Working with GIT

Lately, i have been playing with GIT more intensively than ever. I'm maintaining several GIT repository for my own work, my personal project, and also for community, such as SlackBuilds project which now uses GIT mainly for tracking changes.

GIT itself is a very powerful tool for managing source code. No wonder many open source project decided to switch to GIT from many other SCM tools, such as CVS and SVN. It's nature of a distributed system makes it perfect for projects whom it's member are working in a different time zone, different area, and may have many different policies throughout their code.

As i'm still learning more about GIT, there are still a lot of commands that i still don't understand, but i'm trying to learn all the basic steps to work with my repository and so far, i'm still on the right track (hopefully).

I'm using Pro Git as my reference to work with GIT. You might want to read it as well if you want to learn more about GIT. I'm sure you will love it.

Samba 4 RC1 is Ready

Samba finally released their first RC release for the upcoming Samba 4. This is another milestone after reaching 8 Beta releases during their development cycle. The primary additional features over Samba 3.6 are support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above.

Here are the new features implemented in Samba 4:

Samba 4.0 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon
environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain
join and domain logon operations with these clients.

Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in
LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the
Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS.  We correctly generate
the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we
issue.

Samba 4.0 ships with two distinct file servers.  We now use the
file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by
default.

Samba 4.0 also ships with the 'NTVFS' file server.  This file server
is what was used in all previous alpha releases of Samba 4.0, and is
tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller.  We
continue to support this, not only to provide continuity to
installations that have deployed it as part of an AD DC, but also as a
running example of the NT-FSA architecture we expect to move smbd to in
the longer term.

For pure file server work, the binaries users would expect from that
series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd) continue to be available.  When
running an AD DC, you only need to run 'samba' (not
nmbd/smbd/winbind), as the required services are co-coordinated by this
master binary.

As DNS is an integral part of Active Directory, we also provide two DNS
solutions, a simple internal DNS server for 'out of the box' configurations
and a more elaborate BIND plugin using the BIND DLZ mechanism in versions
9.8 and 9.9. During the provision, you can select which backend to use.
With the internal backend, your DNS server is good to go.
If you chose the BIND_DLZ backend, a configuration file will be generated
for bind to make it use this plugin, as well as a file explaining how to
set up bind.

To provide accurate timestamps to Windows clients, we integrate with
the NTP project to provide secured NTP replies.  To use you need to
start ntpd and configure it with the 'restrict ... ms-sntp' and
ntpsigndsocket options.

Finally, a new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing
Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and
internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.

New PHP Released

PHP Team has released PHP 5.3.17 and PHP 5.4.7 to fix several issues found on previous version. There are several segfaults that has been addressed on this release, and hopefully the number of problems spotted has been reduced. See the ChangeLog for more information about the changes.

Head to the Download page to get the latest release of PHP

GNU Patch 2.7 Released

GNU Patch, a very important utility used to patch source code has gotten itself a new stable release after three years without doing so. Andreas Grünbacher has sent an email to several mailing list announcing this great news.

As new stable release, GNU Patch has received several big changes, such as:

* Support for most features of the "diff --git" format, including renames and
  copies, permission changes, and symlink diffs.  Binary diffs are not
  supported yet; patch will complain and skip them.

* Support for double-quoted filenames: when a filename starts with a double
  quote, it is interpreted as a C string literal.  The escape sequences \\, \",
  \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, and \ooo (a three-digit octal number between 0 and
  255) are recognized.

* Ignore destination file names that are absolute or that contain a component
  of "..".  This addresses CVE-2010-4651.

* Refuse to apply a normal patch to a symlink.  (Previous versions of patch
  were replacing the symlink with a regular file.)

* When trying to modify a read-only file, warn about the potential problem
  by default.  The --read-only command line option allows to change this
  behavior.

* Files to be deleted are deleted once the entire input has been processed, not
  immediately.  This fixes a bug with numbered backup files.

* When a timestamp specifies a time zone, honor that instead of assuming the
  local time zone (--set-date) or Universal Coordinated Time (--set-utc).

* Support for nanosecond precision timestamps.

* Patch no longer gets a failed assertion for certain mangled patches.

* Many portability and bug fixes.

The source code for this new patch utility can be taken from GNU's FTP Server.

Arang and the Magistrate

Finally, after several days without any KDrama to watch, finally i have decided to watch Arang and the Magistrate. One of my reason to follow this drama is because it has a good translations from DarkSmurf Sub. I can't speak Korean, so i need good translations from subbing group so that i can enjoy the movie.

This drama is scheduled to have 20 episodes (10 weeks) and it has been airing since last month (August 15). The main cast of this drama is Shin Min Ah, who played as Gumiho in her previous drama. It looks like she enjoyed being a "ghost" character.


Here's some synopsis, taken from several source:

The drama is based on famous folklore, as all ghost stories are: During the Joseon era in the city of Miryang, Arang was the pure, beautiful, goodhearted daughter of a magistrate. She grew up without a mother, and was raised by a wicked caretaker who conspired to have her be raped and ruined by a servant. He attacked and she resisted, so he stabbed and killed her, and left her body to rot in the woods.
Her father the magistrate just believed that she dishonorably eloped with a man and so resigned his position swathed in shame. Thus the legend goes that every time a new magistrate comes to Miryang to fill the position, Arang’s vengeful ghost shows up to tell him her story and he flees in terror.
But one day a new magistrate comes to town — a young man by the name of Lee Eun-oh. Arang appears to him like every other magistrate before him, but this man doesn’t flee, and instead sympathizes with Arang, and promises to find her killer and avenge her death.

Hotel Hell

Right now, Gordon Ramsay is not only working on finding the best chefs through Master Chef and Hell Kitchen, but he's also working on hotel management TV shows called Hotel Hell, produced by One Potato Two Potato, and broadcasted on Fox Channel. This TV shows are narrated by Gordon Ramsay himself.

Too bad that season 1 only consists of six episodes, featuring 5 hotels (the first hotel is split into two episodes) and one of the have to be closed before the show was airing.

Fox has renewed Hotel Hell for their second season. I'm looking forward for the next season. It should be quite interesting.

Kernel 3.6-rc5 Released

Linus finally released Linux Kernel 3.6-rc5 and it's getting more calm than previous rc release. He was hoping that the current situation goes all the way until the final version of Linux Kernel 3.6 is shipped and the development will shift to the next merge window that marks the new development cycle of Linux Kernel 3.7.

Get the Linux Kernel 3.6-rc5 from Kernel.org

Database Designer for iOS

I'm involved in quite a complex project right now and i'm responsible for the system architecture and DB design as i'm the project leader for this project. Sometimes, when i'm not in front of the PC, i wanted to work, at least designing the database using my iPad.

I searched through Google and found a product that might be perfect for me: MySQL Mobile Database Client by Impathic. Here's some description and it's feature copied from the original page in App Store:

Browse, search, and update all your MySQL databases on the go with the DataGlass Mobile Database Client for MySQL! DataGlass is your one stop for complete and flexible access to your MySQL servers. From DBAs and IT professionals that need to run ad-hoc queries, to executives who need immediate access to the raw data, to analysts who need to build and execute sophisticated reports, DataGlass is the only app you will need to connect you directly to your data. Whether you are accessing your servers from your local network, or remotely through your organization's secure VPN, you never need to be without the information that is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. DataGlass requires no complicated desktop servers or expensive middleware to set up: the speed and flexibility of direct connections to your server provides unparallelled efficiency.

• Compatible with MySQL versions 3, 4, and 5
• An unlimited number of databases can be simultaneously managed by DataGlass
• Connect directly to your databases without the need for complex and expensive middleware
• Corporate databases can be accessed remotely using a VPN or by using the built-in SSH tunneling
• Can access tables and views in OLTP databases and data warehouses alike
• Export your raw data to Numbers, Mail, or CSV files for inclusion in external reports
• Save local snapshots of your data for browsing offline or on the road
• Generate elegant charts from your data within the app
• Print the results of your queries directly from your printer-enabled iOS device
• Build and execute sophisticated queries spanning multiple tables using the innovative Query Designer, or enter custom SQL

I think it's a good product. I will have a look on it shortly

Teaching using Slackware

I teach Network Administration course this year and i'm using Slackware as the base operating system during this course. I build a VMWare image using the latest Slackware 14.0 RC4 as the base and i gave it to my students. Some of them dare to set up a native dual boot even though i never asked them to have a native installation.

Today is the second week, but it's really the first week when i really teach them on how to learn the Slackware environment. So far, everything went well and no big problems except that at the beginning, the progress was kinda slow since we had to transfered 5.6 GB of data (VMWare image) to several laptops. When that was done, everything progressed smoothly.

Firstly, i taught them how to add a new user. It's not safe to use root as your daily user, especially when you are inexperienced user. Next, i taught them some basic understanding about directories in Linux, some basic commands, and some basic configuration. I will continue the course next week by teaching them about permissions, package management, and more basic configuration so that their new environment is comfortable to be used by them.

Good Bye ArchLinux Repository

I decided not to host ArchLinux repository anymore since the server is hosting more and more services used in our university. The main problem with ArchLinux is that it is updated too frequent and it took some time to complete the whole update. Meanwhile, i can only use rsync at night because at morning until evening, the bandwidth are reserved for students and academic activities.

So, at the end, i have to end up this service for good. I have sent an email to the ArchLinux mirror mailing list to ask them to remove UKDW Repository as their ArchLinux mirror site and hopefully by tomorrow, i can delete the whole ArchLinux repository. I have removed the information on the page and also the rsync access to the packages.

OpenSUSE 12.2 Released

After suffering several delays, finally OpenSUSE 12.2 came to surface and now it's ready for public consumptions. This is the results of the two months of stabilization phase which hopefully paid their user's patience.

This release uses a stable package instead of going with the bleeding-edge version, such as:

• Linux Kernel 3.4
• Systemd 44
• Glibc 2.15
• Bind 9.9
• OpenSSH 6.0
• Grub2
• OpenSSL 1.0.1c
• Mesa 8.0
• KDE 4.8.4
• GNOME 3.4
• XFCE 4.10
• GIMP 2.8.0
• Firefox 14 (will be upgraded to 15)
• and many others

Download ISOs and torrents are now ready. Go Get Them while  they are still GREEN!!! 

KDE 4.9.1 is Approaching

In the next 24 hours, KDE 4.9.1 will be announced and bringing a monthly update which should bring their users towards a stable, mature desktop environments. KDE plans to release 4 minor updates for KDE 4.9.x branch which will be maintained until December 2012. It's all documented in their release schedule.

KDE team will continue to work on future KDE released, marked as KDE 4.10 which has it's own release schedule. It is scheduled to be released on January, 23 2013 and will be maintained until June 2013.

Meanwhile there aren't any news about KDE 5 yet. QT 5, which will be the base for KDE 5 are now in Beta version, hopefully they will release the final version soon, so that KDE team can start focusing on planning KDE 5.

LFS Upgraded to 7.2

LFS (Linux From Scratch) project has been updated to 7.2. A lot of changes has been included on this release, which is mentioned on the project guide. Some of the most interesting changes are the new toolchain used to build the system, namely Coreutils 8.19, GCC 4.7.1, GLIBC 2.16, KMod 9, Linux 3.5.2, Udev 188, and Util-Linux 2.21.2.

If you are interested on  this project, get started and hopefully you will understand more about creating your own Linux system from scratch (or from other Linux project)

Sore Throat

I think i'm having a sore throat right now. It's really in a bad timing as i need my voice to teach in my daily activities. I'm teaching 8 classes a week and there are still 12 weeks left before i can have some rest a little bit.

I'm hoping that it won't gets worse by tomorrow as i will have 2x3 credits classes tomorrow and i guess it will be a lot of questions and discussions at those classes :)

Optimus Linux Support

While many Linux users might be digruntled about NVidia's decision not to support for Optimus in the past, right now, there might be some hope as Aaron Plattner from NVidia is reviewing Dave Airlie's work on RandR 1.4 and PRIME buffer sharing and he has mentioned that he got a proof of concept working.

It's a long journey to have this feature officially supported by NVidia's blob driver, but i guess many Linux users will be happy with this news. I'm hoping that soon enough, they will support hybrid GPU and i can enable NVIdia on my laptop which has been disabled everytime i boot.

What a Week

What a week!!!. It's a new semester and it was bloody busy for me. My schedule is quite tight this semester and in the end, i taught 9 classes in a week. I postponed one of the class because there wasn't any confirmation from the other university from the IDDIT program.

At least, i managed to get them all without any major problems and hopefully the same situation goes better next week. Right now, all i need is some relaxing time to prepare for next week class :)

Thunderbird 15 Released

Along with Mozilla Firefox 15, Mozilla also released Thunderbird 15 which incorporates several new features, such as the new instant messaging. It allows uses to talk to several IM protocols, such as GTalk, IRC, and XMPP. The Do-Not-Track features has been included as well.

A new menu and toolbar design has been included so that future releases will have the same and consistent theme along with Firefox releases.

More information about this release can be seen on the Release Notes

Firefox 15 Released

Mozilla has placed Firefox 15 on their FTP Server, but no official announcement yet. Probably, they are waiting for mirror sites to download this package and preparing for the automatic update that will start downloading in the next 24 hours i guess.

What's new on this release?

• Preliminary native PDF support (Aurora/Beta only)
• Support for SPDY networking protocol v3
• WebGL enhancements, including compressed textures for better performance
• Optimized memory usage for add-ons
• JavaScript debugger integrated into developer tools
• New layout view added to Inspector
• The CSS word-break property has been implemented.
• High precision event timer implemented
• New responsive design tool allows web developers to switch between desktop and mobile views of sites
• Native support for the Opus audio codec added
• The <source> element now supports the media attribute
• The <audio> and <video> elements now support the played attribute