Watching 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Finally my download queue for 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony has been completed and i can watch the ceremony tonight with my wife. I missed the opening ceremony since it's not time-friendly for me. My parents would also loved to watch this event.

I must say that my current impression about Olympic Opening Ceremony still tends to prefer the previous event held in Beijing, China. It was so spectacular and at that time, most people will doubt that England will be able to surpass it. We will see that in the next few hours.

GNOME's Big Ambition

GNOME 4 and GNOME OS is being targetted to be released on March 2014, which is less than two years from now according to the developers in GUADEC conference. They also expect to have 20% market share by 2014. Looks too ambitious for me, because they failed to impress most of their users with GNOME 3 up to today.

We can see the most visible fact is that Ubuntu is no longer the most favorite Linux distribution out there. Nowadays, people prefer to use LinuxMint, it's derivative maintained by Clem who happened to be the maintainer of Cinnamon as well. LinuxMint succeed to take over the angry and unsatisfied by Canonical's decision to revamp Ubuntu's UI.

Meanwhile, KDE is looking a stable new release in the next few days and it's growing strong each day. Even with some uncertainty of Qt development sometime in the past, they have managed to struggle and keep going on with the roadmap ahead. They are now preparing the next major release of Qt which should be released by next year. KDE 5 will soon be based on Qt 5. Looking forward to see KDE 5.

KDE 4.9 is Coming

According to the release schedule, KDE 4.9 is coming next week. KDE 4.8 has been a great release and i can't wait for upcoming KDE 4.9 since it's built based on the previous 4.8.

Actually, i have been using KDE 4.9 Beta 1 for some time and so far, i don't see major problems using this version, so i expect no difference when using the final version of KDE 4.9. One thing for sure is that they will have a different splash screen on a final version of KDE releases.

Convert VCD into MP3

My father asked me to convert a VCD (.DAT files) to an audio files which can be transfered to USB-based flash drive because he wanted to hear the song on the car. Unfortunately, it's an old songs, so i don't think there's any digital files of it.

Does anyone can give me hints about what software should i use in order to convert a VCD into an MP3 files? I would prefer to use Linux if it's possible, but Windows-based apps is fine with me.

Interactive Spaces API

Google has introduced a new API called Interactive-Spaces which provides runtime that allows developers to build interactive applications for physical spaces. 

Take a look on the screenshot below. You will see that there's a circle under each person. Well, it was taken as soon as a person enters the floor because there were cameras on the ceilings who are doing blob detection.

Interactive Spaces is written in Java, so it can run on any operating system that supports Java, including Linux and OSX and soon Windows. Additional languages like Javascript and Python are supported out of the box. Native applications can also be run, which means packages like openFrameworks which use C++ are also supported out of the box. Plans are also underway for supporting the Processing language.


This is an initial source release. As the final licenses are finished, there will be a binary release. Please see Downloads for a PDF file for documentation. This documentation is in progress.

One Down, Another One Coming In

Today i went to my friend's house to finish up my project which had a critical bug due to different environment used to deploy the system which i talked yesterday. My team had finally fixed the bug after synchronizing the environment we used with the deployment environment and we were about to deliver the update today.

When i wanted to copy the files, suddenly the electricity went off. I couldn't do anything, so i left to go to the office. I finished up my work at the office and then i picked up my wife and settle other things up. Next, i got a text telling me that the electricity is back (it almost took 4 hours), but since i haven't finished my errands, i couldn't go there at that time.

In the next few hours, i finally go to the same place again and fixed the bug by replacing the files with the corrected one and also adding a stored procedure which was missing when i deployed it yesterday. Finally everything is working as intended.

Let's just hope that no more problems in the future, because starting tomorrow, i will start a requirement gathering and initial discussion about our next project with the same client. This time, it will be much more complicated than the current project.

Windows oh Windows

For some time, i developed a web-based application for my friend's company and i developed it with some of my ex students. We developed it using GIT as our code management and we work on our own environment and so far everything went well.

Today, i deployed the application into our customer's system and it was broken. They used Windows as their local server and it turned out that it caused the apps to be broken in someway. My colleagues also uses Windows, but it was fine on their systems, but when it reached the deployment server, everything seems to blew up. Windows oh Windows.....

Slackware 14.0 Enters Beta

This morning, Patrick Volkerding announced that Slackware 14 has reached Beta level. What does it mean? It's another milestone towards the final release of Slackware 14 which is still unknown by now. But, the good news is that we are getting closer to that release.

With this update, Pat also finally included XFCE 4.10 along with other libraries that were requestes by many people in the past. They are required to build many other applications that depends on that libraries. Some people have started to report bugs about XFCE 4.10. I think they still need to be patched in some places.

Distrowatch has picked this news as well. I believe many other media will publicize this in short time. I think i'm quite lucky to notice this good news in the morning, so i can spend some time writing it on my SlackBlogs.

Linux Kernel 3.5

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux Kernel 3.5 after he was satisfied with the changes after rc7 which is quite small. KernelNewbies has written an extensive human-readable changes that Linux Kernel 3.5 has compared to previous 3.4. Here are the major highlights:

1. Ext4 metadata checksums
2. Uprobes: userspace probes
3. Seccomp-based system call filtering
4. Bufferbloat fighting: CoDel queue management
5. TCP connection repair
6. TCP Early Retransmit
7. Android-style opportunistic suspend
8. Btrfs: I/O failure statistics, latency improvements
9. SCSI over FireWire and USB

If you wanted to see what changes in the driver sections, please head to Linux 3.5 DriverArch

It's time to test this new kernel against the NVidia driver and VMWare.

PHP 5.4.5 and 5.3.15 Released

PHP team has released two new stable release, PHP 5.3.15 and PHP 5.4.5. Both packages only got one RC before the final version got released. These two packages fixed several bugs, including those categorized in security vulnerabilities.

Please upgrade to the latest one to make sure your application stays up to date with the latest version and to prevent unwanted situation where somebody attacked your website due to unpatched version.

YKFS Presentation Done

Eight of my supervised students who took the YKFS program has finally gave their presentations this morning. Although i have known most of their work, it seems that some of their work hasn't been presented before, so it's still new discoveries for me.

All i have to do is give markings to their field work subject and that's it. It's all over :)

I do hope that the leason learned during this field work will not be gone away after the marks has been given.

Blackout Without Announcement

In the last two days, i have had several blackout in my house without electricity. Usually, the authority will give early notifications if there will be some project which need to shut down the electricity during the work, but i guess there were no early notification this time.

My first blackout was last night around 8.30 PM. It lasted until 9.30 PM, but i guess it wasn't a big problem since it's at night and it doesn't cause too much problem for most people since it's not office hour.

My second blackout was today when i returned from office. The electricity went off at the office when i was about to return home. When i got home, the electricity also went down. Luckily i was about to leave to watch Ice Age 4 with my wife, so i wasn't too much affected by this problem, but i guess a lot of people were upset about this.

What is GitHub?

For those who have been working with open source projects, probably you will not be surprise to see a term called GitHub. It's one of the most popular source code management repository that are offered for free (there's a commercial service for advanced user or for those who wanted to make a private repository).

Klint Finley wrote an article about What Exactly is GitHub Anyway? which described what GitHub is about and what technology it's based upon. You might want to learn about it since it's really an amazing service. You will see more and more projects hosted in GitHub in the future due to it's features which facilitates developers to share and collaborate with other developers working on source code.

I personally use GitHub for my SlackHacks repository and so far, it worked well for me. Why don't you try it?

If you need assistance on running GIT, please read the Pro Git, GIT Cheat Sheet or just use the visual GIT Cheat Sheet below

Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1

Even though Firefox 14.0 hasn't been released yet, there are already 14.0.1 on the Mozilla FTP Server. I guess they had a major regression on 14.0 so that they forced the place a new minor release because the mirror site probably have updated their repository.

Here's what changed in Firefox 14:

• Google searches now utilize HTTPS
• Full screen support on OS Lion
• Plugins can now be configured to only load on click
• Awesome Bar now auto-complete typed URLs
• Improved Site Identity Manager
• PointerLock API implemented
• Several other bug fixes

You will get the auto update notification in the next few days i guess. But for those who are so curious, you can just skip it and download the latest version from their FTP Server

Wiping ArchLinux and Welcoming Slackware

I just wiped out my ArchLinux installation on my old laptop and replace it with the development version of Slackware (-Current) which will eventually be called Slackware 14. ArchLinux is a great Linux distribution with a rolling release model, but unfortunately that may not be suitable for me due to some reasons.

I also take this chance to help Slackware by testing the new installation on old hardware and making sure that everything works well. In my case, i used USB flash drive to boot the Slackware Linux kernel because i didn't have Slackware 13.37 DVD at home (i probably left it on my office) using usbbot.img file that are placed under usb-and-pxe-installer. I transfer it to my flash drive and boot using it.

Before i started the setup, i placed Slackware-Current updated repository into another flash drive and mount it locally on my laptop. When the setup runs, i point it to the slackware-current directory which contains all the packages of Slackware-Current per July 15 (the latest version at this moment). So it's basically i'm installing Slackware 14 on my laptop. Everything went well, and now my laptop is already running Slackware 14 on top of it. Sweet.....

Linux Kernel 3.5 is close to release

Linux has released the RC7 which probably the last RC before Linux Kernel 3.5 goes gold within next week. He mentioned that he got a patch bomb from several people after RC6 and somehow, this RC release is bigger than RC6, something he didn't expect, but it just happen to do so. With Linux Kernel 3.5, a lot of new interesting features are waiting for user to try on. You can read The H's Kernel Log Series which described about Networking, File Systems, and Architecture

Busy Upgrading

I think my weekend will be quite busy as Patrick has released a massive update on Slackware-Current tree today. Currently, i'm maintaining 5 machines that runs on top of Slackware-Current. So far, i have upgraded two of them and at this moment, i'm upgrading another one.

The last thing i wanted to upgrade is my virtual server which is now a semi production server. Since i need the server to host my project, i must be very careful not to break this machine :)

Bug Fixing Session

Finally, YKFS program is now finished and i can start focusing on my other work which is my side project. It's on the final stage and it requires more attention than before before i can send this project to the customer and get it done.

After the last presentations to the customer, there are still some late change requests and bugs re-appeared after previous change requests, but i'm still able to fix most of them tonight. I will leave the complex one tomorrow morning when usually i have a good mood to fix things. I never force myself to work on things late at night because usually it doesn't work well in my case. When i'm stuck at some condition and i have spent too much time on it, i usually leave it and go to bed and when i wake up, usually i have a nice idea on how to solve it.

Welcome Back YKFS Students

Today is really a busy day for me because the students that joined the YKFS IV program returned back to Jogja and there will be a closing ceremony lead by the coordinator of YKFS IV and attended by the rector (president of the university) itself along with other representatives from both universities (ANU and PolyU). Due to this ceremony, i had to cancel my consultation session with one of my supervised student and postponed it until tomorrow.

The students and staffs from Hong Kong returned to their country later at night even though i know that most of the students still wanted to hang around in Jogja with the local and Australian students to have fun after three weeks living in their hamlet.

Anyway, it's really a great experience of having two foreign universities joining up in the YKFS program and i think we will have more universities in  the next program.

Welcome back to Jogja YKFS students and farewell to HK students and staffs. Have a nice and safe trip back to HK :)

Last Day of YKFS Program

Today is the last day of YKFS program. After spending three weeks in the hamlets, finally they are ready for the farewell party and at this moment, they are still having a party in the Banjaroya village.

Unfortunately i can't join them in the farewell party because it might be my last chance to have a chat with the students from HK and AUS since the HK students will go back to HK by tomorrow night and AUS students will go back to Australia on Saturday.

Anyway, i'm quite satisfied with the results of this program. The students learned a lot from the villagers and they give their contributions back to the villagers as part of their service learning objectives. We had a hearing with the head of the regency this morning and the officials are happy to accepts the recommendations the students gave them. They will proceed with the next action to improve the situations in Banjaroya village.

Preparing for Next Semester

July has come half way and by the end of next month, new semester will begin. For next semester, i will be teaching first year and second year students for regular course. My course will be Computer Technology and Computer Security. Maybe they will put me in charge of one Project Management class again, but i'm still unsure about it.

For international course, i will be teaching Data Warehouse and Introduction to Business Intelligence. I will also supervising students who will take Final Year Project 1.

So far, i have prepared the syllabus and most of the assignments, grading, references, etc. I have also updated my lecturer page to reflect the changes for next semester. I hope the students can see this blog post and have a look on the page to get early information about the course.

PHPMyAdmin 3.5.2 Released

PHPMyAdmin, one of the most popular open source application for managing MySQL database has released another maintenance release to bring bug fixes. The 3.5.2 release brings this changes:

• [interface] JS error when editing index 
• [core] Call to undefined function __()
• [edit] NOW() function incorrectly selected - bug [GUI] Invalid HTML code on transformation_overview.php 
• [browse] Missing validation in Ajax mode - bug Fix popup message on build SQL of import 
• [core] Make X-WebKit-CSP work better - replace Highcharts with jqplot for query profiling, zoom search 
• [interface] No form validation in change password dialog 
• [interface] Broken password validation in copy user form 
• [unterface] Add user form prints JSON when user presses enter 
• [config] duplicate line in config.sample.inc.php 
• [interface] Grid editing incorrectly parses ENUM/SET values 
• [core] More clever URL rewriting with ForceSSL

Vacation at Kaliurang

I spent two days in Kaliurang with my wife and my mother in law along with my nieces for short vacation. Tomorrow i will come back to Jogja and start normal routines on Monday. I stayed in Griya Persada, the same hotel i lived in while i had a faculty meeting few years ago. The difference is that we now lived in the superior room and they have completed more progress on their resort development. They now have more villas and resort and they are building children playground in the back and a horse racing lane in the future. Probably it will be completed next year. It's so nice to have some short vacation with our family and relatives.

Thunderbird will be Abandoned?

Mozilla is planning on restructuring Thunderbird and moving towards community-based projects so that their employees can be assigned to other Mozilla project which are now entering the market, such as Firefox OS or Boot Gecko 2 or improving Firefox into multi platform.

It's probably a sign that Mozilla is now more focused on their Firefox instead of going with Thunderbird project. Let's hope that it will not be another great project that gets abandoned.

Wedding Party

My colleague, Aditya Wikan Mahastama has changed it's status now to married. He has just marry his fiancee today and held a wedding party few hours ago in Gedung Wanita Jl. Solo Yogyakarta.

Congratulations to Aditya Wikan and enjoy your new life with your new family

Ancient Aliens

My colleague told me that we watched a good TV series called Ancient Alien and he recommended that movie to me. I was interested of watching it, so i started to downloading it via Torrent. It has reached Season 4 currently, but i will start from season 1, even though the film is not a continuous movie. You can start at any season without any worries.

I hope this could be an alternatives besides KDrama that i watched. Currently, i'm watching Dream High and Dr. Jin. I have Dream High 2 on my next watch list :)

Easier to Crack Password

Cracking password nowadays is getting easier everyday. With the help of today's powerful computation and also newly developed resource-efficient algorithm, makes users's password seems less secure than before.

The latest version of John the Ripper (1.7.9-jumbo 6), well known password cracker is now able to crack password using GPUs via CUDA and OpenCL. This brings major improvements to it's performance.

Taken from H-Online:

In the case of sha512crypt, this means that the GPU on a GeForce GTX 570 graphics card can generate around 11,000 hashes per second – still more than five times faster than on a computer with eight CPU cores.

This means that we should pick our password more carefully. We can't just use the old method of selecting password, because it take less and less time to crack a password using today's tool and computing resources

Slackware ARM on the Raspberry Pi

Slackware ARM or ARMedslack project by Stuart Winter of the Slackware Team has now implementable on Raspberry Pi devices. Follow the instructions on this page to get Slackware installed on Raspberry Pi devices.

I'm sure a lot of Slackware fans will be glad to hear this out.

Glibc 2.16 Released

Glibc 2.16 has been released and it comes with several new features such as:

• x32 ABI
• C11 ISO Standard
• Removal of Linux Kernel 2.4. The minimum requirement has been raised to Linux Kernel 2.6

As we all know, Glibc plays an important role in all Linux distribution since it is the C library used by most systems that are based on the Linux kernel. Having an unstable glibc means you will not enjoy your system as it should be.

Slackware 14 will not be shipping glibc as part of it's supported application. Instead, they will go with patched glibc 2.15 which is proven to be stable enough after several patches goes into the stabilization process.

Besides, Slackware is going to be released based on Linux Kernel 3.2.x, which hasn't supported x32 ABI as well (it's officially supported since Linux Kernel 3.4), so there's no point of including this glibc version to Slackware for now. Future Slackware releases might be based on glibc 2.16 (or newer version) though.

Half Year Passed

It's already July 1 and that means we have been through six months of 2012 and we will continue with another six months to complete before we are heading towards 2013 and prove that 2012 is not the doomsday like many stories and legends are told.

It's been a magnificent year so far and i'm enjoying my new life along with my new family, new challenge ahead, new friends, students, etc. There are a lot of new things around me that motivates me to do more.

So does this blog keeps updating daily with all the things that happened around me and across the globe. We hope to keep serving you daily :)