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!!!