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.