Monday, December 30, 2013

Alysia is 1 Year Old :)

Alysia was celebrating her first birthday party last night with a simple dinner with my family and my wife's family. Time does tick so fast. I remembered, last year, she was just born, weighted around 7 lbs (3.55 Kg), 49 cm in height and now she has turned around 22 lbs (11 Kg). She is now able to walk, even though i had to hold her hand since she's not ready yet to stand firmly and steadily.

Thank you for all your good wishes in Facebook and Twitter for her birthday. I hoped they all came true and wishes the best for her future :)

Monday, December 23, 2013

Progress on 2013

Time flies so fast. It's already December and in less than one week, my daughter Alysia will celebrate her first birthday. I just remembered how small she was last year and now she has grown up so fast while still preserving her cuteness :)

As for myself, lots have happened during this year. On my work, i have passed the national certification for lecturers which was announced yesterday after battling with it few months ago. It was really a perfect gift by the government even though i believed that i would make it long before they announced it.

As for side jobs, i have been pretty busy with Kencana project that completely finished around April, but there was still some maintenance until July. It was one of the complex project that i ever handled, but we (me and my team) managed to finish it succesfully.

I also joined the MSB project along with Chess Griffin to provide MATE packages for Slackware and we released two releases this year: MATE 1.6 for Slackware 14.0 and also 14.1. We are now planning to include MATE 1.8 for Slackware 14.1 for next year.

On November, the SBo admins has asked me to become one of them and i really thanked them for this honor. I also learned lots of things after joining this small team of highly talented people. I also joined the IRC once again, after leaving it few years ago since many discussion happened in IRC.

A new 2 TB of hard disk was installed and i got plenty of space to play with, so i built a new build virtual machine in my local computer for SBo-related work on top of qemu/kvm and libvirt, thanks to Robby and Matteo. I might even use this to my operating system class next semester as i have compiled and installed it on my laptop last night as well.

Oh well, i may not be able to remember all things in 2013, but here's what i'm proud of. Sorry for not being to active updating this blog in 2013, but higher priorities takes place over blog posting quantities :)


Monday, December 16, 2013

New Space Capacity

My computer is already quite old and since it only had 320 GB of space which should be divided for Windows and Linux, i didn't allocate much for Linux during partitioning the hard drive. I only gave 55 GB for Linux, 80 GB for Windows (C), 100 GB for Master (D), and 70 GB for Data (E). Both D and E were shared with Linux since reading/writing NTFS partition is no longer a problem with Linux. At that time, i didn't think of using virtualizations and building so many packages like nowadays.

Things changed when i joined Chess Griffin to work on MSB project, providing MATE packages for Slackware 14.0 and 14.1. The packages must be built on a clean environment, so i had to use virtualization technology to build them. Since it should be built on two arch (x86 and x86_64), i had to make 2 VMs for that. I'm still able to manage things at that point as i only need like 17 GB for 2 Slackware VMs built using a full clean installation of Slackware 14.0 (now 14.1), but i had to clean up some packages which i rarely used.

On November 2013, i joined the SlackBuilds project as the team member after Robby Workman invited me and at that time, i was thinking of buying a new disk for saving the sources and also the files created during build process. Testing a package sometimes really takes a lot of space since sometimes it requires so many dependencies and it takes a lot of space and time to build a single package.

Today, i made up my mind to buy a new hard drive for my desktop at home and i bought 2 TB of hard drive which should be more than enough. I already formatted the disk and prepare all the partitions. Suppose my old hard drive is dead, i can just install the OS onto this new partition and all of my data has been transfered there as backup. I have allocated 500 GB for build partition and another 500 GB for VM partition, which should be more than enough for MSB and SBo project (and probably other future project).

I'm still using my old disk together with the new one and it's already synchronized in most of the data contained, but i still have plenty of room in the new disk.

Sunday, December 08, 2013

Shell Commands Explained in Detail

If you happened to came to Linux world, then you must know that shell is considered one of the biggest assets, especially for those who loves automation and also scripting for their daily tasks.

But for some people, learning all those commands (including their parameter/options) will take some time and patience that not everyone has.

There's an easy way to solve that issue. Just visit explainshell.com and place your command there and they will try to explain it to you in detail. Well, basically they just grab the relevant part from the manual page, but it's easier for us to see instead of digging the whole manual pages. They already prepared some examples for you to try out.

Sunday, December 01, 2013

Linux Mint 16 and EFL 1.8 is Out

Two interesting projects has released their latest product this weekend and they are Linux Mint 16 (codename Petra) and EFL 1.8, which is a major release since EFL 1.7.

Linux Mint 16 is a results of 5 months of development based on Ubuntu Saucy Salamander and it's available on two flavours, MATE and Cinnamon. More will come in the future (XFCE and KDE).

EFL 1.8 is another interesting project which now tries to combine all elements (Ecore, Edje, Eet, Eeze, Efreet, Eina, Eio, Embryo, Emotion, Ethumb, Evas and Evil) into a single EFL package. They even added another new elements inside: Eldbus, EPhysics, and Escape.
Eldbus a replacement for E_dbus, which is still able to be built in it's 1.7 form but will no longer be updated or maintained, but still functions against EFL 1.8 if you depend on it.

EPhysics is a new library that glues in the Bullet physics engine into EFL to allow you to make use of an entire physics engine easily and simply in your creations. Edje also makes use of this allowing your themes to use it too.
EFL 1.8 features Wayland support, audio support, Async rendering (in Evas), and Office document loading for Generic Loaders.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Source Checker Script

It's been a long time since i wrote a blog post on this one. It's been a busy life ever since i had a baby girl, but i enjoyed it so i am not complaining :)

Anyway, right now i'm making some simple script to test whether an upstream source is still available or has they been deleted or moved to another place and create a broken link on the SlackBuild script at SBo project. For most of the sites upstream, my simple script worked fine, but there are several sites that rendered my script unusable and they are not a simple website. They are big vendors, such as sourceforge and Google Code.

I'm not really sure about sourceforge, but Google Code is clearly not supporting HEAD method, thus making my script failed to download from their site using wget --spider option. It worked fine using a normal wget command, but then i will need to download the file, which is something i don't really need. I just need to know whether the files are still there or not.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem? Let me know if you do :)

Update (November 30, 1: 15 AM): I'm able to check on Sourceforge.net now, but i still need to work around Google Code as some SBo scripts are hosted there as well.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Winamp is Shutting Down

AOL, a big company who have acquired Nullsoft, parent company of a music service Winamp in 1999 has made a big decision by shutting down Winamp on December 20, 2013. This means that after that date, there will be no more Winamp releases and it will be history.

Just before the final date, Winamp has managed to release Winamp 5.66 and i guess this will be their final release before shutting down.

Winamp was one of my favorite multimedia player since i used computer back in junior high school. I followed it's development from winamp 2, 3, and lastly 5. It was a great software, easy to use, and it just worked. I guess it's time to say good bye to all of those and switch to other application that does the same thing.


Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Cisco is Opening Their H.264 Codec for Free

Cisco has just announced that they will release their H.264 codec for public and it will be open-sourced so that it will boost WebRTC deployment in many other products, such as Firefox who have also responded by making an announcement that they will support it as soon as possible.

Cisco will release a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet and this enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. This will surely boster WebRTC implementation in Firefox and hopefully Google Chrome will follow soon enough.

I love it when big organization realize that by opening technology will surely give them more benefits instead of disadvantages.

Go Open Source ......

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Upgrading Slackware Machine

Few days ago, i perform my biggest upgrade ever on one of the server running Slackware. It was running Slackware 12.2 and since it will be EOL'ed by Patrick on December 2013, with two months left, i think it's time to move on. I decided to upgrade to Slackware 14.0, and i'm using slackpkg to help me on this one.

Since on that machine i have all the Slackware repository for 12.2 up until 14.0 (and even -Current), it's so easy to do so. I just changed the default configuration of slackpkg to use DOWNLOAD_ALL=on just to make sure everything is downloaded before attempting to upgrade the packages. Next is updating the mirror location to the local files and change it to Slackware 13.0 and ran
  • slackpkg update gpg
  • slackpkg update
  • slackpkg install-new
  • slackpkg upgrade-all
  • slackpkg clean-system
After all of these steps are done, i reviewed changes on the configuration and merged them and make sure that it still worked. This is the most time-consuming if you have so many customized configuration. Since this is a server, there weren't so many packages installed and most of it are basic applications and libraries.

I continued with Slackware 13.1, 13.37, and finally 14.0. These upgrade steps must be done one by one. You can't jump from 12.2 to 14.0 directly or else you might skip some important packages between those two versions.

There are some packages that will not work until you reboot your system and your kernel is updated with a new one. One of them is apr-* packages which is a dependency of httpd (apache web server).

Right now, the server is running on Slackware 14.0 and i'm planning to upgrade to Slackware 14.1 once it's released (it should be released soon).

Big thanks to slackpkg to make my upgrade process went so smooth :)

Friday, October 18, 2013

Ubuntu 13.10 Released

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) to the public as scheduled. This is their latest non-LTS release before Ubuntu 14.04 which is going to be declared as LTS version.

Canonical is also providing Cloud-based service based on Ubuntu with a new service called Ubuntu OpenStack and for the first time ever, they also released it on the phone with Ubuntu Touch.

Check out the features page to find out more about their features and finally, head to the download page if you want to start downloading the ISOs. I have downloaded all of the ISOs on our campus ISO Server which is located here: http://iso.ukdw.ac.id/ubuntu/13.10/.

Friday, October 04, 2013

LibreOffice 4.2.1 Released

Italo Vignoli has just sent a press release about the announcement of LibreOffice 4.2.1, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats. 
The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.5 (with 4.0.6 expected soon), supported by certified professionals.
List of bug fixes for this release can be seen in the ChangeLog for pre-release version: RC1, RC2, and RC3. You can start downloading the binary and source codes for LibreOffice 4.2.1 in their download page.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Free Alternatives from Google and Apple

Apple has decided to give iWorks which consists of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMovie, and iPhotos for free to all customers who bought their new iDevices, particularly iPhone 5S/C that are preloaded with iOS7, their latest mobile operating system. Shortly after that, Google released QuickOffice, which was acquired last year for free as well. This is surely a good news for all users who used these products.

QuickOffice was once a commercial product, $14.99 for Quickoffice on iPhones or Android smartphones, and $19.99 for a version for Android or iOS tablets. That really costly, but worry not, since it's now FREE!!

This really gives Microsoft a pressure since other vendords has started to give their office suite for free. Google did more than that actually, by adding QuickOffice into Chrome OS and also to Google Chrome browser few months ago.

I have upgraded my iPad 3 to iOS 7 and i'm really glad that Google provided this wonderful application for free. I loved this application, except for one missing feature: WiFI upload. It's really a nice feature and it really helped me since i don't use Windows so often. With this feature, i can upload any files i want anytime even though i'm using Linux. This feature is now missing on Google's version of QuickOffice.

Other feature that is missing is to add third party service. Google now limit it onto to their Google Drive service. I don't really use this feature as i already have DropBox on my iPad, but still it's quite annoying to see some features are removed in the latest version.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

BBM for iPhone Officially Launched

BlackBerry has officially launched BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) in other platform than BlackBerry itself which is in iOS. For Indonesian people, you can start downloading BBM for iPhone from this link. It's targetting for iPhone and not applicable to iPod and iPad.

As for the Android platform, it hasn't been released yet, but probably shortly and don't try to download scam applications which tried to trick you. Just relax and wait for the official announcement and link to the Google Play.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Faulty Updates

Few days ago, i installed updates from Microsoft and it was fine after rebooting for the last time (and switched back to Slackware). Today, i tried to log in to Windows to perform an upgrade to my iPad to iOS 7 and noticed a reboot. I tried to log in to Windows again and it happened again. I tried to use safe mode, but it all failed. I guess the update is the culprit. This system has been installed on my desktop for almost 5 years without being reinstalled. I followed Microsoft's update monthly. I guess it's time to say good bye.

I have just finished installing Windows 7 on this machine and right now, i'm still installing all the applications and also patches from Microsoft since Windows 7 SP 1 was released. It's also a good time to start with a new operating system after a while.

OK, time to restart Windows (as always) :)

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

Linux Kernel 3.11 is Out

Just week after celebrating Linux's 22nd anniversary, Linus sent out the final version of Linux Kernel 3.11. This marks the end of 3.10 development and now the maintenance will goes to Greg whom will update on his weekly -Stable cycle and Linus will open up a roughly two weeks of merge window where all of the planned feature that has been developed or sitting on linux-next can be pushed to Linus' main tree by using a pull request.

For now, the entries in KernelNewbies hasn't been updated for Linux Kernel 3.11 (but it will soon), and since The H has shut down some time ago, the best thing you can get deeply in Linux Kernel 3.11 will be from Phoronix.

I'm compiling it right now and it should be finished soon. Let us see what visible improvements that we can get from this shiny new kernel :)

Thursday, August 29, 2013

LibreOffice 4.1.1 Released

LibreOffice 4.1.1 has been released and Italo Vignoli already made the announcement via email that i received few hours ago. It's a bug fix version, so it focuses on fixing bugs found after LibreOffice 4.1 gets released last month. For Enterprise users, they are still recommending users to use the previous LibreOffice 4.0.5 which is backed by certified professionals and considered stable enough for production environments.

Another great news that comes along with the announcement was that Spanish autonomous region of Valencia's migration to LibreOffice on 120,000 PCs, which will save the government some 1.5 million Euro per year on proprietary software licenses. This adds more and more governments who are considering the migration to open source and avoid proprietary software which will force them to pay annual license fee.

LibreOffice 4.1.1 fixed so many problems during RC1 and RC2

Friday, August 23, 2013

iWork for Free

You might be happy to see the title, but don't get over excited first. Read the whole news and see if you are happy with it or not.

So, Apple is now testing iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) as a cloud service and place them on iCloud.com (their cloud service along with other apps that are available on most of their iDevices, such as Notes, Reminder, Calendar, Contact, etc). This means, you don't really need to install separate iWork applications (worth US$ 9.99 each) from App Store and just use Chrome or Safari to access icloud.com and have them available on your iDevice.

It's still in Beta phase and we are not sure whether it will be free or not, but for this beta, it's free for use. For best experience, it's recommended to use Safari, since when i used the latest Firefox on Linux, it showed a message that my browser is not fully supported when trying the Keynote. I couldn't see the slideshow when i click on the Play button as well. I guess only Pages works well with Firefox currently.

Taken from Apple's Knowledge Base:
The following browsers are supported for use with iWork for iCloud beta:
  • Safari 6.0.3 or later (OS X)
  • Internet Explorer 9.0.8 or later (Windows)
  • Google Chrome 27.0.1 or later
iWork for iCloud beta will allow you to use these browsers, but some features may not work as expected:
  • Safari 5.0 - 6.0.2 (OS X)
  • Firefox 9.0 and later
  • Google Chrome 7.0 - 26.0.1
Other web browsers may not work with iWork for iCloud beta.

Here's the screenshot of the main page of iCloud after logging in:


Sunday, August 18, 2013

RIP : My Modem

I woke up early this morning and noticed that all 4 LEDs from my modem has turned off. I didn't turn the modem off last night, so i tried to turn it off and on again, but it still went off. So i guess it's time to say good bye to my modem which has accompanied me for the last 3-4 years. It was a simple, yet nice modem so far, but lately, gets disconnected so often.

I already prepared the replacement since last month, so i just replaced it with the new one. It's quite cheap, but it has quite a lot of features. One thing i dislike about this new modem is that the original firmware has been modified by Telkom Indonesia (biggest telco operator in Indonesia) and they put a backdoor inside the modem. The reason was because to ease their job for troubleshooting. Suppose the client's modem was having a trouble, they can check it from their server or remotely change the configuration of the modem without user intervention.

For me, this is something unaccepted since it's not documented on the manual book and they don't even tell us about this. One of my colleagues have written a lengthy blog post about it on his blog (here and here). I have disabled the CWMP feature and disable all remote users and login along with other changes as well. For TP-Link users, you can try to use this reverse-engineering trick to get it done.

Anyway, the new modem is working fine here and hopefully it will last longer than the previous modem.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Amarok 2.8 "Return To The Origin" Released

After few months of development, finally Amarok 2.8 has been officially released. It also marks the comeback of their founder, Mark Kretschmann to the team after going hiatus for some time.

What are the highlights?
  • A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
  • Smooth fade-out when pausing music
  • Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes
  • Significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger
  • Power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options
  • Performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok
This release also features the first code contributions by our current Google Summer of Code students: please welcome Anmol Ahuja, Konrad Zemek and Tatjana Gornak. Our release manager Matěj Laitl takes part in GSoC as well.

Here are the detailed changelog:

Features

  • Tracks from Recently Played List widget can now directly be added to the playlist. (BR 279263, BR 296090)
  • Before 2.8 Beta:
  • Ctrl+C copies the currently playing artist & title to the clipboard. (BR 228872) Patch by fleissig fleissig.
  • Volume fade-out is now also available for pause.
  • The Files browser now has a Refresh button. (BR 213666)
  • The active playlist item is animated with a soft glow effect.
  • Added an audio analyzer visualization applet.
  • Added a function for resetting the GUI layout back to default state. (BR 300753)
  • Pressing enter when searching collections now adds found tracks to the playlist and clears the search bar, this is a very convenient way to populate your playlist.
  • Allow to transcode only certain (different format, playability) tracks when transferring them to a collection; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 312407)
  • On-Screen-Display fades in/out smoothly.
  • Added support for .asx playlists; patch by Tatjana Gornak. (BR 170207)
  • Add Radio GFM radio streams to Cool Stream Script. (BR 317978)
  • Added options to pause playback on system suspend and to inhibit automatic suspend if playing a track (enabled by default); patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 259862) (BR 222571)
  • Playlist files are now read asynchronously when possible; patch and great deal of refactoring by Tatjana Gornak. (BR 291934)
  • Added support to filter tracks to scrobble to Last.fm by label. Patch by Vedant Agarwala. (BR 140198)
  • Added transcoding support for Opus codec if ffmpeg is compiled with support for the libopus library, patch by Martin Brodbeck.
  • Added keyboard shortcuts for small 2 s seeks (Ctrl + Left/Right) and long 1 minute seeks (Shift + Left/Right) in addition to standard 10 s seeks. Durations are now configurable in amarokrc, see Amarok Handbook. Patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 177258)
  • Added support for files in Opus codec if Amarok is compiled against recent enough TagLib (post 1.8), patch by Martin Brodbeck. (BR 312905)
  • Added Ctrl+H shortcut to randomize playlist, patch by Harsh Gupta. (BR 208061)

Changes

  • The Jamendo service now uses a higher quality MP3 format instead of Ogg Vorbis.
  • Added an option whether adding tracks to playlist should start playing. (BR 322428)
  • Amarok now depends on Qt 4.8.3.
  • Amarok now uses FindFFMpeg.cmake from kdelibs
  • Before 2.8 Beta:
  • Removed LikeBack (a development feature in debug builds). (BR 312498) (BR 252323)
  • Collection Browser: Artist level was renamed to Track Artist and replaced by Album Artist by default. Various Artists item is no longer shown under Track Artist level.
  • Removed the splash screen.
  • Playlist-related actions were harmonized, double-clicking or pressing enter will append tracks to playlist, using any "play media" action or middle-clicking will prepend tracks to queue and immediately start playing. (BR 145468, BR 145490, BR 194549)
  • When a new collection plugin is enabled, its collections appear immediately without a need for restart.
  • Update the MusicBrainz tagger to MusicBrainz web service 2, make it show some more good suggestions for tagging, and add some options to help choosing the best results.
  • Add note about generating .mood files into Moodbar Options; patch by Harsh Gupta with tweaks by MatÄ›j Laitl. (BR 289483)
  • Amarok now depends on Qt 4.8.2.
  • Add prepareToQuit() signal to Amarok.Window script bindings; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 241066)
  • Data CDs are now recognized in Amarok; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 316128)
  • On-Screen-Display now uses the system font instead of hardcoded sans-serif. (BR 248707)
  • Fancy behavior of some context menus showing different actions when Shift key is held has been reverted. All entries are now shown all the time.
  • The dynamic playlist behavior has changed. It will no longer generate "pretty good" playlists that do not fulfill the given biases. Instead it might add no song at all if given impossible-to-fulfill conditions.
  • The "tracks have been hidden in the playlist" warning when filtering the playlist is now displayed inside the playlist. (BR 260352)
  • Update tag widget for Layout edit, filter edit, organize collection and guess tag dialog.
  • When fadeout and/or Replay Gain isn't possible, gray-out related UI elements in order not to fool users.

Bugfixes

  • Don't reload Wikipedia applet content if artist/album have not changed. Patch by Frank Meerkoetter. (BR 112044)
  • Jamendo service: Albums are now downloaded directly instead of going via BitTorrent. This is far more reliable and also supports on-the-fly transcoding. (BR 299434)
  • Work-around Solid UDisks2 backend bug that caused USB Mass Storage devices and iPods not being recognized when connected before Amarok was started. Also fixes a bug where blank devices would appear in Play Media dialog. (BR 322980)
  • Definitely fix a bug where storing Last.fm credentials in plain-text isn't offered when KWallet is disabled. (BR 315306)
  • Radio streams from scripted services are now instantly playable. (BR 320718)
  • Recently Played List widget now keeps its own time for tracks instead of relying on the Last Played statistic. (BR 302485)
  • Prevent hitting an assertion failure if just removed track from the Local Collection is edited. (BR 322474)
  • Fixed a regression introduced in 2.8 Beta where tracks in the Local Collection were sometimes forgotten and then found again. (BR 322603)
  • Fixed invalid SQL queries when you have files or folders with an apostrophe in your collection. (BR 322415)
  • Fixed organizing/copying/moving tracks to Local Collection on Windows. (BR 279560, BR 302251)
  • Various usability improvements for the applet toolbar. (BR 197948)
  • Removed broken Apply button in applets' settings dialog. (BR 322015)
  • Fix incorrect colors in Context View toolbar when switching themes. (BR 301305)
  • Many fixes for various bugs with switching desktop color themes at runtime, including OSD, spectrum analyzer, collection browser.
  • Avoid updating the MPRIS2 Metadata between tracks. (BR 321602)
  • Before 2.8 Beta:
  • When you remove whole directories from the Local Collection and have Watch Folders for Changes enabled, the tracks now disappear from Collection Browser. (BR 311078)
  • Fix dynamic playlist bug: When "Automatically scroll playlist to current track" was enabled, Amarok would keep scrolling to the bottom. (BR 284214)
  • Fix a problem where ghost tracks would remain in the Local Collection until the database is wiped. (BR 319084)
  • Added missing CMake check for QtWebKit. (BR 321598)
  • Definitely fix a bug where Local Collection wouldn't update in browser. (BR 262504)
  • Fix crashed caused by race conditions at the end of the track scanning. (BR 319835)
  • Fix crash when disabling the Free Music Charts script. (BR 321329)
  • Albums having same name but different album artist won't be mixed together on the playlist if sorting by album is enabled.
  • Fix crash on startup with KDE 4.11. Patch by Hrvoje Senjan. (BR 320855)
  • Fix tracks not able to be dragged around when playlist is shuffled. (BR 320129)
  • Prevent Last.fm scrobbles not being submitted until restart due to change in liblastfm 1.0.7. (BR 320219)
  • Resume Playback on Start will correctly restore paused state, instead of always starting in playing state. (BR 313330)
  • Optimize removal of tens of thousands of tracks from playlist. (BR 316242)
  • Fix `amarok --queue` which didn't actually queue the tracks. (BR 317385)
  • Fix suboptimal initial MusicBrainz tag dialog size by remembering it. (BR 269454)
  • Fix file-browser becoming empty when a file was moved to trash. (BR 317944)
  • Fix `amarok --play file.mp3` option didn't actually start playback.
  • Reason why a particular track is not playable is now shown in playlist tooltip; patch by Anmol Ahuja. (BR 313649)
  • Pre-apmlifier in equalizer is now only enabled if it is actually supported; patch by Harsh Gupta. (BR 301311)
  • Fix Amarok crashed while doing "Organize Files" (BR 317980)
  • Fix Amarok erroneously merges two albums. (BR 216759, BR 272802)
  • Fix Crash on very long artist names. (BR 276894)
  • Fix Move tracks to rubbish and the current track cover changes to the deleted cover. (BR 306735)
  • Fix theoretical configwidget leak in services. (BR 301352)
  • Fix "Local collection" text label is truncated with large font. (BR 282561)
  • Fix crash by putting a broadcast in the playlist. (BR 313718)
  • Fix Keyboard navigates context menu in collection will move two items. (BR 307794)
  • Fix add track to playlist by double click on arrow in the collection. (BR 279513)
  • Fix VFAT safe names missing a couple of idiosyncrasies. (BR 312574)
  • Clarify message when Last.fm streams are not available. (BR 315771)
  • Fix crash when Dynamic Playlist based on last.fm is aborted. (BR 314243)
  • Fix Group by directory doesn't work in main playlist. (BR 265415)
  • Don't remove common labels when editing the tags of multiple tracks. (BR 316043)
  • Fix vertical positioning of On-Screen-Display. (BR 269788)
  • Fix OSD sometimes misplaces the font and the font's shadow. (BR 257643)
  • Prevent inability to save Last.fm password in corner cases. (BR 315306)
  • Fix "Copy to Collection" window doesn't fit on small screens. (BR 283361)
  • Fix crash when quitting Amarok with Statistics Synchronization open. (BR 315525)
  • Fix items moving around when expanded in collection browser. (BR 305602)
  • Fix Organize collection folder deletion going 'too far'. (BR 314348)
  • Fix %albumartist% placeholder translates to some strange unicode symbol. (BR 314351)
  • Fix bumpy fade-out when first used. (BR 312062)
  • Fix crash when switching/removing organize collection presets. (BR 314344)
  • Fix crash on start if a playlist source is unavailable. (BR 313460)
  • Fix Copy/Move to collection picks up wrong destination path and fails silently. (BR 314460)
  • Cleanup TrackOrganizer. (BR 305291)
  • Fix Editing Playist Layout Editor. (BR 250594)
  • Fix Display glitch for rating in verbose playlist. (BR 300118)
  • Refactoring Ampache service, fix Albums with multiple disks not listed correctly. (BR 249857)
  • Fix playlist sorting by type. (BR 249338)
  • Fix subtle bugs when a long fade-out is initiated near the song end.
  • Don't try to fade-out with phonon backends that don't support it. (vlc)
  • Fix Can't edit & save an existing equalizer preset. (BR 241874)
  • Clean up Equalizer Dialog. (BR 274972)

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

First Abroad Trip With Alysia

I just arrived back from my first abroad trip with Alysia and my wife. I was afraid about her since she is still seven months old and i never take a baby abroad. We didn't go too far from Indonesia. We just went to Singapore, 2 hours flight from Jogja so it's relatively close and luckily she didn't complained at all during her flight. That relieved me.

In overall, there's no major problems during our trip. The worst condition was that Alysia got a flu due to her cousin who got flu before her and she played with her for the whole trip. That's why she got infected as well.

It's been a good trip, even though we couldn't maximize the trip since there was one baby, 1 pre-kindergarden kid and 1 junior high school kid coming along with us. Some of the schedule got a little messed up, but that's mainly our fault for not arranging the trip better since we brought our kids along with us.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Firefox 23 Final

Firefox 23 Final has been placed on Mozila's FTP Server, but no announcement has been made for now. Probably they are waiting for the binaries to propagate to several server before they will make the announcement.

What's new on this release? Well, it's not that exciting as Firefox 22, but still there are some room for improvements. Here they are:
  • Mixed content blocking enabled to protects users from man-in-the-middle attacks and eavesdroppers on HTTPS pages (learn more)
  • Improved about:memory's functional UI
  • Enabled DXVA2 on Windows Vista+ to accelerate H.264 video decoding
  • Updated Firefox Logo
  • "Load images automatically", "Enable JavaScript", and Always show the tab bar" checkboxes removed from preferences and reset to defaults
  • Simplified interface for notifications of plugin installation
  • Users can now switch to a new search provider across the entire browser
  • CSP policies using the standard syntax and semantics will now be enforced
  • Implemented a global browser console
  • Social share functionality
  • HTML5 <input type="range"> form control implemented
  • Write more accessible pages on touch interfaces with new ARIA role for key buttons
  • Added unprefixed requestAnimationFrame
  • New feature in toolbox: Network Monitor
  • Dropped blink effect from text-decoration: blink; and completely removed <blink> element
I think the biggest change are the new Mixed content blocking feature and also the Network Monitor. They protect the user and also help developers to have a better understanding about the network activity on a site.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Leason Learned

Last year, i taught network administration course for the first time and i admit there was a some problems during the course since i had a new method of teaching this course compared to previous lecturer. I learned from last year and prepared for the same course this year and this time, i'm fully prepared for the course.

Last year, i gave the students a clean installation of Slackware-Current image for VMWare, but it wasn't a full installation, so on some topics, i had to pause a bit and install the necessary packages before continuing. This time, i will use a clean and full installation of Slackware 14.0 for this course. I really hoped that Slackware 14.1 will come out before this course starts and i can use it, but unfortunately that won't happen for this course. Probably i can ask the students to perform an upgrade to Slackware 14.1 when the course is over :)

This year, i also prepared a special VM of Slackware 14.0 on a public server, thanks to Proxmox which is already installed and fully working. The difference is that this VM will be able to access the Internet, so they can perform a lot of experiments on this machine. I have also prepared a snapshot for this image, so i can roll it back to the original state suppose the students broke the machine.

Thanks to last year's students who gave me a valuable feedback about the course.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Vacation is Almost Over

It's already two months since May and that means my vacation is almost over and new semester on the edge, starting next month (August 26). While it's should be vacation, but i'm not really in vacation since i have been appointed as a coordinator for this year's YKFS service learning program. It really consume most of my time during the program.

After YKFS was completed early this month, my next task is focusing on the procurement and also preparing for next semester. We had lots of meeting in the office and so far so good. Everything is under control.

Next week, we will have one full week of holiday due to Eid al-Fitr, starting on Monday (August 5) until Friday (August 9), but i will extend my vacation until August 14 since i have already planned for this trip long before the announcement. With only two days left before a long holiday, i should start preparing for the trip and this year, i have a new member joining our trip: Alysia, my baby girl. It would be a challenge for me as i have to prioritize her over anything else. I had to make sure her need has been fulfilled first before ours :)

Friday, July 26, 2013

Playing With Proxmox

In the last two days, i have been playing with a new toy called Proxmox. It's a Debian-based Linux distribution used to provide virtual environment. I wanted to test this product so that i can use it to help students for their final project when they need additional resources.

So far, i have a fully working Proxmox 3.0 and also i have successfully installed a Slackware64-14.0 as the first VM client and it's working well. I had a problem of configuring it so that the client is able to access the Internet, but it has been sorted few hours ago. I might be able to use this VM client as my new build machine in the future.

It's a free product and easy to use. The default installation will take all of your hard disk, so make sure you have no data inside it, since it doesn't ask for manual or custom partition layout.

Just in case you have trouble, don't forget to check their Wiki page

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Android 4.3 Released

Google announced the availability of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean to public and it has powered the new Nexus 7 tablet and soon other devices as well (Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus HSPA+ devices across the world).

Some new features on this release:
  • OpenGL ES 3.0 — Game developers can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 3.0 and EGL extensions as standard features of Android, with access from either framework or native APIs.
  • Bluetooth Smart — Now your apps can communicate with the many types of low-power Bluetooth Smart devices and sensors available today, to provide new features for fitness, medical, location, proximity, and more.
  • Restricted profiles — Tablet owners can create restricted profiles to limit access to apps, for family, friends, kiosks, and more. Your app can offer various types of restrictions to let tablet owners control its capabilities in each profile.
  • New media capabilities — A modular DRM framework enables media application developers to more easily integrate DRM into their own streaming protocols such as MPEG DASH. Apps can also access a built-in VP8 encoder from framework or native APIs for high-quality video capture.
  • Notification access — Your apps can now access and interact with the stream of status bar notifications as they are posted. You can display them in any way you want, including routing them to nearby Bluetooth devices, and you can update and dismiss notifications as needed.
  • Improved profiling tools — New tags in the Systrace tool and on-screen GPU profiling give you new ways to build great performance into your app.
More detailed information about this new version can be seen at their platform highlights, API Overview, and DevBytes Videos. Google also released Android NDK (r9) and also Android Support Library (r18).

You can get started developing and testing on Android 4.3 right away, in Android Studio or in ADT/Ant. You can download the Android 4.3 Platform (API level 18), as well as the SDK Tools, Platform Tools, and Support Library from the Android SDK Manager

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Apache OpenOffice 4.0: New Release, New Logo, New Features

Apache OpenOffice 4.0 is finally released after so long of development took place between 3.4.1 and 4.0. It has new logo as a result of  many design iterations, collaboration among talented designers and a contest where 40 logos were rated by over 50,000 users.

It also has LOTS of new features such as :
  • New sidebars (contribution from IBM Symphony)
  • Interoperability Improvements to MSO Documents
  • DrawObject Improvements
  • Picture Crop mode
  • New Charts and Functions
  • More Language Supports
See the rest of the features on their Release Notes.

Go get them on their Download Page

Friday, July 19, 2013

LibreOffice 4.1 is Close to Final

LibreOffice 4.1 is getting closer to the final version as they are now in RC3. If there are no showstoppers, this RC3 will be used as the base for the final version. The upcoming 4.1 will be the sixth major release in two and a half years, and comes with a nice set of new features.

Since this will be a major release from 4.0, the features are huge and here's some of the highlights:
  1. Rotates image on Writer
  2. Embed font in your documents (Writer/Calc/Impress)
  3. More charts option in Calc
  4. New Formula in Calc
  5. Photo Album in Impress
  6. Query Properties Dialog in Base
  7. New Elements docking windows in Math
  8. Export charts to SVG, PDF
  9. More migration from Java to Python in Core modules
  10. Support for legacy Mac word-processing documents
  11. Many improvements to Microsoft OOXML Import and Export filters as well as for the Microsoft Office binary file formats and the RTF format 
  12. Completed the port to gnumake
  13. Support for PowerPC and older Mac OS SDK has been dropped
  14. More Java and UNO API has been deprecated or removed
  15. Performance improvements on all components

Friday, July 12, 2013

YKFS V is Over

International Service Learning - YKFS V is finally over after the HK team depart to Jakarta and then followed to Hong Kong at around midnight. It's been a great work for the past 3 weeks in Banjaroya Village and the strong bond between both students will be reminded even though they are separated.

We have prepared this program for some time along with the HK coordinator and staffs via email. There has been a lot of changes since last year, but we hope that the changes are for the best interest for both parties and it seems the changes i proposed does work as intended and gives us more advantages rather than disadvantages.

I must admit that it wasn't the best service we can do, but i have done my best to make sure they are enjoying the trip in the village and also having the best farewell party in the end of this program.

Thank you to all HK staffs and students for this year's YKFS. Hopefully we can meet again next year in the next YKFS or we can visit HK someday in the future :)

Sunday, July 07, 2013

YKFS V Is Almost Done

Lately i'm just simply to busy at work related to the service learning in which i was appointed as the main coordinator. I had to act as the finance officer as well, so it's quite tiring as i had to travel Jogja - Banjaroya several times a week, especially in the last few days since we are nearing the end and lots to be done here.

At this time, we are working on the banner and the final report which will be handed to the head of the regency on Wednesday. The deadline should be on last Friday, but somehow the students missed it and we had to work extra hard yesterday to collect them and revise it again and again. At the end, i didn't complete all of them and there are 2.5 reports left to be done. Hopefully it can be completed today and we can send it for production later.

Well, that's what keeping me busy these days along with managing all Slackware-related stuffs since -Current is now moving again with pretty big changes such as inclusion of KDE 4.10.5 and Linux Kernel 3.9.9 among other changes.

Monday, July 01, 2013

Happy Original Anniversary

Twelve years ago, i asked my friend (now become my wife) to become my girlfriend at the church and she replied YES. That was our first official journey to create a bond of love between us and it lasts for ten years before we got officially married last 2011.

Although we now have our new anniversary during our wedding, we still celebrate our first anniversary, because without the original anniversary, there won't be any wedding and there won't be Alysia who has now joined our family and she's now six months old.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Firefox 22 is Available

It may not be announced yet, but you can still get the binaries on their FTP Servers.

The release notes lists all changes implemented on this version:
  • Windows: Firefox now follows display scaling options to render text larger on high-res displays
  • WebRTC is now enabled by default!
  • Mac OS X: Download progress in Dock application icon
  • HTML5 audio/video playback rate can now be changed
  • Social services management implemented in Add-ons Manager
  • asm.js optimizations (OdinMonkey) enabled for major performance improvements
  • Improved WebGL rendering performance through asynchronous canvas updates
  • Plain text files displayed within Firefox will now word-wrap
  • For user security, the |Components| object is no longer accessible from web content
  • Improved memory usage and display time when rendering images
  • Pointer Lock API can now be used outside of fullscreen
  • CSS3 Flexbox implemented and enabled by default
  • New Web Notifications API implemented
  • Added clipboardData API for JavaScript access to a user's clipboard
  • New built-in font inspector
  • New HTML5 <data> and <time> elements
  • Scrolling using some high-resolution-scroll aware touchpads feels slow (829952)

Thursday, June 13, 2013

OWASP Top Ten Web Application Security Risk 2013

OWASP has released an update to their Top Ten of Web Application Security Risk. The previous version was released three years ago in 2010.

Injection is still considered as the top risk for any web applications. Broken Authentication and Session Management is now on second position, followed by XSS which goes down from second position. XSRF goes down to 8th position and Security Misconfiguration has gone up to 5th position.

Here are the complete list of Top Ten:
  • A1 Injection
  • A2 Broken Authentication and Session Management
  • A3 Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
  • A4 Insecure Direct Object References
  • A5 Security Misconfiguration
  • A6 Sensitive Data Exposure (2010-A7 Insecure Cryptographic Storage and 2010-A9 Insufficient Transport Layer Protection were merged to form 2013-A6)
  • A7 Missing Function Level Access Control (renamed/broadened from 2010-A8 Failure to Restrict URL Access)
  • A8 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
  • A9 Using Known Vulnerable Components (new but was part of 2010-A6 – Security Misconfiguration)
  • A10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
Get the PDF version

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Community Service Learning Program

Tomorrow the students will start their community service learning program in Banjaroya, Kulon Progo for one month. This year, the service learning program in UKDW are split into two areas: Kulon Progo and Tobelo, Halmahera, North Sulawesi. The ANU students will go  to Tobelo, while the HK students will go to Kulon Progo.

I wish the best for them and hopefully everything works as intended and the students can learn something from the local people about local wisdoms.

I became the coordinator for this year's YKFS V (Yogyakarta Kampung Field School) program as the last year coordinator is now become the coordinator in Tobelo. This gives me a chance to get more experience managing a lot of people together to complete this program by next month.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

LinuxMint 15 Olivia Released

After Ubuntu 13.04 gets released last month, almost two months later, LinuxMint 15 Olivia is released with two default flavour: MATE and Cinnamon. Clem announced it on the Mint's webpage and ISOs are now spreading through mirror sites.

There are lots of new features in Olivia:
For known issues, please refer to the release notes

Monday, May 27, 2013

Marking Done

I have finally completed marking all the exams and i will submit the final grades tomorrow and my job is finished for this semester. It's another exciting semester, except for one course in which one student of mine was found cheating during the final exam and i had to gave him an "E" which is Failed.

My focus right now is planning and coordinating the work for service learning which will start next month along with Hongkong Polytechnic University.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Proxmox 3.0 Released

For those who have been waiting for new release of Proxmox, here's your prizes: Proxmox 3.0 has been released.

Proxmox VE is a complete open source virtualization management solution for servers. It is based on KVM and container-virtualization and manages virtual machines, storage, virtualized networks, and HA Clustering.

The enterprise-class features and the intuitive web interface are designed to help you increase the use of your existing resources and reduce hardware cost and administrating time - in business as well as home use. You can easily virtualize even the most demanding Linux and Windows application workloads.

Change log:
Released 24.05.2013:
  • pve-kernel-2.6.32 2.6.32-100
  • fix CVE-2013-2094
  • update ceph packages to 0.61.2
  • libpve-common-perl 3.0-4:
  • fix bug #381: use persistent reservation file for ports
  • new function PVE::Tools::next_migrate_port()
  • libpve-storage-perl 3.0-6
  • rbd : clone volume to same pool that base volume
  • extend storage list API with useful parameters for clone
  • fix iscsi session scan bug
  • pve-cluster 3.0-4
  • depend on fuse (seems most utilities moved from fuse-utils to fuse)
  • remove depencency on fuse-utils (this package is no longer required)
  • fix warning about uninitialize value
  • fix bug 383: restart pveproxy instead of apache2
  • pve-manager 3.0-20
  • fix login problem when http_proxy is set
  • updated Chinese, German and French translation
  • allow to upload files with spaces in filename (replace with '_')
  • allow to delete pools with non-existent VMs/Storage
  • use correct icons for templates
  • sort templates after regular VMs
  • StorageSelector: allow to use new target option, used by Clone
  • fix bug #385: correctly handle Accept-Encoding
  • fix bug #374: correctly remove destroyed container from pool
  • pve-qemu-kvm 1.4-12
  • vma create: only store basename of config file.
  • qemu-server 3.0-15
  • clone disk : keep source volume params
  • clone: check is we can clone to target storage
  • fix bug #381: use PVE::Tools::next_migrate_port()
  • restore: do not restore template flag
  • vncterm 1.1-3
  • re-enable javascript-events.patch (needed by migrate)
  • based on Debian 7.0 (Wheezy)
  • new VM clone feature
  • new event driven API server (pveproxy)
  • completely replace apache2
  • efficient support for HTTP keep-alive
  • support bootlogd (boot log can be viewed on the GUI)
  • update pve-qemu-kvm to 1.4.1
  • update kernel to vzkernel-2.6.32-042stab076.7.src.rpm
  • changed default IO Scheduler to 'deadline'
  • updated Intel network drivers for e1000e, igb and ixgbe
  • Countless bug fixes (for all details see bugtracker and GIT

Saturday, May 18, 2013

digiKam 3.2.0 is Out

digiKam 3.2.0 has been released and it contains quite a lot of bug fixes compared to previous version. What's new on this version? Taken from the blog
This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.
Face recognition is planned for the next digiKam 3.3.0 release. You can see the progress on YouTube. It seems that it should be released on 3.2.0, but the developer doesn't seem to think it's ready for public usage.

Go get the source or wait for your distribution to package this application

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Linux Kernel 3.8.x Gets Extended Support

As +Greg Kroah-Hartman has EOL'ed Linux Kernel 3.8.x starting from 3.8.13, there are no LTS support for any modern Linux Kernel releases since Greg are maintaining two kernel version already and he didn't want to add the third one (not until he released one of them).

Slackware Linux is planning to use Linux Kernel 3.8.x for their default kernel stock in their next release (don't ask when. IT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN IT'S READY), but doubt has rising in since the kernel has been EOL'ed and that means no further support for this tree, which is no good for a distribution.

Ubuntu Kernel Team is stepping forward to take care of the Linux Kernel 3.8.x branch since they used the same kernel version for their 13.04 Ubuntu Linux until August 2014. More information about Ubuntu's approach can be seen on their wiki page.

Hopefully Pat is convinced with this good news and keep 3.8.x for the next Slackware release and not using the old 3.4.x (which has LTS support from Greg).

Sunday, May 12, 2013

G7 Reunion

It has been several months since our last reunion, but we finally managed to meet after Andre came back from US for the next two weeks in Indonesia and we had a long holiday this week. We were planning to stay in Kaliurang for two nights, but i can only join them partially since i have a baby to be taken care of.

Last night, we decided to join the party and we had a short BBQ party, but the party didn't last long since she was crying so loud and didn't stop for some time, so i guess she is not ready for that kind of party. We had to take her home and left the party earlier.

Sorry guys for not being able to join the party longer, but i do have higher priorities on the baby first.

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

New Editor and Image Upload Support in Blogger iOS App

Blogger has just updated their iOS application to support new WYSIWYG editor and also support for image upload through the editor. This is something that i have been waiting for since up to yesterday, there are no way to upload images using the native apps in iOS. The only way is to use the web version.

Thanks to Google for updating the apps and implementing this feature in iOS :)

KDE 4.10.3 Released

A monthly update for KDE 4.10.x branch has been released by KDE Team. They are polishing this branch by releasing KDE 4.10.3 on May 7 2013. The focus is bringing bug fixes and translation updates. It's safe to upgrade to this version if you have been using previous 4.10.2 or even if you used older version of KDE, namely KDE 4.9.

As with last month, the main area that KDE tried to improve is KWin and also PIM suite. See the KDE's Bug Tracker for complete list of bugs that has been fixed on this release.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

WebPG for Firefox and Chrome

I have been searching for a software replacement for fireGPG, a GnuPG tool management for Firefox to manage GnuPG operations/management. The project was discontinued three years ago because the author didn't have time to continue following GMail's changes.

Today, i found the alternative and that is WebPG. It's available for Firefox and Chrome. It's actively developed in github repository (Firefox and Chrome) by Kyle L. Huff. It still has some issues, but for most cases, it's not completely their fault and some of them are GMail's fault.

Let me know if you like this project :)

Thursday, May 02, 2013

New NVidia Linux Driver

NVidia has released a new version of Linux Driver: 319.17. This new version brings a lot of new features mentioned below:
  • Added support for the following GPU:
  • GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST
    GeForce GT 720M
    GeForce GT 735M
    GeForce GT 740M
    GeForce GT 745M
    GeForce GT 750M
  • Fixed a regression that caused multiple BUG messages to be printed in the kernel log on SMP systems.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the X server to crash when repeatedly enabling and disabling displays.
  • Updated nvidia-settings to preserve the relative positioning of displays when changing from a layout where multiple displays are on the same X screen to one where the same displays span multiple X screens.
  • Fixed nvidia-settings to dlopen(3) "libvdpau.so.1", rather than "libvdpau.so".
  • Added nvidia-persistenced, a daemon utility, to the driver package. nvidia-persistenced can be installed to run on system startup or manually run to allow the NVIDIA kernel module to keep persistent driver state allocated when no other user-space NVIDIA driver components are running.This can improve startup time for other user-space NVIDIA driver components.
  • Fixed CVE-2013-0131: NVIDIA UNIX GPU Driver ARGB Cursor Buffer Overflow in "NoScanout" Mode. This buffer overflow, which occurred when an X client installed a large ARGB cursor on an X server running in NoScanout mode, could cause a denial of service (e.g., an X server segmentation fault), or could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution.
  • Added initial support for restoration of efifb consoles on UEFI systems where the primary display is driven over VGA or TMDS (e.g. DVI, HDMI, or LVDS).
  • Added support for the xorg.conf Monitor section options "Ignore", "Enable", "Primary", and "Rotate".For example, to rotate a monitor identified by a specific EDID hash, one could add the following to /etc/X11/xorg.conf or a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d:
  • Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "DPY-EDID-ee6cecc0-fa46-0c33-94e0-274313f9e7eb"
    Option "Rotate" "left"
    EndSection
  • See the README and the xorg.conf(5) man page for more information.
  • Added an Underscan feature in the nvidia-settings X Server Display Configuration page which allows the configuration of an underscan border around the ViewPortOut.This feature was formerly known as Overscan Compensation.
  • Added support for application profiles to the NVIDIA client-side GLX implementation. See the "Application Profiles" chapter of the README for more information.
  • Added support to nvidia-installer for crytographically signing the NVIDIA kernel module. See the "Installing the NVIDIA Driver" chapter of the README for more information.
  • Added the "PanningTrackingArea" and "PanningBorder" MetaMode attributes.
  • Added support for RandR 1.3 panning.
  • Improved performance when the Accel option is disabled.
  • Added initial support for RandR 1.4 Provider objects with the Source Output capability, which can be used to render the desktop on an NVIDIA GPU and display it on an output connected to a provider with the Sink Output capability, such as an Intel integrated graphics device or a DisplayLink USB-to-VGA adapter.See the README for details.
  • Added nvidia-modprobe, a setuid root utility, to the driver package. nvidia-modprobe can be used by user-space NVIDIA driver components to make sure the NVIDIA kernel module is loaded and that the NVIDIA character device files are present.When possible, it is recommended to use Linux distribution native mechanisms for managing kernel module loading and device file creation. This utility is provided as a fallback to work out-of-the-box in a distribution-independent way.
  • Updated the nvidia-settings command line interface to accept display device names, as well as optional target qualifiers, e.g.
  • nvidia-settings -q [DVI-I-0]/RefreshRate
    nvidia-settings -q [GPU-1.DVI_I-1]/RefreshRate
  • Updated the nvidia-settings command line interface to no longer assume the "X screen 0" target, when no target is specified in query and assign operations.Instead, all valid targets of the attribute are processed.
  • Fixed a memory leak that occurred when destroying a GLX window but not its associated X window.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause nvidia-installer to fail to delete directories created as part of a previous installation.
  • Updated nvidia-installer to report failures to remove installed files or restore backed up files with a single warning message, instead of a separate message for each individual failure.
  • Improved the performance of modesets in cases where the mode timings remained the same, but other parameters of the mode configuration, such as the ViewPort or panning domain, changed.
  • Fixed an issue with RENDER convolution filters.The driver will no longer normalize filter kernels before accelerating them.
  • Improved debuggability of the NVIDIA OpenGL libraries by including proper stack unwinding information on all supported architectures.
  • Updated the dkms.conf file and the makefile for the NVIDIA Linux kernel module to allow DKMS installations on systems with separate source and output directories.
  • Fixed a bug that caused RENDER Pictures to be sampled incorrectly when using nearest filtering in some cases.
  • Added support for the RandR "Border" and "BorderDimensions" Output properties, which can be used to configure the ViewPortOut of an RandR output.This is functionally equivalent to the "ViewPortOut" MetaMode token.
  • Fixed a bug where RRGetCrtcInfo could report incorrect size information when an RandR output has a custom ViewPortIn.
  • Further improve performance of some versions of HyperMesh with Quadro GPUs.
  • Added a VDPAU page to the nvidia-settings control panel, to display information about the decoding capabilities of VDPAU-capable GPUs.
  • Added support for dynamic mode management through RandR, e.g. via the --newmode, --rmmode, and --delmode options in xrandr(1).
  • Increased the number of pages that are shareable across multiple processes in the x86 build of libnvidia-glcore.so, by reducing its R_386_PC32 relocation count.
  • Fixed a bug that caused XVideo applications to receive BadAlloc errors after VT switches and mode switches that occurred while a composite manager was running.
  • Removed the X driver's support for "CursorShadow".
  • Updated nvidia-installer to attempt unprelinking files whose checksums do not match the checksums recorded at installation time.
  • Switched .run package compression from gzip to xz.This provides a higher level of compression.
Go grab it here (32 bit and 64 bit version)

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Good Bye 2, Welcome 3


Oh well, i'm 30 years old now and Google also knows about it too. I guess it's time to say good bye to 2[0-9] and welcome 3[0-9] :)

Friday, April 26, 2013

Dropbox Auto Update Service

For those who have been using Dropbox service, you might notice that since version 2.0, Dropbox has an ability to auto-update to the latest version, meaning that we no longer need to download every update manually. Let your computer connected to the Internet and it will download the update and upgrade it automatically.

If you haven't upgraded to 2.0 yet, it's time to do so since there has been a lot of improvements since then. Please refer to Release Notes document for more information about the changes in Dropbox.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Ubuntu 13.04 Released

Ubuntu 13.04 aka Raring Ringtail has been released and it's available for download. There are several flavor: Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Chinese version (Kylin).

Here are the highlights of this release:
  • Linux Kernel 3.8.8
  • Unity 7
  • Upstart 1.8
  • LibreOffice 4.0
  • CUPS 1.6.2 and cups-filter-1.0.34
  • Python 3.3
There are other variants such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and UbuntuKylin which was released on the same day. Check the Release Notes for more information about this release and possible known issues.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

MU Claimed Their 20th Title

After they got beaten by Manchester City to the title race last year, Manchester United finally claimed their trophy back to Old Trafford after crushing Aston Villa 3-0, thanks to Robin Van Persie's hattrick. This is 20th EPL title for MU, 13th for Sir Alex Fergusson and first for some new players who have joined MU this season, including our hero of the match, RvP and also Shinji Kagawa.

Visit Manutd's Champions 2013 page for more story about their journey to reclaim their title.

Viva Manchester United


Monday, April 22, 2013

IRIS II Completed

Finally the second season of IRIS KDrama has been completed with another same ending, the main character died. This time, it's not by gunshot, but he died due to health problem and also because he took the nuclear bomb with a helicopter to an island far away from Seoul to minimize the casualties due to the effect of nuclear explosion which was estimated of bigger than the bomb exploded in Hiroshima Japan long long ago.

It's been a great movie, but then the ending that makes me kinda disappointed with the writer. I hope they produce IRIS III with a better plot in the end.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Patrick Volkerding's CafePress Account

I saw an interesting thread on LQ about Patrick Volkerding's CafePress account. I recall few years ago, i tried to buy items from this site and yet it failed, because they weren't shipping to Indonesia and decline my transactions.

Since Ruario started this topic, i got curious if they have improved or not, so i tried to buy two items from them and it seems that they accepted my transactions this time. This is a great news since by doing this, i can directly help Slackware Project financially and it provides another alternatives to Slackware Store.

Let's wait for the next few weeks before the items reached my house. Can't wait to use them :)

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Hacking Secret Ciphers With Python

If you like Cryptography and you like to learn programming language, then i would suggest you to read Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python. It's available for free in PDF format or the online HTML version or you can buy it for $25 in Amazon.

What you will get is a fun tutorial with Python on Cryptography. This book is aimed at people who have no experience programming or with cryptography. The book goes through writing Python programs that not only implement several ciphers but also can hack these ciphers.

The book's website is available on http://inventwithpython.com/hacking

Sunday, April 14, 2013

H@dfex Conference

Last Saturday, i attended H@dfex conference in Royal Ambarrukmo after i got a free pass for the conference from the commitee. They even gave 5 discount voucher for students who would like to participate on this conference.

There i met several colleagues which was invited as a speaker and we had some discussions about security and also other things. Chances like this doesn't happened so often, so that's why i forced myself to attend this event even though i also have other activities on Saturday which is supervising the KKN program, but my schedule is for next week.

Thank you UII commitee for the free pass :)

Friday, April 12, 2013

Final LibreOffice 3.6.x Release

The Document Foundation has released their last release for LibreOffice 3.6.x branch. They will focus on fixing bugs on LibreOffice 4.0.x and probably working for future release of LibreOffice 4.1.x.

This is an unplanned release as LibreOffice 3.6.5 was supposed to be the last maintenance release for 3.6.x branch, but then it was decided to have another release and this is it. It brings over 50 bug fixes since LibreOffice 3.6.5.

Users who prefer stability to more advanced features should stick with this release and for those who are willing to test new features should go with LibreOffice 4.0.2 which was released last week.

You can download it from their Download page, but you will have to switch the version to 3.6 since 4.0.x is the default option picked.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

NVidia Start to Support Optimus Users in Linux

NVidia has finally started to support Optimus in Linux Platform by releasing their new beta driver 319.12. By utilizing RandR 1.4, the new beta driver adds a way for drivers to work together so that one graphics device can display images rendered by another. This can be used on Optimus-based laptops to display a desktop rendered by an NVIDIA GPU on a screen connected to another graphics device, such as an Intel integrated graphics device or a USB-to-VGA adapter.

This is a great news for Optimus users as they don't have to use bumblebee project anymore and with further releases from NVidia, i think Optimus users should have smoother performance in the future.

Here's the changes in 319.12:
- Support for restoring of EFIFB consoles on UEFI systems with VGA/DVI/HDMI/LVDS/DP outputs.

- Support for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST graphics card.

- Support for application profiles to the NVIDIA client-side GLX implementation.

- Support within the NVIDIA Installer to cryptographically sign the NVIDIA kernel module as would be needed for SecureBoot.

- RandR 1.3 panning support.

- A new nvidia-modprobe user-space utility.

- Improved debugging of the NVIDIA OpenGL libraries by including proper stack unwinding information.

- RanDR Border and BorderDimensions output properties.

- Better HyperMesh performance for some versions on Quadro GPUs.

- A new NVIDIA VDPAU page is present on the NVIDIA Settings control panel to display decoding capabilities of GPUs.

- Memory leak, bug, and performance fixes.

Monday, April 08, 2013

KDE 4.10.2 on Slackware-Current

Nowadays, Slackware-Current is quite active and it's taking most of the bleeding-edge applications such as XFCE 4.10.2 and KDE 4.10.2, GLIBC 2.17, GCC 4.8.0, and many others. This is a good sign that next Slackware release will be another great release as usual and it should support major components out there without any big issues.

Next release should also mark a new milestone where it should be a UEFI-compliant version of Slackware. Patrick is working hard on this issue with the help of others.

Meanwhile, Eric Hameleers is now working on an ARM port of Slackware on his new Google Chromebook. He is targeting the next Slackware release to bring a full ARM port of Slackware that can be used for modern CPUs

Thursday, April 04, 2013

New NVidia Drivers for Linux

NVidia has released three updates to their proprietary drivers for each category:
Latest Long Lived Branch version: 310.44
Latest Short Lived Branch version: 313.30
Latest Legacy GPU version (304.xx series): 304.88

All of them fixed one security update
  • CVE-2013-0131: NVIDIA UNIX GPU Driver ARGB Cursor Buffer Overflow in "NoScanout" Mode. This buffer overflow, which occurred when an X client installed a large ARGB cursor on an X server running in NoScanout mode, could cause a denial of service (e.g., an X server segmentation fault), or could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution.
Great news is that this driver also fixed a blank TTY problem found on 304.84. I have been waiting for this update as i can switch back to console or logged out from any DE back to my console instead of having a blank screen.

Thanks to NVidia for this update.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Firefox 20 Features

For those expecting new Mozilla Firefox 20, here are the highlight of changes implemented in the final release:
  • Per-window Private Browsing 
  • New download experience
  • Ability to close hanging plugins, without the browser hanging
  • Continued performance improvements around common browser task
  • Continued implementation of draft ECMAScript 6
  • New JavaScript Profiler Tool
  • blend modes supported by <canvas>
  • <audio> and <video> improvements 
  • getUserMedia implemented for web access to the user's camera and microphone (with user permission)
You can download them in their FTP Server as of now, but expect an automatic update within 2x24 hours

Monday, April 01, 2013

MATE 1.6 is Close

MATE 1.6 is getting closer as some of the core modules has been bumped to 1.6.0 release on their GIT repository. The roadmap indicates that most of their TODO list for 1.6 release has been completed and the rest is a minor task to do. We should expect a MATE 1.6.0 release on April.

I have been working closely with Chess Griffin to bring MATE Desktop 1.6.0 for Slackware users in our MSB project and we are preparing to test the upcoming 1.6.0 release when it's released.

I have personally prepared two virtual machines which i installed Slackware-Current and Slackware64-Current on it. Both are updated with the latest patch and update from Pat.

So far, the basic desktop has been quite stable, with some minor problem as noted in the KNOWN ISSUE file. I really hope that MATE Desktop will bring another great experience for those who liked GNOME 2.

Friday, March 29, 2013

GMail New Compose Menu

As you probably have known, these days, GMail is pushing their new compose menu into public and you shall see them when you logged in into your GMail account and start composing new message or replying a message.

Unfortunately, it caused some problem (well, at least for me):
- It is by default set to HTML composer, where i would prefer plain-text
- Most of the options are hidden on the bottom part
- When replying a message, the original message is hidden and an additional click is needed to see them
- When replying, again, by default it will be top-posting. I prefer to have bottom-posting as many open source community prefer it that way

I am hoping that GMail keep their old composer as long as they can while they fix the above problems.

Play Games on the Web

With the work of Mozilla and Epic Games, more and more developers are going to have a new platform for gaming environments: The Web.


Yes, Mozilla had released a new video showing how they ported Unreal Engine 3 playable on web browser. It's kinda fascinating since they ported this project consisting of lines of codes within 4 days with Emscripten and asm.js combined with WebGL.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Slackware Switch to MariaDB

So, it's more than 2 days since my last post, but here's something interesting. Slackware and ArchLinux is now migrating to MariaDB and dumping MySQL in their repository. For Slackware, this change only happen in -Current tree, so the first official Slackware release with MariaDB will be on the next release, not in Slackware 14.0.

More and more Linux distributions are migrating to MariaDB after they feel that Oracle might do more changes to MySQL in the future that restrict Open Source developers and users to work closely with them. OpenSUSE and Fedora has done this and others might follow soon. Since MariaDB is backward-compatible with MySQL, replacing them should be easy to be done.

You can just remove MySQL and then install MariaDB without losing your data. Of course you are advised to backup your data first, but on my system, i don't really backup the data first and it's still safe.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Interviewing For YKFS V

Tomorrow i will be interviewing students who would like to join the YKFS V. It's Yogyakarta Kampoeng Field School and this year, we had a collaboration with Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Last year, we had collaboration with PolyU and also ANU from Australia.

It's an honor for me to be selected as the coordinator for this year's YKFS program as i had just joined this program last year. Hopefully all goes well during preparations and also executions which will commence on this June-July.

Upgrading Server

I'm planning of upgrading one of the server i maintain on my office. It's Slackware-based, so the upgrade process will be easy and straightforward since i have been using the same procedure over years and it's working on all of my machines that i used.

The only problem is the applications inside the server that needs to be checked with newer version, especially the web applications. Hopefully there won't be any major problem and i could have a safe and enjoyful upgrade.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Half Semester

This week, i started to work in full time again after two weeks of mid test exams. But it won't be too long since next week it will be another long holiday due to easter. I guess i'm going to have some fun for some time with my daughter Alysia :)

Some markings has been done on several assignments and more to come in the upcoming weeks. So far, i'm still working on daily basis plus taking care of Alysia at night, so it's a double job in a day. That's my responsibility of being a father now. I enjoyed it though.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

HD Broken and Slax Comes to Rescue

My laptop has finally reached a point where it's HDD are EOL. It's been 8 years since i bought this laptop, so i think it's already time to let it go away. The laptop was still using IDE HDD so it's very hard to find the replacement. Other than the HDD, other parts are still OK. The battery still last for 2.5 hours on Linux which is very good since nowadays laptop couldn't last that long.

So, i finally decided to use SLAX on USB Flash Drive and use it on my laptop. It's working well and since it's so modular, i can add more packages to the flash drive easily using offline method or online method. Thanks to Tomas M for creating such a wonderful Linux distribution that is based on Slackware, so no learning curve on using this distribution.

I can still use my old laptop using Linux :)