RIM is now Gone

RIM is now gone, and has been renamed to simply BlackBerry, the same name that they used for their main product brand, BlackBerry. In the same time, BlackBerry has released BlackBerry 10 along with their newest product BlackBerry Z10.

IMHO, this is the critical point for BlackBerry (as a vendor) because lately their sales are decreasing and Android and iOS-based devices are entering the market with an exponential growth compared to BlackBerry-based devices. If they failed to attract users with this new OS, i think it would cause a catasthropy in BlackBerry's future business.

Head to Engadget to see the BlackBerry OS 10 review and BlackBerry Z10 review and see if the new OS and new device has attracted you or not?

iOS 6.1 Released

After releasing iOS 6.1 Beta 5 few days ago, Apple gave a surprise by launching the final version of iOS 6.1 to public. What's new on this new release? Well, not much and not too interesting, but here they are:

• LTE support for more carriers (complete list of supported carriers at www.apple.com/iphone/LTE)
• Purchase movie tickets through Fandango with Siri (USA only)
• iTunes Match subscribers can now download individual songs from iCloud
• New button to reset the Advertising Identifier
• Bluetooth keyboard compatibility to the Apple TV
• new Map APIs for better app integration

Go get the firmware on this download page

On the good side, an untethered jailbreak might be coming after this release as the JB masters has confirmed that they have found a working exploit and right now, they are reviewing this release with the exploits they have found. If it's proven to be working, they will start updating their tools to perform the jailbreak process in user-side.

Newly Wed

Congratulations to Mark and Yochebed for becoming a newly wed couple as of today. The holy matrimony was held in Wongsodirjan Church and the party was held few hours later.

Unfortunately, not all of our group member can attend this event. Andre is now in US, while Yohan is in Germany and Andi is in Jakarta. So, only me, Jongky, and Joko attended this event. But that doesn't matter as they have their own reason for not attending this event.

Mega and Chrome

If you have used Mega, you might already know that Mega utilizes Chrome's HTML5 rendering engine and thinks of other browsers as outdated. It's kinda strange for me as Chrome is not the best browser in terms of HTML5 rendering.

Well, anyway, i'm still using Firefox and so far, nothing breaks while using Mega's cloud feature. I really hoped that in the future, they will improve their features and also their security because after the launch of the new Mega, it's cryptographic features has been critized by many party. Take a look on one of the article in The H.

Another Alpha Release for PHP

PHP 5.5 is now at Alpha 4. The PHP Team has decided to release another ALPHA release to public for testing. There are some noteworthy changes implemented on this release:

• Class Name Resolution as scalar via "class" keyword ,
• Added DateTimeImmutable class, a variant of DateTime that only returns the modified state instead of changing itself 

Besides these two new changes, the rest of the changes are bug fixes and it can be seen on this NEWS file

Linux Kernel 3.8-rc4

Linus has released another RC towards the final version of Linux Kernel 3.8. The number of changes are smaller than RC-3, but there has been a bug reported in this RC in LKML by Shuah Khan.

Let's see if this gets fixed in the next RC because fixing this bug would have caused an old bug in RC-1 to re-appear again, at least from what what Khan has bisected on his machine. The temporary solution by Alexander Deucher was to disable the DMA Ring for now.

Firefox Behind Proxy Problem

Lately, my Firefox often not responding after being used for some time. It's the computer in my office which is behind the proxy. I  thought by upgrading to 18.0.1, which fixed several problems with proxy the problem should go away, but it seems that the problem is not within the Firefox itself or probably the real problem hasn't been fixed yet.

The symptoms is that the system will not connect to any websites after being used for some time (usually like 10-15 minutes) until it has been restarted.

Any ideas on solving this problem? It's kinda annoying to have this problem as i have to restart the browser and lost all of it's content and i have to reload it again.

AmaroK 2.7 Released

Today, we have some open source applications gets a new release and one of them is AmaroK which happened to release AmaroK 2.7 ahead of KDE 4.10 which is scheduled to be released on February. It was supposed to be in January, but eventually got delayed for one month to ensure the quality before releasing it to public. If the delay didn't happen back then, it would be a perfect timing for both application to gets released in same month.

Anyway, AmaroK 2.7 aka Minor Tune has some interesting new features such as

• Preliminary version of the Nepomuk Collection plug-in
• Statistics Synchronization between collections and with Last.fm
• The File Browser's behavior and appearance was greatly improved
• Audio CD playback was resurrected

Here's the complete list of changes in AmaroK 2.7 with over 470 bug fixes and 15 feature requests were granted by the developers:

Features

• Track dragging support in Unique Tracks tab of the Synchronize Statistics action; allows you to do a "diff" between collections and transfer missing tracks. (BR 237266)
• Amarok now scrobbles tracks in streams if the stream correctly updates meta-data. (BR 240732)
• When scrobbling to Last.fm, Amarok announces suggested tag corrections (configurable). (BR 309697)
• Ability to scrobble recently played tracks from iPod (and the like) to Last.fm.
• Synchronization of labels and rating between Last.fm and Amarok collections; play count can be synchronized one-way from Last.fm to Amarok. (BR 206249)
• Statistics synchronization between collections, supports rating, first / last played time, play count and labels.
• New APG constraint: Specify a total file size for playlist. (BR 283618)
• Amazon store: Added support for Amazon MP3 in Italy and Spain. (BR 307981)
• Mark downloaded podcast episodes to keep, even when purge is enabled. (BR 261062)
• Nepomuk plugin: Play and manage tracks using the Nepomuk database.
• Support for reading and writing tags from/to mod, s3m, it and xm files. Patch by Mathias Panzenböck.
• Amazon store: It is now possible to add items to your shopping cart using amarok:// URLs.
• Amazon store: Use the context info applet to show further infos about a selected item.
• New argument --debug-audio to enable Phonon debugging.
• Amazon store: We now ship a utility to handle downloads from Amazon.

Changes

• Files page has been made more intuitive by making Places the root view and significantly improving breadcrumbs behaviour.
• Make dropping large directories into playlist more responsive by reading track metadata asynchronously in a background thread.
• Harmonize keyboard, mouse and context menu behaviour of the Files pane so that it matches Local Music and Saved Playlists panes. (BR 307386)
• Last.fm Skip button re-added after being removed in Beta by error. (BR 311733)
• Podcast episodes are now loaded asynchronously on startup to reduce delays.
• Removed alpha state and not really working spectrum analyzer applet.
• Before 2.7 Beta:
• Dependencies raised, Amarok now depends on Qt >= 4.8 and kdelibs >= 4.8.4.
• When configuring Last.fm plug-in, the changes are now applied immediately in most places. (BR 311331)
• If liblastfm is provided, it is strongly recommended to use version 1.0.3 or newer for fixes of bugs that otherwise prevent iPod scrobbling and synchronization.
• Configure Amarok dialog gets new Metadata tab to grab some weight from the Collection tab and to configure statistics synchronization.
• APG now saves its presets each time it's run, to lessen preset loss if Amarok crashes. (BR 294743)
• APG playlists no longer limited to 100 tracks. (BR 301829)
• The confusing "Local Collection Backends" category of plugins was removed from the Configure dialog. All backends are enabled from now on.
• Statistics of tracks outside of collections are only read/saved to file tags (if enabled) instead of being kept in the database.
• Last.fm Skip button removed; Last.fm API no longer provides it. (BR 305576)
• Optional liblastfm dependency raised to 1.0.0. (BR 302597)
• Add composer button to wikipedia applet (BR 272982)
• New optional dependency for Amazon downloads: clamz.

Bugfixes

• Fix a regression where stream metadata would be forgotten on start. (BR 305389)
• Fix scrobbling of plain files streamed over http. (BR 309976)
• Fix scrobble-before-play behaviour when playing Last.fm streams.
• Fix double-scrobbling when playing Last.fm streams. (BR 311852)
• Fix The size of rating stars should not change in inline editing (BR 209684)
• Various improvements that should result in more stable Audio CD playback (modulo phonon-vlc BR 313046). (BR 305708, BR 308084, BR 311446)
• Fix queued track indicator overflow, patch by Riccardo Ferrazzo. (BR 253802)
• Fix Amarok crashes when selecting song with Enter [@ Playlist::PrettyListView::trackActivate] (BR 312439)
• Fix amarok starts at beginning of playlist if you previously stopped during a track (BR 312183)
• Audio CD: fix crash due to no composer being set. (BR 293698)
• Audio CD: fix track recreation on startup. (BR 312685)
• Fix incorrect display of folder names containing & (ampersand) in File browser breadcrumbs. (BR 244817)
• Fix Media Sources pane growing in size when navigating in it. (BR 246029)
• Fix Media Sources breadcrumb items sometimes appearing as new windows. (BR 285712)
• Fix editability and drop-ability of playlist folders.
• Make track announcements via KDE Notifications instant. (BR 263952)
• Fix dynamic playlist progress bar.
• Fix Last played bias is ignored or doesn't work. (BR 311906)
• Fix amarok dynamic play list with biases EchoNest similar artist gives no results. (BR 291162)
• Fix When I try to create a dynamic playlist by Last.fm similar songs creation takes a lot time. (BR 301716)
• Fix updating of Amarok database playlists then track uid changes. (BR 312128)
• Fix hangs and inappropriate messages when trying to play a track from a saved playlist that has been deleted in the mean time. (BR 308371)
• Fix existing files preventing complete transfer of tracks to collection. (BR 312001)
• Fix crash then doing Last.fm love with uninitialized Last.fm plugin. (BR 311857)
• Fix Last.fm streams not being correctly recreated on startup. (BR 305576)
• Fix Ampache albums & track not being shown, a recent regression. (BR 310862)
• Fix crash in Network Requests Viewer. (BR 311760)
• Definitely prevent crash when using File Browser breadcrumbs. (BR 265626)
• Prevent crash in ServiceBase::setModel triggered by Last.fm rewrite. (BR 311723)
• Fix incorrect display of Last.fm tags and other items. (BR 244555)
• Before 2.7 Beta:
• Fix empty collection when using DynamicCollection=false (BR 265419)
• Fix suboptimal KWallet usage in Last.fm plugin. (BR 292096)
• Fix crash in Last.fm plugin caused by sloppy KWallet usage. (BR 306134)
• Fix WMA files interpret Album as Album Artist (BR 276015)
• Fix after adding next slash previous one disappears in organize collection (BR 296136)
• Fix Dynamic Collection and other features not working if the database was initially created by a very old Amaork version. (BR 302837)
• Fix incorrect "Stop after current" indicator behaviour in some cases. (BR 253822)
• Fix untranslatable texts in preset dynamic playlists. (BR 276023)
• Better Last.fm scrobbling behaviour and error reporting due to rewrite, should fix long-standing problems. (BR 293320, BR 285820)
• Update stream meta-data correctly even with phonon-gstreamer back-end. (BR 300189)
• Fix available transcoding encoders detection with ffmpeg 1.0. (BR 309454)
• Fix playback resuming with phonon-gstreamer; raise phonon-vlc dependency to at least 0.6.1 as a side-effect. (BR 290612)
• Create collections even for SD/MMC/etc. cards on PCI-connected slots.
• Fixed some incorrect logic in the PlaylistLength constraint, which was causing the APG to create playlists that were shorter than expected. (BR 293616)
• Improve Duplicate files found dialog. (BR 308762)
• Fix crashes in SqlRegistry because of its false thread-safety. (BR 230991)
• Fix crash on malformed DAAP reply. (BR 284186)
• Fix first & last played time not remembered for files outside of collection.
• Nepomuk plugin now makes Nepomuk ratings visible in Amarok. (BR 174630)
• Fix some track tag modifications not being updated until restart (e.g. changing disc number from 1 to 0).
• Repeat playlist correctly with a single track playlist. (BR 290955)
• Don't append playlist when pressing enter while editing. (BR 305203)
• Fix track transfer to iPods in de (and perhaps other) locale. (BR 305134)

I will start building this package on my computer...

PHP New Releases

PHP has released a new version for both of their current stable releases (5.4.x and 5.3.x branch). This version comes with not so much bug fixed, but still it's advised to perform an upgrade if you are running PHP on your machine.

Here's the changes in PHP 5.4.11

• Core:
• Fixed bug #63762 (Sigsegv when Exception::$trace is changed by user).
• Fixed bug #43177 (Errors in eval()'ed code produce status code 500).

• Filter:
• Fixed bug #63757 (getenv() produces memory leak with CGI SAPI).
• Fixed bug #54096 (FILTER_VALIDATE_INT does not accept +0 and -0).

• JSON:
• Fixed bug #63737 (json_decode does not properly decode with options parameter).

• CLI server:
• Update list of common mime types. Added webm, ogv, ogg.

• cURL extension:
• Fixed bug (segfault due to libcurl connection caching).
• Fixed bug #63859 (Memory leak when reusing curl-handle).
• Fixed bug #63795 (CURL >= 7.28.0 no longer support value 1 for CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST).
• Fixed bug #63352 (Can't enable hostname validation when using curl stream wrappers).
• Fixed bug #55438 (Curlwapper is not sending http header randomly).

Fedora 18 Released

After suffering multiple delays, finally Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" gets released by their release team. It's the latest release of Fedora that includes several interesting new features such as support of UEFI Secure Boot, new look on anaconda installer, based on Linux Kernel 3.6 (an update to upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.7 is also available), and include most of the latest stable release of Open Source packages in this distribution.

Fedora 18 use GNOME 3.6 as the default, but they provide KDE 4.9 and XFCE 4.10 as an alternative options. It also uses the latest release of Samba 4, which means it can be used to become an active domain controller for an Active Directory. As usual, Fedora is packed with numerous developer's tool, such as Perl, Python, Rails, and many more.

Go get them while it's still hot from the release team :)

A Little Bit Windy

Lately, the weather is not so good. It's too windy with too much rain on my area. Some of my people i know is not feeling well due to this condition. Most of them suffer from cold and some minor cough.

Human's biggest treasure is wealth, so keep your body healty :)

LibreOffice 4.0 is Approaching

It's new year and The Document Foundation is now shaping up to make ways for a new major release for their flagship product, LibreOffice 4.0. While it's not going to be released until next month, but they have just released their first RC 1 out of three RC scheduled before the final version gets shipped.

Since this is a major release, expect a number of new interesting features, such as Persona support in LibreOffice, meaning that you can use the same theme used in Mozilla Firefox. It also has improved support for docx ink annotations and export native RTF math expressions. You can also generate documents with different header and footer without having to create different page style as it used to be. Other components such as calc, impress, and draw are getting improved as well.

One big feature that has been requested by many people is better multimedia support in Impress and it's likely to happen in this release. You will find that attaching videos in your presentation will be easier and works better in LibreOffice 4.0.

More features can be seen in their Release notes found here https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0

Native PDF Reader in Next Firefox Release

Firefox 18 has just been released, but Mozilla are working fast to publish their first Beta release for the upcoming Firefox 19. One of the key feature of Firefox 19 that has been expected by many people (including me) is the native PDF reader without any need to install PDF plugins by Adobe Reader.

This feature has been included, but disabled by default by the developer since it's still considered unstable (but can be enabled by modifying the about:config window). This time, the developer thinks it's ready for public use.

Another interesting features are the new experimental Remote Web Console which can connect to Firefox for Android and Firefox OS web applications and interact with them from within the desktop installation of Firefox and Browser Debugger for add-on and browser developers. They are still disabled by default for now and probably be enabled by Firefox 20 or even 21.

TeamViewer 8 Beta for Linux

TeamViewer 8 has been released, but unfortunately, it's only released on Windows and Mac. Linux version is still stuck at version 7 and it's not yet compatible with the latest version on another platform.

My Windows machine on the office has been upgraded to version 8 and when i tried to connect to that machine from my Linux system which is still running version 7, it says that i should upgrade my TeamViewer installation to latest version. I have been using the tar.gz binary file to install TeamViewer, but TeamViewer 8 Beta for Linux is only provided on DEB and RPM format, so i had to rely on Binh's SlackBuild script on SBo project which converted from DEB to TGZ format.

The problem is that TeamViewer 8 has some path changes as well as service addon. Right now, we need to make sure that teamviewer daemon (teamviewerd) is started before we launch the main TeamViewer application. I have successfully modified the SlackBuild to work with TeamViewer 8 and i'm planning to push it to my SlackHacks repository, but first, i would like to ask for his permission first. When it's approved, you will see it on my SlackHacks soon enough :)

Mozilla Firefox 18 Released

Mozilla has released Mozilla Firefox 18, which is a new major release which has been developed for several weeks. What's interesting about this version? Here are some of them taken from the Release Notes:

• Faster JS compiler thanks to IonMonkey
• Preliminary support for WebRTC
• Improved tab switching performance
• Implementation of W3C Touch event
• Improve responsiveness for users behind a proxy
• New HTML Scaling Algorithm

For those who are using auto-update mechanism, you will be prompted in the next 24 hours, but for those who can't wait to try this version, head to their FTP Server to grab the binary files for all platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac)

First Working Day

Today is my first day working again in my office and it was already a hectic day. This week, a lot of my time will be spent on thesis presentation because there were a lot of students who have completed their work and is now ready to present their work.

Meanwhile, i also have to take care of my daughter's paper for her birth certificate, which i plan to do so in the next few days when i have some spare time in the morning. Let's hope that everything is working as i planned to.

I have also started to keep up to date with many news related to technology, Linux, Open Source, etc. My SlackHacks repository is also now updated and i have submitted updates to my packages in SBo project as well. Life must go on :)

Less Frequent Update

Lately, i'm not able to post daily on this blog due to my new role as a father to a baby girl. Me and my wife had to take care of the baby all day long, so i didn't have time to do other things.

With less spare time, i'm focusing on my baby girl, so pardon me for not updating this blog as often as it used to be

Happy New Year

I know it's a bit late about new year thing, but i just got a change to post it just now since since late December, i was busy with my new baby and i just got home last night. It was simply a new experience for me to become a father of a cute baby girl, whom we named Alysia Selena Tan. She was born at December 2012 at 7:27 AM in Panti Rapih hospital with caesar operation.

Since then, i spend all of my time to her, and didn't do anything else besides taking care of her and her mother. I read emails sometimes via my cellphone, since there wasn't any WiFI connection around the room. I had to go to first floor, but i prefer to stay in the room. Well, practically i'm out of date in terms of IT, Open Source, or any Linux news out there.

Last night was our first day staying at home along with our baby and it was amazing, even though we couldn't sleep. We still have long way to go, but this is a good start.

So i just want to say HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013 for all of my blog readers....

Best wishes

Willy and Family