Waiting For News and Access

Right now, i'm waiting for a news from one of Indonesian people who worked on the OpenOffice.org's QA (Quality Assurance) after the tsunami and earth quake dissaster last month. I have send him an email, but i had no answer up until now. I hope he is OK.

Meanwhile, i also wait for an access to OOo site by a confirmation that my new public key is already uploaded. I have waited for quite a long time to have support team uploaded my public key on the OOo site.

Good Bye

Last night, i got a shocking sms messages, saying that my lecturer, Mr. Wahyu Prakoso Adi has passed away because of an accident. I didn't believe that messages, because i didn't recognize the sender's number, so i asked the other lecturer and also called Mr. Wahyu's cellphone and i realized that the news was correct. I was quite shocked for a while, since he was on the campuss at the mourning and he was still joking with other lecturers and in the night, he suddenly left all his family and us.

I went to his house today with all my friends, lecturers and all my campus staff to attend his funeral ceremony in Klaten. I got there at 10 AM and the ceremony was supposed to be held at 1 PM to 2 PM but it was longer than i thought and it ended in 3 PM before i back to Jogja, while some of my friends still went to watch him for the last time when his family burried him.

He is a smiley, active, humorist, and great lecturer, and many people and students like him because of that. Too bad he left us so fast in an unpredictable ways.

Good bye Mr. Wahyu, may your spirit rest in peace in an eternal place called heaven.

Start Your LiveUpdate

It's thursday right now (Wednesday in some country), so it is time to start your LiveUpdate right now, since it is the day when Symantec Corporation, the company who made a well-known antivirus product Norton AntiVirus as well as other system products, such as Norton SystemWorks, Norton Security and Norton Firewall releases it's LiveUpdate version of the latest virus database.

For you who always download the database manually via Security Response, you will not get a big updates, since it was included in the daily updates, but for those who runs LiveUpdate, perhaps you will get a quite big updates (nearly 400 KB on my computer). While looking the fact that viruses and worms are spreading wild in the Net that can caused a nightmare to anyone which is infected, these ammount is considerably cheap and should be done by everyone that installed Norton AntiVirus on their computer and they have an Internet connection.

Back to Mandrake Task

For several months, i have done a lot of translations for the Indonesian Documentation Project and i forgot the Indonesia Mandrakelinux packages translation. Right now, it's time for me to concentrate on the Mandrakelinux packages. Today i have updates three packages :

- drakfirsboot-id.po
- mdkkdm-id.po
- menudrake-id.po.

I'll send another updates later on

Opera 8.0 previews & betas

Recent heated discussions inside Opera have led to the versioning change making what was originally intended to be Opera 7.60 to now instead be Opera 8.0. A preview (alpha) for the Mac (changelog) has been released, as well as betas for UNIX (changelog) and Windows (changelog). Planned feature set remains the same, which means that what was formerly 8.0 targetted features (such as per-site preferences) will be future features. To recap the changes since the last major version:

This blog entry will be heavily biased towards Opera, for no other reason than that I think it’s the second best browser all over, and perhaps the best for many. It still lacks some capabilities of the Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple competitors but those are not general user (joe sixpack) oriented features. Also note that Opera is a power user - but not web developer - geared Swiss army knife-like application, and that’s the viewpoint I’ll take.

Interface is slimmer and slicker, and doesn’t feel especially clogged any longer, in difference from how the early 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 versions felt. Well, I think even 7.5 users will find improvements in the user interface. It’s not entirely Windows like and still not quite Mac like on the respective platform. It stands out by for example not using the same keyboard shortcuts as most other applications for the same tasks, but when you’re used to it that becomes a minor problem.

Opera claims to be the fastest browser around and in most cases I would not dispute them. Their rendering engine seems to be superior (when it comes to speed) to Gecko, Trident, Tasman and WebCore/KHTML for both static rendering and in many cases also incremental rendering. However, the browser takes quite some time to load (more than Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, more than everybody but MSN on Mac). The ECMAScript engine, linear_b, is getting faster. It’s second to only Microsoft JScript when it comes to number crunching, it’s second only to Mozilla SpiderMonkey when it comes to most object and DOM handling. There are some cases where it does very bad, though. I’ve not done any testing of it’s liveconnect speed, so I can’t say anything about that. Also a benefit over Gecko is that the entirety of Opera doesn’t slow down if a single page is doing some heavy duty scripting - Opera keeps being snappy and responsive.

Standards support is excellent, as usual. CSS is except for a few CSS3 adoptions in Safari and Mozilla every bit on par with them. DOM support is the area where Opera has long been lagging behind Gecko, but with the exception of DOM2StyleSheets I would say that Opera are no longer behind. Being the first browser with DOM3LS support is a welcome initiative as well. The addition of XMLHttpRequest object makes the remote scripting features every bit as powerful as those in Mozilla.

Opera has improved lots of small things. It’s session handling features and ability to recall closed tabs is a feature I would welcome Mozilla to replicate. Improved popup handling is another welcome feature.

On Windows, Opera has the XHTML+Voice support I talked about for the previews. This makes Opera the first combined graphical and aural user agent. I’ve also heard from testers of the Opera voice support that it’s ahead of the competition in many ways, among others that you don’t need a Californian accent to make voice commands work, and that it has support for the CSS3 Speech module.

Of course, there’s more, but that’s what you have the changelogs for. I’ll round this up by saying that Opera has made improvements lately that have made it a browser that might very well be the best one for you. It’s certainly made itself worthy of a permanent position on my dock.

For more, visit the Opera Beta Testing forum.

CVS and SSH2

Right now, i'm concentrating to learn the CVS and SSH tutorial to complete my access to OpenOffice.org's site because i am new to CVS and SSH2. I need this two to update the Indonesian page of the OpenOffice.org documentation page as OOo site use them as their system. It's kindda confusing, especially if you never had any experience with them before.

For days, i was kindda frustated with the access, since i always rejected when i tried to login even though my public key has been uploaded and i commit the same way with the guide. I feel sorry to those who helped my out (Louis, Gerry, Diane, Scott, and support at the CollabNet). I have spent their time and still i'm confused :(

Came Back

In the mourning, i went to Kotabaru church with my friends (Andre and Yohan again). There, we met some of our friends (Eldoan, Ferdy, Danny, Arifin, and Novi). After that, we had our breakfast at Soto Sawah and we went to Yohan's house to fix his computer problem (but it wasn't finished perfectly). Just hoping that he can continue the process on his own.

My girlfriend has come back from her vacation to Jakarta along with some of her family for five days. She bought so many items there and having a great time in Jakarta, since she never been to Jakarta before. I picked her up at 5.20 PM at the airport and then i went to her house and have a dinner in the Pengok restaurant (again) and go to comic rental to borrow some comic books.

Registration For New Semester

Today i will do a registration for the next semester. The schedule is about 1.00 PM but i will go after i submit this blog. Just hoping that schedule that i have arranged will not be messed up with a full class.

Update :
There is one small changes to my class, since there was a class between embedded system class and the algorithm and programming class. I took priority of the embedded class so i canceled out the algorithm and programming class. Besides that, no major changes was made.

One Day Sports

My friends were coming to my house today (Bambang, Andre and Yohan). Bambang came in the mourning to ask me a favour, while Andre and Yohan came at 1 PM and we played billiard for a couple hours and then it was continued with basketball with Andre for a view minutes before the rains came by and stopped our game. After that, i went to Yohan's house to wait for Andre checking his teeths in the dentist for about half an hour. While in Yohan's house, i encouraged him to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer since it lack of many security feature (and he hasn't applied Service Pack 2).

After Andre arrived at 7 PM, we went to Andre's house to pick his sister, Jessica, but we waited hor her for about half an hour, since she still had her course. After that, we went to Pengok restaurant to have some small dinner before we went to Citra to eat corn. Unfortunately, we had to move to Papindo because it was ran out of corns. We talked a lot of things in Papindo. Jessica was afraid with cocroach, so when i told her that there were cocroach nearby, she instantly jumped into Adi's back while screaming. It was the funniest event that happened today :)

Junior High School Reunion Part 2

Today i went with my junior high school friends (Andre, Yohan, Adi) to Galeria after in the morning i went to my campuss to submit my final project reports. I came at Andre's house at 10 AM but we started to leave at 12 AM and we ate at the Kentucky Fried Chicken and after that, we played a snooker (billiard) for about three hours. I have Adi as my team mate and we beat them 5-4 through a lot of fun and shouting at each other when there were failures.

After playing billiard, we went to Fantasia to play some arcade games. We played a snipper-act shooting game and also a car race (Daytona i guess) for some times, because it was really fun and exciting. At 6.30 we came back to Andre's house and we have a little chat together with Andre's little sister, Yessi. At 19.10 PM, we went home and i was suprised that my Ubuntulinux CDs have finally arrived after a long waiting for about three months.

It contains 2 CD, one for LiveCD and the other for install CD. The live CD also contains Windows versions for several of the application included in Ubuntu, such as GIMP, Abiword, Audacity, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. I got 10 CDs and maybe i will distribute it for some of my friends.

Mandrakeclub Account

After waiting for a few months, finally my VIP account for Mandrakeclub has been created. Here is the email that i received from the Mandrakeclub's webmaster

Dear Willy,

The Mandrakeclub team is happy to send you your VIP account information on Mandrakeclub, valid until end of August 2005:

URL: http://www.mandrakeclub.com/
Login: [myLogin]
Password: [myPassword]

Your VIP level membership will allow you to:

* Download all Mandrakelinux ISOs using BitTorrent or HTTP/FTP before they get publicly available
* Download commercial drivers and applications
* Access to faster download sites
* Harness Mandrakelinux capabilities by sharing ideas and distro-related knowledge with other users through Mandrakeclub forums and Mandrakeclub knowledge base wiki
* Stay abreast of all Mandrakelinux related news
* Get special discounts on Mandrakestore offers
... and much more!

Please feel free to send an email to webmaster@mandrakeclub.com in case you'd like to change your nickname or for any other request.

Mandrakeclub should undergo drastic changes Q1 2005 to evolve progressively toward a help-desk inspired by Semantic Web principles. A contributors area will offer a way to brainstorm permanently on new services to be implemented to foster collaboration on the distro cooking and usage.

Together Pablo, Club team and all other Mandrakesoft employees thank you sincerely for all your contributions. It is thanks to your collective effort that Mandrakelinux is today the most internationalized GNU/Linux distribution. Please accept our apologies for the delay in opening your account.

See you soon on the Club!

And happy new open-source year :)

Mandrakeclub Team
http://www.mandrakeclub.com
webmaster@mandrakeclub.com

Reunion Part 2

Today, i went to Selera Kuring restaurant with my friends to enjoy our annual reunion part 2. We have six peoples (me, my girlfriend, Pauling, Doddy, Ferdy, and Wawan). We initially want to go to Solo Grand Mall, but after a conversation with my other friend via SMS, we decided to cancel it, because the mall is still new and all the store aren't opened yet, so we decided to move our target to Kaliurang, but before that, we ate at Selera Kuring.

After we reach Kaliurang, we went to Poci and ordered some meals while playing a card. It was a fun game and we spent two till three hours up there before finally we came back down and went to Galeria to play billiard. We played only several times, because some people have their own business, so we split up at 6.30 PM and i went back home in a rainny evening. Too bad the reunion is not completely fun, because some of our friends can't join our reunion.

New Santy Mutant Offers 'Help'

Another mutant of the Santy worm has started squirming, this one depositing a so-called patch for vulnerable Web forums powered by the phpBB software. The "Anti-Santy-Worm V4," discovered by anti-virus vendor F-Secure, works very much like the original Santy worm, which used Google search results to randomly find—and deface—phpBB forums.

Google has since tweaked its search engine to filter the worm's queries but the public release of the Santy source code continued to put unpatched phpBB sites at risk.

According to an F-Secure advisory, the anti-Santy fixer worm also uses search engines to find vulnerable message boards. "Then the worm tries to patch the system so Santy variants won't be able to infect it any more," the advisory states. PointerSymantec has issued patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities in firewall appliances. Click here to read more.

Once a site becomes infected, the Santy mutant drops a file called secure.php with the following text: "Your site is a bit safer, but upgrade to >= 2.0.11 !!"
The "2.0.11" refers to the newest, more secure, version of phpBB.

While the worm purports to have good intentions, F-Secure Director of Anti-Virus Research Mikko H. Hypponen, does not believe in the benefits of renegade fixes. "This is not a beneficial worm. We have no idea how safe the patch the worm applies really is. We also have reports from phpBB administrators whose site is perfectly safe already to be under a denial-of-service attack caused by multiple requests created by this worm," Hypponen said.

The discovery of a "good" worm following a major Web attack isn't entirely new. Last August, at the height of the Blaster worm attack, a fixer worm called Welchia started spreading and attempted to patch the Windows vulnerability. However, the benefits proved fraudulent because Welchia's propagation technique led to swamped network systems and denial-of-service conditions.

Three years ago, during the Code Red outbreak, a 'good' worm called Code Blue was released with the intent to prevent vulnerable Web servers from being infected by Code Red. In 2001, the 'Cheese' worm attempted a similar repair job on Linux systems that had been infected by the Li0n worm.

OpenOffice.org 1.9 m65 Snapshot

While releasing the 1.1.4 Final to public, the OOo developers have continued to update the 1.9.x version which will be version 2.0 in this year. For now, the latest snapshot of 1.9.x version (updated per three weeks) is 1.9 m65 which is released on 17 December 2004. For you who use OpenOffice.org for production use, don't update to this version, as it still contains a lot of bugs and incompatibilty, because OOo is developing a new XML file format which is somehow may not be backward compatible with the stable version (1.1.4).

Just like the other 1.9.x version, this release comes with ugly hacked splash screen to make clear, that this is not the final 2.0 build. In the snapshot page, you should see that there is an important note about the file format. Some documents that have been saved with SRC680 build prior to m64 cannot be loaded into SRC680m64 and future builds. This especially applies to Writer documents. To be able to load them, the file need to be coverted.

The conversion can be done as follows:

1. Create a backup of the document.
2. Rename the document to a file with the same name but an extensions that has the 2nd "o" replaced with a "d". For instance, test.oot becomes test.odt. For drawing documents, use the extension "odg". For templates,only the extension of drawing templates has to be changed to "otg".
3. Unzip the sub documents "mimetype" and "META-INF/manifest.xml" from the document using an arbitrary zip tool.
4. Within the unzipped "mimetype" and "META-INF/manifest.xml" files, replace all occurencies of "x-vnd.oasis.openoffice" with "vnd.oasis.opendocument".
5. Add the "mimetype" file uncompressed to the document.
6. Add "META-INF/manifest.xml" to the document.
7. Load the document into OpenOffice.org and resave it.

For a file called test.oot, on Unix/Solaris the following commands do that job:

> cp test.oot test.odt
> unzip test.odt mimetype META-INF/manifest.xml
> mv mimetype mimetype.bak
> sed -e"s/x-vnd\.oasis\.openoffice/vnd.oasis.opendocument/"

mimetype.bak >mimetype

> zip -0 test.odt mimetype
> mv META-INF/manifest.xml META-INF/manifest.xml.bak
> sed -e"s/x-vnd\.oasis\.openoffice/vnd.oasis.opendocument/"
META-INF/manifest.xml.bak >META-INF/manifest.xml

> zip test.odt META-INF/manifest.xml
> [start OpenOffice.org, load file and dave it again]

Background: The OASIS Open Office Technical Committee (TC) recently decided to rename its specification from "Open Office Specification 1.0" to "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0", abbreviated "OpenDocument". At the same time the TC decided to use new extensions (odt, ods, etc. instead oot, oos, etc.), new MIME types (application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text, etc. instead of application/vnd.oasis.openoffice.text, etc) and new XML namespace URIs.
This change has been implemented in SRC680m64.
Elizabeth explained the proper naming in her message to the dev@l10n list.

Happy New Year 2005

Happy New Year to all of you. Wishing that this new year will bring joy and happinness to all of you and new spirit will be blessed on you all. Let's leave the 2004 with peace and we will look forward into 2005 to find another fresh view and spirit. There are a lot to be done in the 2005, so start your engine right now :)