Few Days Left

After being delayed for some time due to some Change Request from the customer and also a lot of improvements of the program itself, finally the OWG project will be finished. This project has been started few months before i joined my current company last year and i was assigned to be the developer of this project along with other fun colleagues. As time goes by, the project has been running for one year and three months. Quite a long time, since it's a complicated modules.

I learn a lot of things during the implementation of this project, mostly due to accessibility issue. Thanks to Dick Lunenborg from Bartimeus for his knowledge on accessibility issues. I would like to thank my colleagues that already worked hard together to make this project accomplished.

FYI, OWG project is a desktop-based educational application that was built to help visual and hearing impaired childrens to learn using computers as their tools. It consists of eleven modules which are categorized for learning alphabets, words, typing, basic arithmetic such as decimal numbers, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a fun and friendly environment. It has a text-to-speech and also highlighting features to provide both visual and audio feedback to the students.

What Happened With LinuxOrId ?

This morning Indonesian Linux Forum was still accessible and suddenly at noon, they can't be accessed anymore. All domain which belongs to linux.or.id couldn't be reached, including all Linux User Group websites and also Indonesian Slackware's Community Site. What happened? Maybe Ronny Haryanto can give an explanation about this?

UPDATE 4:24 PM: All Linux.or.id domain has been restored and is working normally as it used to be :)

Email Obfuscator

Nowadays, spambot are getting smarter and wilder. They harvest many email address from public site and sending spams all over the world with unwanted messages. Suppose we have a running website which sometimes displays an email address and we don't want to have them harvested by the spambots. What can we do about that? There are several ways to solve this and it's up to you to decide.

- Using images (most of case are using GD library)
- Use added words, such as (user@_NOSPAM_domain.com)
- Use replaced text, such as (user(at)domain(dot)com)
- Use space between text, such as (user at domain dot com)
- Use email obfuscator

Talking about email obfuscator, there're several application which use this to protect their email address to be harvested. It's quite effective since the text will be converted to an equivalent hex value, thus the same result will be displayed on the browser but it will not be the same text the spambot wants when they view at the source. You can try to look at the implementation of email obfuscator by looking at Alicorna.

WP also have Obfuscate email plugins which automatically convert the email address into the obfuscated email address.

Here's the example for my email address will look like if being translated to obfuscated version:
willysr@gmail.com

New Filter Extension Tutorial

Finally i have time to install Filter packages in my Slackware system and managed to try the Filter Extension. The result can be seen in my CodeBlog. So far only 3 posts are available but it will be increasing soon. I hope it will help other people as well. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Mono 1.2 Released

Novell which has just signed a deal with Microsoft has just released a new updates to Mono which adds several improvements support for the Microsoft*Windows* Forms API to more easily port .NET client-side applications to Linux. This version will be more compatible with .NET Framework 2.0 (and Microsoft has just launched .NET Framework 3.0 few days ago). The Mono can be downloaded at Download page.

Click here if you want to read the press release.

Indonesian Slackware Community

The new Indonesian Slackware Community has been launched, thanks to Ozzie and Ronny Haryanto for the domain name and hosting. You can download the latest Slackware 11.0 ISOs there and you might find a lot of information (soon, because it's still empty currently) about Slackware. When the site has been running, maybe i can propose to Patrick Volkerding to include this site as one of Slackware's repository.

We are waiting for your contribution to this site.

.NET Framework 3.0 Arrived

Windows Vista is being planned to be released this year and it will include .NET Framework 3.0 which has just been released. In this page, you will find detailed information about .NET Framework 3.0 which is considered a "additive" release compared to .NET Framework 2.0 so every application that was build using 2.0 will be fully working with the new .NET Framework. BUT if you use .NET Framework 1.x version and wants to upgrade to .NET Framework, it's best to look for changes in 2.0 that might break your application.

This version includes some new features such as:
- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly code-named "Avalon")
Provides classes for building next-generation smart-client applications that combine UI, documents, and media.

- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly code-named "Indigo")
Offers a unified programming model and runtime for building service-oriented applications.

- Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
Offers a programming model, engine, and tools to build workflow-enabled applications that model business processes.

- Windows CardSpace (formerly code-named "InfoCard")
Provides a technology for simplifying and improving the safety of working online with personal identity information.

- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
Enables productively building Windows and Web-based applications.

This new version will only be available for this OS:
* Microsoft Windows XP Home or Microsoft Windows XP Home Professional, with Service Pack 2 or later.
* Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family with Service Pack 1 or later.

Living Without Anonymity

There will be no net anonymity in Brazil soon if the bill proposed by Senator Eduardo Azeredo (PSDB-MG) is being approved. What a nightmare it will be. I wonder what will people react if this kind of bill is applied in every country, including Indonesia? I don't think there will be a freedom again in Internet. Well, it's too paranoid i think as it's very very complicated to force every people to give their personal data just to download something.

From this blog, you can see some consequent of this bill:

This bill, if passed into law, will require every ISP to store each connection performed by a user for at least 3 years.

If approved, it will be a crime, punishable with up to 4 years of jail time, to disseminate virus or trojans, unauthorizedly access data banks or networks and send e-mail, join chat, write a blog or download content anonymously. The bill states that every user must fully identify herself before using the Net, with full name, current address, phone number and the equivalent of the Social Security Number. To access the Net without providing this information, or to give false information, will also be a crime.

OMG!!!!!!

Broken PEAR Script?

Today i want to test the new FILTER extension which was introduced in PHP 5.2.0, but when i tried, i got an error message: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function input_get(), so i looked at PHP's manual on FILTER extension and i got an information that this filter is not installed by default. You will have to install PEAR first and then run pear install filter in order to have this filter installed.

The problem is when i tried to run the batch script provided from PHP, it's broken and i couldn't get PEAR installed on my system. I forgot to capture the screen, but after looking at PEAR's manual, i managed to get PEAR installed by downloading the latest script from go-pear and running it by using php go-pear.php (see screenshot below).

Next i want to list all upgrades available by using pear list-upgrades, but it displayed a warning message : WARNING: channel "pear.php.net" has updated its protocols, use "channel-update pear.php.net" to update , so i run the command and i can remove the warning message when i want to list all available updates again.

Next step is installing the filter extension. When i run pear install filter, it displayed a feedback message:

No releases available for package "pear.php.net/filter" - package pecl/filter can be installed with "pecl install filter"
Cannot initialize 'filter', invalid or missing package file
Package "filter" is not valid
install failed

According to the messages, i had to use pecl command rather than pear and so i do what they ask. But then i got another message :

Failed to download pecl/filter within preferred state "stable", latest release is version 0.11.0, stability "beta", use "channel://pecl.php.net/filter-0.11.0" to install
Cannot initialize 'filter', invalid or missing package file
Package "filter" is not valid
install failed

So finally i run pecl install channel://pecl.php.net/filter-0.11.0 and i ended with :

downloading filter-0.11.0.tgz ...
Starting to download filter-0.11.0.tgz (25,946 bytes)
.........done: 25,946 bytes
8 source files, building
ERROR: The DSP filter.dsp does not exist.

I'm curious, what is this DSP file? So i searched PECL's site and found some information on this page. Here's the answer:

The ".dsp" file is a Ms Visual Studio project that is meant to be compiled on Windows.

So i think in Windows platform, you may have to spend more efforts in order to get Filter installed. I will try to use my Slackware later on and see if it worked.

Has anybody have successfully installed Filter extension on Windows platform? If yes, please give your steps.

Thanks in advance

Return of Incredible Machine

My girlfriend once introduced me to Incredible Machine, the old-time educational and rational game which is played under Windows 98. I'm looking for the PC version and could not find the same version anywhere, until i came up with Return of Incredible Machine Even More Contraption. It's like a reborn to the game since it has won a lot of awards from PC Magazine, Computer Gaming World, Family PC, PC World, Newsweek, etc. You will love it when you play it, since it's challenging and fun to play this game.

For children, it can be used to increase their rational way of thinking and problem solving. For adults, the same reason can be used also plus another way of removing stress.

By the way, here's the screenshot from eBay:

Hidden Expedition is Over

After three days of playing the game, finally i finished Hidden Expedition last night (actually i didn't know if the game has only 15 dive and i stopped at Dive 14 the day before yesterday). The last task was very tricky, since after you had to solve 36 items, you will have to open the treasure chest which contains the lost crown and the captain save the combination number around the chest and you didn't get any clue (there's still a hint to be used but it waste a lot of time if you used it, so i suggest that you don't use it except for the last number). You will have to click most of the items and hopefully you can finish this game off. I had to restart three times before i managed to get the clue (did i forgot to mention that the items that holds the combination number was always changing?).

After finishing the game, you will find this screen:

Working With New PHP 5.2

Just looking at Eris post on Planet Terasi, i then looked at the PHP 5.2 changelog and it does include HUGE updates. They even release a special note about upgrading to PHP 5.2.

Time to work with PHP 5.2 and i will test whether my site is already PHP 5.2 compatible (it's just a simple site, so i think it will have no side effect). Besides, it depends on the hosting service whether they want to upgrade to PHP 5.2 or not. Let's get back to reviewing our code to support changes in PHP 5.2.0.

Update (2:24 PM): It seems that PHP team has updated their Windows installers also (and also the size has increased a lot compared to their previous one). They changed into MSI format and they make life easier by giving an options to set what extenstion will be installed by default and also an option to install PEAR and PHP Manual as well. It's a worthed update and no wonder it takes PHP team three months to upgrade from 5.1.6 into 5.2.0.

Next step is to try to upgrade my Slackware into PHP 5.2.0. For several times, i failed to upgrade to PHP 5.2.0. Maybe because i used incorrect parameter when configuring PHP. I will try later on and hopefully it will be successfull today. Btw, here's the updated PHP installer screenshot:

Resetting Atom

In blogger, if you set the Atom to display full post, then it might changed to semi full if you encountered some problem when publishing your post. I don't know why they changed automatically, but the only way to fix this is by post a new post and it will automatically rebuild the Atom using your setting. I have tried to republish the blog completely, but it didn't work either.

New Click and Found Game

After finishing the Mystery Case File (Prime Suspect and huntsville), i'm looking for the similar game and i never got one, until yesterday when i browsed BigFishGame and i found an interesting game which i thought will be like the MCF series and it was called Hidden Expedition. It's the no. 1 hit game on BigFishGame, so i'm curious about this game, so i tried to download it and play the trial version of the game (trial version is limited to 60 minutes of play, but if you're quick enough, you can finish half of the game).

The game was more complicated compared to MCF, because your time was very limited by the oxygen that you had (mostly if you use the hints which will reduce your oxygen suply). Luckily there's an option to extend your oxygen supply by finding the oxygen supply icon which will add your supply a little bit. There's also some gems to be found, but i don't know what's the advantage of collecting this gems. After you collect all the items, you will face an extra task which has three variations as far as i know. The first task is collecting all the gems, the second one is completing the puzzle (some kind pictures), and the third one is collecting another set of someone's belonging. For the first and third task, your time will be very very limited as you will use the remaining time after collecting all the items, so sometimes it's very very hard to finish the last task because mostly you will run out of oxygen/time.

Last night i managed to complete 7 dive and i'm looking for more today. If you are curious, here is the screenshot:

Mandriva PowerPack 2007

Finally i finished downloading Mandriva Power Pack 2007 edition after 4 days of downloading at night. I had to scheduled the download because i'm not the only one who's using the Internet connection at the office, so i set it to start the download at night when nobody is using it. I started to download last saturday and it was finished this morning. I already burn them into CD, but i don't think i will install it on my laptop as i'm already satisfied with Slackware and i don't have new space left for the new system. Maybe i will install it on my office laptop if someday i will need to use it.