Finishing Season 2

It's been a few days and i have finished most of the episodes in season 2 of Prison Break. I'm streaming the episode 21 currently and then shortly after that 22. After this, i will continue to season 3. I wonder when will it ends? Michael and Lincoln has traveled in most US cities and now he's in Panama. Some of the fugitives were dead and only five left (Michael, Lincoln, Franklin, Sucre, and T-Bag). Let's hope the streaming goes smoothly and no interruptions

New Default Skin For Winamp

Winamp has just released their final 5.5 version (this version takes some time to finish, but at last it's out and it's worthed if you look at the changes). This version also marks Winamp's 10 year of anniversary. Here are some of the new features that are new in Winamp 5.5:

* New "Bento" Skin as Default
* A Completely Redesigned Interface, including Album Art
* Multiple device support, including iPods
* Access and Share Your Music and Videos with Winamp Remote
* Play and Playlist the Best Music on the Web with Media Monitor
* Get Artist & Concert News, Videos & more with Smart Search
* Enjoy Dynamic Song Recommendations
* Experience MP3 Surround Sound Support
* Access to Thousands of Online Radio Stations, Videos and More!
* 50 FREE MP3 Music Downloads compliments of eMusic's 2-week Trial
* Auto-Tagger provides automatic updates to file information
* Control Winamp From Your Browser with the Winamp Toolbar
* New installer

The filesize has increased as well. It's 9,81 MB now, compared to the version 2 which only less than 3 MB. Here's the screenshot of the latest Winamp.

Sorry For Unfinished Translations

Mandriva 2008.0 has finally been released and lots of new and great stuffs are there. Here are some of them: GNOME 2.20 desktop, KDE 3.5.7, Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, latest Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0. This version will use 2.6.22.9, the previous stable version of the kernel, since 2.6.23 has just gone out and there hasn't enough time to include this on the distribution. You might want to check Mandriva's wiki for more information about this release.

Few weeks ago, i just re-started translating the Mandriva project again and it's not finished yet, since they have added lots of new translations strings, so you might not get the finished work of Indonesian translations in Mandriva 2008.0. The biggest change is in their new simplified menu system. This will take some time to finish and if you want to help, please join mdk-id mailing list. I will try to update the project as soon as possible, but since the old statistic page is now gone, it will be more difficult to look at the changes and it has to be done manually.

2.6.23 Finally

Finally the waiting time is over. Final release of kernel 2.6.23 is out there and it's time to compile time

Read the Changelog for more detailed information.

House Planner

Are you planning to buy a new house or make from scratch? If you do, you can use FloorPlanner to help you design your new 'castle'. You can even share it to your friend and ask them their opinions. It uses a sweet combination of Flash and a little bit of AJAX, so make sure you have Flash player installed and Javascript turned on.

The registration is very simple. All you have to do is enter your email, password, and password confirmation. It will take you to the project page shortly after the registration is finished (it will only take seconds to complete it). When the loading is finished, you can start working on your new house of dream

Credit goes to Teguh who told me about this site

2.6.23, Not Yet?

It's been five days since Linus release 2.6.23-RC9 and still no sign when will final 2.6.23 kernel released. Meanwhile, in LKML people are busy introducing new features that are being planned to be pushed in Linus' tree in the merge window (shortly after 2.6.23 released and after the x86 merge process is finished, since Linus said it will be the first thing after 2.6.23 gets their way). It's been a long process and i hope it will be a smooth release with as little regression as possible.

This Is The Real MU

Now this is what i call a game. MU beat Wigan 4-0 in front of their 75.300 supporters at their home base Old Trafford just now. Who scores? Well, it's all the strikers that MU has (except for Saha and Scholes), which was Tevez (the opening), Ronaldo (double goal), and Rooney (the ending). This is what people are waiting for. A lot of goals from the goal getters. MU spent the most budget this season by buying several players and they were very slow at the start. After winning charity shield, they couldn't show great performance like last season and most of their winning game ended by 1-0 at the score line.

People start to criticize MU for useless spending, but now they have proven that their decision to buy those players were correct one. It happened when MU bought Christiano Ronaldo several years back. Nobody nows Ronaldo and he was wearing Beckham's number (7). People at that time still thought that 7 is a holy number (since it was used by great players. You name it, Beckham, Cantona), so Ronaldo wasn't considered fit to use that number, but Sir Alex have made his decision and Ronaldo prove that it was the right choice. Well, it looks like that Sir Alex was right again this time. It does worthed to buy Tevez, Nani, and other players. They just need time to prove that they are the best team in the England (or probably Europe).

What impress me about MU is that they really have a big fan. Look at the attendance in the last match : 75.300. If i'm not mistaken, MU is one of the top rank club that has the biggest average of attendance on each matches. If one ticket is 30 pound sterling, then in one match, they could gain 2.259.000 pound sterling (equals to 42.132.609.000 IDR with the rate of 18651 per 1 pound sterling). Just calculate if they were competing in several league, such as FA Cup, Champion League, Carling Cup (unfortunately MU lost on this one). That's a big money

Ban Control

phpBB has a useful feature called ban control. It can be used to ban several users to register to our forum. There are several methods to do this, but i think the most effective way to do this is by banning the domain address which is used for their email address. If you ban an ip address, there's a risk on it. What happened if someone who turned out to be a spammer was accessing the forum via public internet cafe? We could block the entire visitor on that cafe to access our forum. It's not a good choice.

What about usernames? It's not that good either, since bot can randomly pick any username they wanted, so you have virtually unlimited usernames to be checked on. So the best pick for now is to ban the domain. For example, one of the biggest spammers came from bigmir.net domain. It's some kind of a news portal, but i don't know which country is it from, since i don't understand the language they used on their site. In order to ban all users from this domain, go to administration panel and access the ban control. Put *@bigmir.net (yes, it supports wildcards) in second to the last field (email address) and from that moment, all email which directly comes from bigmir.net will be denied to register to our forum. I have used this method for several days and it's quite effective.

The major drawbacks is that i have to be very careful not to ban a white domain, for example *@yahoo* which will block all emails from Yahoo to sign up on the forum

IE7 On All XP

Microsoft is releasing an update to IE7 which can be downloaded and installed on all Windows XP (whether they are original or cracked version). You can get this version from Microsoft site or via Automatic Updates (if you are a fans of this feature).

Besides all the updates are applied, the new IE7 by default will have this changes:
# The menu bar is now visible by default.
# IE 7 online tour has updated how-to’s. Also, the “first-run” experience includes a new overview.
# Include a new MSI installer that simplifies deployment for IT administrators in enterprises.

.NET Source Code Will Be Published

In the next release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 (it's scheduled this year), Microsoft will publish source code for their .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows) to the public. In the next following months, they will publish more and more codes to the public (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Read more detail on ScottGu's blog

New Is Not Always Better

Sometimes, people like the old version of an application. Why? Since it's smaller, efficient (in term of memory consumption) and they have fulfill the user's need. Why would they need to upgrade and spent some money on the newer version which sometimes bloated, full of unused animation/features, and of course, more expensive (on commercial application), except for new features that are critical or security updates. For those who like to use the old version of an application, try to visit this site, OldVersion. It listed some of the old application that people still use up to now.

One good example are ACDSee and Winamp. Both of this program has a good history in the old version. They works perfectly and did what they was designed for. It is very fast on the operation and also very small in the term of size. I can run the application in a seconds on the old computer, which i couldn't get with the latest version now.

Finishing Season 1

I have just finished watching Prison Break Season 1. I know it's kindda outdated, since it has been released since two years ago, but i have never seen this before, until few days ago, my friend told me to watch this movie. So i watched them by streaming (since downloading torrents will be much longer). So i finished 22 episodes in just 2-3 days. It could be faster, but since i must do other activities, i can't just sit and watch the movies everyday

Well, season 2 is also available, so i will start looking at it, since the breakout in season 1 is not yet finished. We'll see the progress in the next season. Meanwhile, season 3 has already started in the US. Nice movie by Paul Scheuring. The moral i could take from this movie: Always prepare for the unexpected and plan for contingency plan.

Spam Emails

In the last two months, incoming spam email on my inbox is getting worse. I don't know why, but GMail's spam filter sometimes let them pass their filter and go through my inbox. They came from different email address, so it's impossible to identify them all, but one thing for sure, they have similarity on the content, since usually the message is related to drugs and viagra (and some other things). I think it's time GMail team start reviewing their filters and do something about it.

Is it only me or other people have the same symptoms?

404 Songs

Two months ago, i wrote something about 404 pages (standard code for web application if the browser couldn't find the target), which i took from SmashingMagazine. Few hours ago, i got an email from Walt Riberio who had read my previous post and decided to make it better by creating a 404 Songs. Curious? Check this out

Even though it's very short (only 1,5 minutes), but it expresses most of the common thing when people couldn't find their target (URL, Files) on the Internet. Sweating, nervous, depressed. Well, it's not happening for most people, but to some specific people.

Heroes 2 Is ON

For those who loved Heroes, be happy for this good news. Heroes season 2 is already started (24 September). Lots of new characters and abilities. The first episode is called Four Months Later. It will consist of 24 regular storyline episodes split into two volumes, Volume Two: Generations and Volume Three. During the season's breaks, 6 episodes of the mini-series Heroes: Origins will air.

The video is already available on some sites (and torrents), but it's up to you to find the source. Hm... can't wait to see the story of this new season. Watching heroes is always exciting, since it's full of surprises and shocking events.