Are You Prepared for PHP 5.3?

PHP team has released PHP 5.3 RC 2, which will be followed by RC 3 in the next two or three weeks. It means that the final version of PHP 5.3 is getting ready for prime time. As always, changes in 5.x is quite enormous and sometimes makes people confusing because scripts that was working in prevous version become broken on the next version.

For that reason, PHP team has tried to make some documentation on PHP 5.3 Upgrading Notes. Basically, it gives you spesific changes within PHP 5.3 which will give you some hints on what should you do with your scripts related with the changes implemented on the next PHP 5.3. There are some changes that might break your scripts and it's a good time to test for it before it's too late

Second Novel of Rick Riordan's Collection

I just came back from Galeria and while i was there, i bought the second novel from Rick Riordan's collection, called The Sea of Monsters.I have finished reading the first novel within two days only. Probably i will bring this novel when i go to Manado next month (it's still uncertain, but the chances are high), because i will be spending time there for about a week.

I still had 4 magazines which i haven't read. Two are mobile-related magazines and the rest are Oracle-related magazines. There are still two final project reports which i have to read for tonight and tomorrow, assignments for my classes and also final test which will start tomorrow.

Oh... give me some power to finish all this

Celebrating IEEE's 125th Anniversary

Today, IEEE celebrates it's 125th anniversary. It's a long history since IEEE founded 125 years ago and since then, they have worked hard to engineer the future by doing lots of things, such as holding a seminar/conference, publishing magazines/journals, launching digital library and many more.

You can see the celebration page on this site. You can also become a fan on Facebook

Real-time Update

Facebook has integrated their real-time update notifications on home page and status page. When somebody posted a comment on your status, you will get a notification on your bottom right of the page, giving you almost real-time update to your activities.

The home page also gets an update by giving you a real-time update on your friend's activities and status updates. It will shows you XX new posts, where XX is a number and those number will keep increasing if you don't show them on your home page. When you clicked on the link, it will display all the updates on your home page.

Very nice features by Facebook.

Three More Novels

When i was out of town last week, i went to book store and bought three novels at once. Actually i wanted to buy six of them, but i realize i won't have that luxury to read them, so i return the other three. One of them has been finished only two days since i bought the book. It's called The Lightning Thief. It's one of five books written by Rick Riordan and it's talking about Greeks' mythology. We are talking about Zeus, Hera, Hades, Medusa, Poseidon, and many other. It was fun reading it and i am hoping to see the second and third one published in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, i haven't finished my Brisingr book and i still have plenty of novels which i haven't had time to read, but yet i'm buying another one

KDE 4.2.3 Released

Another monthly release for KDE has been released for public few days ago. I was behind schedule because i was out of town. It has been included on Slackware's tree (in -Current only) and it's getting better. In fact, i have just completed downloading it and upgrading my laptop with KDE 4.2.3 along with other changes made in Slackware-Current which now supports for .txz file formats that already uses lzma compression algorithm to compress Slackware packages.

For changes compared to 4.2.2, please see the changelog.

Upgrading BIOS From Desktop

Upgrading BIOS is like a nightmare for some computer users and it's enough to scare them away and leave it untouched. Phoronix wrote an article about The Flashrom utility developed by CoreBoot project, which can be used to read, write, erase, and verify flash ROM chips from your Linux desktops.

Here are some ofthe cool explanation about Flashrom which is taken from Phoronix site:

This utility supports nearly every x86 motherboard after having worked on support for over 150 flash chip families (and many various for each family), 75 different chipsets, workarounds for non-standard motherboards, and there is no need for CD-ROM or floppy disk.

Previously Linux users have had to create an MS-DOS or FreeDOS boot disk and then run a proprietary DOS-based BIOS flashing program, but it is now becoming easy and universally supported to flash the BIOS from your desktop. Flashrom can also flash a BIOS perfectly fine over SSH or through other means as long as there is root access. Flashrom also supports cross-flashing and hot-flashing.

Codename

Usually, big products have their own codename. Every Linux kernel release has their own names, even though it's never being published sometimes. Mozilla, Windows, KDE, and Ubuntu are examples of products which have a unique names for every release.

This is not what happened on OpenOffice.org. In the past (OpenOffice.org 2.x), they used a specific notation on the about dialog about product versions to distinguish between Beta, RC, and Final release. Currently (OpenOffice.org 3.x), they do not use those kind of naming again, mostly for Final release. What they use is just a build number and milestone (CMIIW). For example, OOo 3.1.0 has a release information: m11, Build 9399.

I think this information might be confusing for some people, because they *may* not know which one is the final release and which one is the RCs. Just a small hint, on OOo 3.x development, the last RC will usually be the final version, so those packages will go into stable directory on every OOo mirror site. Every time a new version comes into stable version, you can say that that's the final release. To be sure, you can wait for few days and make sure that you got the correct build.

Day Off

Starting today until Sunday, i will be taking a day offs and heading for other city in Indonesia for short vacation. I may not be able to reply your messages, your offline message in YM, nor approve any request to join Indonesian Linux Forum. I will do my best stay in touch using my cellphones and public WiFI, but don't count on it

Cheers everybody

Fixing OOo 3.1.0 Installation Problem on Windows

Yesterday, i upgraded my OpenOffice.org installation on Windows and Linux to OOo 3.1.0. On Linux, the upgrade worked just fine without any problems and i have mentioned it on my other blog.

The problem arose when i tried to upgrade on Windows. I downloaded the OOo 3.1.0 from Austrian mirror (GDS) and i removed the previous version prior installing this version. When the installation finished, i tried to try it out but i got an error like this:

the application cannot be started.
loading component library failed:
file://C:/Program%20Files/OpenOffice.org%203/program/../Basis/program/i18npool.uno.dll

I submitted an issue at OOo's issue tracker and the ID was 101570. Several people helped me out to fix this problem as it happened on the final release of OOo 3.1.0, so i guess it will affect many people who will use OOo 3.1.0 on Windows platform.

Right now, i already got the solution, but you will have to fix it manually after installing OOo 3.1.0 on your system. Based on the detailed explanation by sb, he assumed that the dll which couldn't be found (i18npool.uno.dll) depends on other libraries (icuin40.dll and icuuc40.dll) which also depends on icudt40.dll. The problem arose when there are some ICU DLLs which are located on Windows\System32 directory and it has the same name with DLLs that were being used by OOo, but it's not compatible.

OOo's component (soffice) will find the incorrect DLL files from Windows system rather than the correct one from OOo installation directory, resulting the unexpected errors.

The solution is very easy: copy all files named icu*40.dll from OOo's "OpenOffice.org 3\Basis\program" directory to its "OpenOffice.org 3\program" directory. Try to restart OOo and voila, it will work like charm

Thanks to quick responses by OpenOffice.org team and also from the community.

Hesitate to Change

I have been asking my students to submit their assignments using OpenDocument Formats, which is being used by OpenOffice.org and many other office suite applications. Most of them are used with Microsoft Office 2003/2007, so they made the assignment on MSO and then open the file in OOo and save it as .ODT extension. I'm wondering, why on earth do they have to do that? OOo can handle document creation like MSO and best of all, it's free. Geezz....

I made my final project for my undergraduate program using OOo 1.1.x, and for my thesis, i did it using OOo 3.x and nothing wrong with my papers. I believe many of you have done the same thing with your job. OOo can handle most of our needs. It's just the students who hesitate to change/migrate to OOo. Too bad...

Free of Quizzes

Facebook lately are full of quizzes which can be made easily by ordinary users. Not many people like this behavior, so Steeev created a simple script called FB purity which purifies FB to it's original's state, clean. This script will hide all the annoying quiz messages and other silly application spam from your facebook homepage.

This script works only with Firefox 3, Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari. If you are using Firefox, then you must install GreaseMonkey extension prior installing this script. For other browsers, you should check link on each browser.

Thanks for this nice scripts.

Last Week

Starting next Monday, it will be the last week before students at UKDW will have their final test in the next two weeks, starting from Thursday, 14 May 2009. Usually i gave review of all material that i have given, but since this semester has a lot of holidays, my materials are not yet finished. Some of them will have to be delivered this week and next week, some of the class are already for presentation of their assignments.

Good luck guys/girls

Closer to the Title

MU is getting closer to reach their 18th title after beating Middlesbrough on away match held in The Riverside Stadium. With six points ahead of Liverpool who will play their game tomorrow, any mistake mad by Liverpool would made ease their way to get Treble title this season (and i'm hoping for another one from Champion league).

Ryan Giggs, who has just been awarded PFA player of the year and Ji-Sung Park scored a goal each to give another winning for MU. They are not in their full team as they still had tight schedule for Champion league next week against Arsenal at Emirates Stadium.

Little Disappointment

I'm a little bit dissapointed today. I went to movie theater in Amplaz today and i wanted to watch X-Men The originals: Wolverine by using my credit card to get buy 1 for 2 promotions. I was surprised to know that the promotions are only valid in Saturday and Sunday and no longer valid in Friday.

One of my friend applied for BCA credit card just to enjoy this promotion because he often watched movies on Friday and at that day, the price is quite low and you can get cheaper prize by using credit card. Now, it's gone