Army of Darkness Defense HD

This weekend, i had a chance to play Army of Darkness Defense HD, another great game from BackFlip Studios, which has published several other great games, like PaperToss HD and NinJump HD. This game is more likely a strategy game and unlike the other game i have ever played, it's not boring as the pressure keeps getting higher and higher.

I bet you will like it too when you have played it on your iOS devices (i played it on my iPad). OK, it's time to beat level 35. I'm stuck at this level for now

Update (13 June 2011): I have completed this game

Testing IMAP

Today, i upgraded my KDE installation to the latest version, KDE SC 4.6.4. This version also brings a new KDEPIM package along with Kontact which is now based on Akonadi framework. I used KMail a lot in the past to manage my email, so i decided to try this new package.

After upgrading, i tested the new KMail by registering my account to KMail and it instantly checked my email using IMAP protocol. So far so good. The problem came when i started to read the messages. Sometimes, it's not really synced properly, so even if i deleted the message, it's still there, or sometimes it displays the wrong message for me. KMail also support OpenPGP/S-MIME by default, so no addon is required to have signing/encryption feature enabled.

Next, i tried Thunderbird to do the same thing. It actually gives better performance over KMail, but it does require an addon (enigmail) to work with OpenPGP/S-MIME. Spam detection are included in KMail, but we must install AdBlockPlus for Thunderbird, but so far, i'm quite satisfied with it, so not a big problem for me.

At last, i decided to stay with web-based interface, meaning i abandoned all those two applications, since my email has lots lots of email and it would be problematic for me to sync all of them. So far, i managed to reduced a lot of my email by deleting the old and unused threads on my inbox, but still there are 2 GBs of email which is still considered important for now and i don't want to delete them. Syncing 2 GB is not a good option if you have slow Internet connection.

So, probably i will leave IMAP for now, until i have much better Internet connection

Best Marriage Proposal Ever

I have seen a lot of marriage proposal on YouTube, but thanks to my ex-student who shared the link on Facebook, i must say, this is probably the best one ever. Check it out

Binary Auditing Training Material

For those who's interested in binary auditing, you can check BinaryAuditing's website for a free material about Binary Auditing, full with a free IDA Pro tool. These material are suitable for university lectures who learns and work with binary auditing. This can also be useful for researchers working on this subject.

Inside the website there's a password-protected zip package that includes a lot of materials such

• HLL Mapping
• Manual Decompilation
• Algorithm Analysis
• Crash Auditing 10
• File Understanding
• Copy Protection Auditing
• Unpacking
• Vulnerability Auditing
• Malware Auditing

Also included in the zip package is IDA Pro tool which is very famous in binary auditing process and it's given for free.

I hope you can take an advantage of this offering.

Thanks to BinaryAuditing for giving this materials

Google Chrome Reaches 12

In Google Chrome Release Blog, Jason Kersey of Google Chrome team officially announced the availability of Google Chrome 12 into stable channel, which means that users will have an update when they opened the about dialog in Chrome.

The latest stable version of Chrome is now 12.0.742.91 and it includes a number of new features and updates, including:

• Hardware accelerated 3D CSS
• New Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files
• Ability to delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome
• Launch Apps by name from the Omnibox
• Integrated Sync into new settings pages
• Improved screen reader support
• New warning when hitting Command-Q on Mac
• Removal of Google Gears

There's also a bunch of security fixes which are described on the blog post. They keep doing the incremental updates scheme and so far, they are doing it properly by release it often, mostly when dealing with security updates. I only wished for a delta updates in the future, so users doesn't have to download the full package, but only the delta (differences) between two versions. Mozilla Firefox has done this and Apple also have delta updates for their system and it has been officially announced in the WWDC 2011. Why can't Google do the same for their products?

WWDC 2011 and Apple Innovations

Today, i watched WWDC 2011 keynote by Steve Jobs and other Apple top managements, thanks to my colleague Yuan Lukito who gave me the link to download the podcast. The original event was held few days ago and i couldn't watch it online due to lack of bandwidth

I was amazed on how Apple innovate small things, but it can make people wanted to try the new products by Apple, such as Mac OS X Lion, new iOS 5 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and of course, iCloud, the new service by Apple. Everything they do are based on problems spotted by their engineers or a request by their loyal users and at the end, they provide a nice and elegant solution for their end users. I really love how they work to please their users everytime they show any new features.

I'm really curious about the new iMessage that will head to head with BBM from RIM. I think this will be a big blow by Apple to aim directly to RIM and BlackBerry. One advantage of iMessage is that it should work on all iOS devices, including iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone.

I wish i had all those Apple products to try

Pidgin 2.8.0 Released

After months of development, finally Pidgin has released a new major release, 2.8.0. Their last release was three months ago, which is uncommon for an active open source project to have this long delay. Anyway, it's worthed to wait, since it's a new major release and there are a lot of new improvements on voice/video support along with many code cleanups, better NetworkManager interoperability, many updates on multiple plugins, and the last but not least: removal of QQ plugin since it's no longer working and has been unmaintained for some time. More to tell on the ChangeLog

New KDrama

I just got a new KDrama on my watch list: Lie To Me. This drama was out of my radar, but one of my ex student spotted it and she told me that it is a good one, so i'm following it right now. It's my second YEH KDramas after My Fair Lady. I hope it will be a good one too.

So far, i have completed this dramas in the last two weeks

• 49 Days
• King of Snooker
• Legend of Star Apple

And i'm still following:

• Lie To Me
• Drunken to Love You
• City Hunter
  

Updating iPad

It's been some time since i updated my father's iPad. After moving to a new room, i have never used my father's iPad again. I just started to look at the front screen and i noticed about six updates are available to download

I just realized it's almost a month since i updated those apps, so it's normal to have that number. Anyway, i'm updating the apps right now. Let's hope all of them will be completed by tomorrow since it's a big updates

Driving Lesson

Today, i accompanied my fiancee for driving lessons. She already took driving course few months ago, so she only need to get used with the driving techniques that she has learned. Since she wasn't ready for driving on the street yet, we went to Mandala Krida stadium where most people go there to learn how to drive since the area was huge and there were a lot of obstacles that were great for getting used to real condition.

She wasn't nervous as before, but she does need more practice before she is ready for live driving

Fake Comments

Recently, there has been a lot of comments coming to this blog, but inside the comments, they put a link to another website. I think this is a new method to get an outside link from other website, probably to increase their page rank as this algorithm will count for every incoming and outgoing links to and from that site.

I'm sorry if i can't approve your comments even though most of the comments are good comments (or else i would mark it as spam )

LibreOffice 3.4.0 Released

The Document Foundation has released a new major version of LibreOffice 3.4.0 that contains a lot of new features and bug fixes.

Most notable features are:

• Redesigned Move/Copy Sheet dialog
• Improve HTML export
• Tuned Font
• Color Chart
• Named range as data source
• Improved Linux text-rendering

This version is focused on community members and power users, so usage on production environment is not recommended. For corporate usage, it's advisable to use x.x.1 version. If you think you can live with LibreOffice 3.3, you can relax a little bit as this version will not be abandoned in short time. The Document Foundation will maintain it for several months, probably until the end of 2011, which is six months to come.

Creating a Creative Presentation

As a lecturer, i gave a lot of presentations on each of my class and i use LibreOffice (previously OpenOffice.org) as the main tool to deliver the material. I often prepared the material long before the class, but sometimes i prepared it one day before the class started.

In every slide i made, i tried to make it as simple as possible, but still gave the complete information to the audience, since i know that the audience http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdoesnhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif't like too much garbage text in it. They prefer more images on it because a word can visualize a lot of things.

Tonight, i just realize that my method is not 100% correct as there are a lot of improvements i can use after i read Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations and slide:ology : The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations.

If you often give talks to other people, i would recommend that you read both of these books. It's worthed and it might give you a lot of inspiration when creating your next presentations.

Chrome OS Vanilla Nightly

You might have heard about Google Chrome OS right? It was announced in 2009 and in this year's Google I/O conference, Sundar has officially announced that Google ChromeOS (which will be called ChromeBook) will be available by this year and they have a joint cooperation with several vendors to provide you a netbook with Google ChromeBook pre-installed.

If you just curious about ChromeOS, but you don't have a feel of buying the netbook, then you can try the ChromiumOS Vanilla Nightly Build by Hexxeh. They provide you with daily build of ChromiumOS, available for VMWare, VirtualBox, and USB Flash Drive image, so you can install it on your desktop/laptop or you can bring it everywhere on your portable flash drive. It's around 214 MB, so 1 GB of flash drive would be sufficient for the image.

Follow his Twitter account for future updates.

Metasploit Megaprimer

When i attended the seminar in Surabaya, one of the speaker, Amien gave a quiz and the winner would get a Metasploit Megaprimer videos. Unfortunately, i didn't get it because the quiz was about analyzing an attack using Network Miner and Wireshark, but Network Miner was only available on Windows only. At that time, i never thought that it could be run under Wine, so i traced it using Wireshark alone

After coming back to Jogja, i tried to find what's so special about this videos? It seems that Amien was right. It is an interesting video and if you learn about security, this video is a must-watch. It tells you almost all information you need to know about Metasploit, starting from it's history, basic usage, until advanced techniques to use Metasploit. It's very valuable to me as it would be a good example when i wanted to teach CEH class next semester. It can also tell the students how advanced a tool can be and they really need to update and harden their system so that their system can't be compromised by Metasploit which is updated so frequently. It's a race between an exploit being developed in Metasploit and also a patch is being deployed on our system.