Last Customer

Today, me and my fiancee went to Amplaz to meet up with my remaining G7 members (some have came back to their office in Jakarta and in Kudus) to have dinner together. I came first as they still had their party at Papindo while i'm done with my errants, so i head there first.

We gathered in KFC and start ordering some food and had a chat. We talked quite a lot and realize that we were the last customer at that time and when we decided to leave, all of the stores were already closed and no one left besides those who still counted for the money and did the clean up before they closed their store.

It's the second time we became the last customer after last night we became the last customer in Food Fezt

LulzSec Disbanded

The famous LulzSec group has been disbanded after they announced it officially in PasteBin and also in Twitter. They also released a link to a torrent file hosted at ThePirateBay that includes lots of usernames and passwords and also other private data that they gathered during the last fifty days of their operation.

So far, they have attacked Sony, NATO E-Bookshop, Nintendo, Fox, and many other government agencies, including CIA and US Senate, Arizona police and the UK's Serious Organised Crimes Agency (SOCA).

Although they disbanded the group, it doesn't mean that other attacks will stop. Everyone should be aware of other attack in the future. Don't loose your security perimeter. You should tighten your system to prevent attacker crack into your system.

It's been a while since i got home late at night, but today is an exception. Today, all of G7 members gathered in Papindo at last. We had an old tradition of gathered here together with the rest of the crews and had a chat while eating corns. It's been some time since all of us gathered here, so today we went there again and have some fun together.

Next, we went to Food Fezt restaurant where we had dinner and one of the most fun time for us today, playing UNO . We played so long and we finally ended our game at the time the restaurant was closed, so it's really a close call before we were asked to leave the restaurant. We laughed a lot. Unfortunately, not all of the ladies could join us, but we are planning to play again tomorrow at Kaliurang. Hopefully most of the ladies can come and join the party in Kaliurang

Andre & Cynthia's Wedding

Today, one of my best friend, Andre Lokasari got married with his fiancee (now has become his wife) and i'm honored to be one of his bestmen. The other bestmen was also our best friend, Jongky. The three of us are part of our team called G7 and we were founded around 1999 and it lasts until today (we do hope that it will last forever)

Andre is the first of us who got married and i will soon follow in September, followed by Jongky on October and Yohan next year (i still don't know the exact time yet). It's a great time to have our team reunited all again in Jogja, since it's very hard to find a perfect time to gather, since Andre is living in US, while Yohan is studying in Germany. They lived in the opposite side of the world while Andy is in Jakarta and Joko is in Kudus. So as you can see, we both lived separately. Only me, Jongky, and Mark which still lives in Jogja.

I have just attended their wedding party at Banyumili and have fun together with the rest of the team. In the past, we don't bring our girlfriend, but now, most of us have brought our girlfriend or fiancee. Looks like our next meeting will be held when our son/daughter are born

Anyways, congratulations to Andre and Cynthia for their perfect wedding. I personally enjoyed it very much and i believe the others were too. Best wishes for both of you and your new family

Start Early, Plan Early

It's still about two to three months before new semester started in August, but i should get started preparing the materials and mostly the assignments since i will be quite busy at August and September, so it would be wiser to start working on the material early and i can leave without no worries later on.

I will be teaching Computer Security, Software Engineering, Advanced Software Engineering, and Project Management for next semester

PHP 5.3.7 RC1 Released

After three months since the last PHP 5.3.6 release on March, finally PHP developer team decided to release another RC1 for the next PHP 5.3.7 release which is expected to be released in July/August (depends on the quality of testing phase for RC releases).

You can help the PHP team by downloading the latest RC on their download page and see if it breaks your code or not (hopefully not). See the HowTo if you are new on this role

Firefox 5 Released

It doesn't take long for Mozilla to release Firefox 5. I think this is one of the smoothest release for Firefox so far, even though they give a lot of efforts to release this. You can see how hard their effort was by just looking at the features that they have implemented for Firefox 5. They have CSS Animations, Do Not Track Header, Improved Canvas, JavaScript, memory and networking performance as well as standards support such as HTML 5, CSS, XHR, SMIL, MathML, Canvas, and many more.

Actually, the final release has been released few days ago, since i have been using it and so far, the only complaint was that Echofon is not yet compatible with this release, but it's just a matter of time until Echofon updated their product to make it works with Firefox 5. Based on my personal opinion, so far Firefox 5 has done a great job of reducing the memory hoggs, but they still need to do more work if they want to be able to beat Google Chrome. Chrome is still the most lightweight browser on my machine (Slackware Linux).

Change Your Password

We have seen how LulzSec got lots lots of email accounts and their password by hacking several websites and they even published it to the public on this page. This is not a joke. Those are real accounts and if you think your account is one of them, CHANGE IT IMMEDIATELY!!!!

DoudouLinux Gondwana: Linux for Children

A new Linux distribution has been released called DoudouLinux. They have just released their first 1.0 release Congratulations

The first major release is called Gondwana . It might sound strange, but this is a very spesific-purpose Linux distribution. This distribution is targeting children from 2 to 12 years old and gives them an environment as easy to use as a gaming console. Kids can learn, discover and have fun without dad and mum always watching!"

They provide ISO file and ready to be burnt in CDs or USB flash drive and it has officially supporting 15 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Italian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Serbian, Swedish and Ukrainian.

What applications are included on this release? I can say it's quite interesting for kids, but for this major release, they add some new apps and they are:

• SongWrite
• StopMotion
• JukeBox
• NetworkManager

They also incorporate a lot of bug fixes and a nice boot splash screen like the one below

LibreOffice 3.3.3 Final

LibreOffice 3.4.0 has been released about two weeks ago, but it was intended for power user and contributors. It's not yet encouraged for enterprise or corporate users and it will be likely so when 3.4.1 is out in the future. At that time, all LibreOffice 3.3.2 users has no update at all, but that has changed as of yesterday, as LibreOffice 3.3.3, the third release for 3.3.x series has been released by the developer team.

If you look at the Release Note, there's nothing interesting there, but actually there's a lot of bug fixes on this release. They continue to fix all problems that has been reported since the release of LibreOffice 3.3.2, while backporting all bug fixes from Oracle's OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 series.

For list of features in LibreOffice 3.3.x series, please have a look on this page.

If you are interested on testing the new LibreOffice 3.4.0, you can check the list of features here.

WordPress Security Scanner

Wordpress users should think about their system's security more carefully. It's not only because Wordpress is getting a lot of attacks lately, but also due to the introduction of Wordpress Security Scanner (WPScan) which is developed by Ryan Dewhurstand hosted at Google Code.

WPScan is a black box WordPress Security Scanner written in Ruby which attempts to find known security weaknesses within WordPress installations. Its intended use it to be for security professionals or WordPress administrators to asses the security posture of their WordPress installations. The code base is Open Source and licensed under the GPLv3.

Features include:

• Username enumeration (from ?author)
• Weak password cracking (multithreaded)
• Version enumeration (from generator meta tag)
• Vulnerability enumeration (based on version)
• Plugin enumeration (todo)
• Plugin vulnerability enumeration (based on version) (todo)
• Other miscellaneous checks

CSS Lint

For developers, writing a good CSS is so much fun, but sometimes it could be a nightmare when something goes wrong with it, especially when you are a strict-type developers. Thanks to W3C, they offered a CSS validator for developers to test their code.

Another tool that developers can use for validating CSS code is CSS Lint which is also available on GitHub if you are interested. Basically it provides the similar service as W3C does, but it also gives you more information about the error/warnings that are produced, so you have a hint what to do in order to fix it.

Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0 Released

After about a year of development, finally Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0 is released by Apache Software Foundation. This version has received lots of improvements and has been benchmarked in real time production servers so that it's quality are proven. Most of Yahoo! servers are using this product to serve their terrabytes of data.

FYI, Apache Traffic Server is a Cloud Computing "edge" service, able to handle requests in and out of the Cloud, both by serving static content (images, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files), and routing requests for dynamic content to a Web server (such as the Apache HTTP Server). It's a fast, scalable, and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server designed to improve:

- Caching: improves response time while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested Web pages, images, and Web service calls;

- Proxying: easily add keep-alive, filter or anonymize content requests, or add load balancing by adding a proxy layer;

- Speed: scales well on modern SMP hardware, handling tens of thousands of requests per second;

- Extensibility: APIs allow for customized plug-ins, from modifying headers and content to implementing new protocol handlers;

- Reliability: successfully handles hundreds of terrabytes of data, both as forward and reverse proxies

Here are the new features based on the Release Note:
- Full 64-bit support;

- Client side IPv6 support;

- WCCP (Web Cache Communication Protocol);

- Clustering is functional and supported (many benefits include an efficient distributed cache);

- Major plug-in API improvements, making the APIs more feature rich and easier to use;

- Support for many platforms, including OSX, Solaris and FreeBSD (Linux, of course, was always supported);

- New improved RAM cache algorithms, for better performance and memory utilization

- Many configurations are now configurable per transaction (or per mapping rule)

- Many improvements in statistics and management APIs;

- Multiple accept threads, and a dedicated DNS thread:

- Build environment is now much more flexible, and package owner friendly;

- Many, many bug fixes for improved stability and functionality.

Performance improvements

- Overall throughput is 2-3x improved over v2.0 (depending on the traffic patterns)

- Response latency is up to 5x better than v2.0

- Benchmark: Serving small objects out of RAM cache, a high end server has showed over 220,000 requests / second

- Benchmark: Serving small objects that are not cacheable, the same high end server could proxy 100,000 requests / second

(NOTE: all benchmarks are on local network, with keep-alive)

As with other Apache software, it's open source and released under the Apache License v2.0. You can grab the latest source code along with the documentation and other resources at http://trafficserver.apache.org/

New Linux NVidia Driver

NVidia has been working on a new driver for some time and they even release several Beta release, but now it has been unveiled to public that a new stable version is out. Please welcome 275.09.07. It brings a lot of bug fixes along with new extensions. Here are the highlights:

• Fixed a bug that caused desktop corruption in GNOME 3 after a VT-switch or suspend/resume cycle.
• Added support for the following GPUs:
  GeForce GTX 560
  GeForce GT 545
  GeForce GTX 560M
  GeForce 410M
  GeForce 320M
  GeForce 315M
  Quadro 5010M
  Quadro 3000M
  Quadro 4000M
• Fixed a bug that caused freezes and crashes when resizing windows in KDE 4 with desktop effects enabled using X.Org X server version 1.10 or later.
• Modified the X driver to request that hardware inform the audio driver whenever a display is disabled. This will allow the audio driver to generate the appropriate jack unplug events to applications.
• Added support for the GL_EXT_x11_sync_object extension. See the extension specification in the OpenGL registry here:
  http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/x11_sync_object.txt for more details.
• Improved performance of window resize operations in KDE 4 on systems with slow CPUs.
• Added support for hardware button based pairing to NVIDIA 3D Vision Pro. Single click button on the hub to enter into a pairing mode which pairs one pair of glasses at a time. Double click the same button on the hub to enter into a pairing mode which pairs multiple pairs of glasses at a time.
• Added unofficial GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extensions:
  GL_NV_framebuffer_multisample_coverage
  GL_NV_texture_barrier
• Added GLX protocol support (i.e., for GLX indirect rendering) for the following OpenGL extension:
  GL_NV_register_combiners2
• Fixed a bug that caused the pop-out and external DVI displays to go blank on Lenovo ThinkPad W701 laptops.
• Fixed a bug that caused corruption on the menus in OpenOffice.org when the screen is rotated.
• Improved performance of certain memory allocations.
• Fixed a bug that caused Java2D widgets to disappear when Java is configured to render using FBOs.
• Fixed a bug that caused nvidia-settings to crash while saving the X configuration file on some Linux distributions.
• Added a new X configuration option "BaseMosaic" which can be used to extend a single X screen transparently across all of the available display outputs on each GPU. See "Appendix B. X Config Options" in the README for more information.

EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite

So far, GCC is the best and well-known compiler in open source world. It's domination can't be beaten by many of it's rivals, even though lots of efforts has ben worked on to beat GCC. One of the reason is that because it's very mature and it has a great track of record in the past, for both backward compatibility and also stability.

But that doesn't mean that GCC is the best compiler for performance purpose, as PathScale is said to announce that they will make their product EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite as an open source program.

For those who doesn't know about EKOPatch 4 Compiler Suite, here's some hint taken from their official web when they release version 4 last January:

KOPath 4 is a major revision of the leading compiler suite for high performance computing.

PathScale Inc, developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux® clusters, is now shipping EKOPath 4 for C, C++, and Fortran (77/90/95/2003.). This new version is available immediately at no additional cost to customers with a current support entitlement. A 15-day free trial version is available to qualified new customers by sending a request to sales@pathscale.com. "The PathScale EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite completely replaces our C++ stack from the ground up," explained Fred Chow Chief Scientist of PathScale. "Developers writing C++ applications will realize immediate performance benefits by switching over to EKOPath 4. Amongst other things, this new release shows we take C++ seriously as more HPC applications migrate to C++."

The new version of the EKOPath Compiler Suite introduces several key functional enhancements including a completely new C++ STL, C++ runtime, exception handling, faster compile times and native 64bit packages. In addition, PathScale EKOPath compilers now support the Intel Nehalem architecture. This enables programmers to standardize on a single compiler suite for AMD64 and Intel 64 computing applications. The PathScale EKOPath suite now includes an advanced assembler PathAS. Maintained and developed by PathScale, this enables the assembler to be more tightly coupled with the rest of the tool chain.

In real-world application testing performed by beta users, EKOPath 4 continues to excel in robustness and extend its performance lead over alternative compiler products. This makes PathScale the clear choice for compiling 64-bit Linux applications and delivering maximum performance.

Phoronix has been working on benchmarks using the open source EKOPath 4 Compiler codename dirndl and post it on their website. As you can see, the results are magificent. They outscored GCC in most aspect of benchmarking, making it more suitable for performance purposes.