VMWare Workstation 8 and Linux Kernel 3.2

I have just completed compiling Linux Kernel 3.2, the latest release of Linux Kernel which was released early this month. Like always, new major release brings a lot of improvements which can be seen in KernelNewbies.

For those who would like to compile Linux Kernel 3.2, please pay attention when it comes to ethernet drivers. You must make sure that you have written down your ethernet card vendor as the configuration will ask you again and if you failed to answer (by typing no or picking the wrong vendor), you will end up with no ethernet driver loaded and if you are connected to the Internet using a wire, then you are out of connection. Luckily it can be solved by just recompiling the kernel and load the new module.

New kernel means new patch for VMWare and i have confirmed that a patch from Weltal's Blog is working like charm. All you need is to apply the patch included and it should go just fine. Please change the version according to the VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player version installed on your machine.

In case you find this error:

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_AdjustMappings’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:180:4: error: implicit declaration of
function ‘iommu_found’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c: In function ‘IOMMU_RegisterDevice’:
/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/iommu.c:415:7: error: too few arguments to 
function ‘iommu_domain_alloc’
include/linux/iommu.h:68:29: note: declared here

Then, you can fix this problem by :

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source
tar -xvf vmmon.tar
cd vmmon-only/linux/
vi iommu.c

add this in top part of the file

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= KERNEL_VERSION(3, 2, 0)
#include <linux/pci.h>
#define iommu_found() iommu_present(&pci_bus_type)
#define iommu_domain_alloc() iommu_domain_alloc(&pci_bus_type)
#endif

then finish it by saving it and then:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/modules/
rm vmmon.tar
tar -cvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/
vmware-modconfig --console --install-all

That's it. You can start your VMWare and voila... it's working again.

MU Advanced in FA Cup

Manchester United got their revenge to their rival, Manchester City after crushing them at their home base, Etihad Stadium in Manchester, in the third round of FA Cup, the oldest competition in England.

The game was likely to be an easy win for United as they managed to get 0-3 in the half time, but City struck back with 2 goals in early second half and few minutes later. After the two goals, City couldn't add more goals and United won the game to advance to the next round where they will meet another EPL club, Liverpool.

In the EPL title, MU is 3 points behind City and the race will continue next week. We surely hope for the best for our club, be it Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, or any other EPL clubs out there.

Integrated Parking System

During my trip to Singapore, i noticed that in Singapore, you can see how many empty parking spaces in several famous places on the streets because they put the information on a digital panels. The information is updated everytime there's a new car entering or leaving the place, so it's a real time update.

The concept is simple, but the visitors who are planning to go there can take the benefit of this features and decide whether it's a good option to go there or not. Why waste your time and money if there aren't any empty space for you to park your car (unless if you want to use public transportation such as buses or trains).

Since cars are not that much in Singapore due to strict car life cycle regulation, the numbers displayed is always over 500 and sometimes it even reach 1000 for big places, such as Suntec.

Traffic Jam and Regulation

We all know that Singapore is very strict with it's regulation. One of them is car life cycle policy. If i'm not mistaken, private cars are only allowed to be used for five years. After that, they should pay higher taxes which is only payable and feasible for rich people.

By doing this, they basically control the number of cars available in Singapore so that there are no traffic jam everywhere,just like in Jakarta. From my previous two visits in Singapore, i never saw any crodwded street at all, but guess what? I experienced it today. The reason? It's clear.

In the next few weeks, there will be Chinese New Year celebration and Singapore is one of those countries where most of it's population were Chinese. During Chinese New Year, most shops closed down, so most tourist go to Singapore before the main day to buy many items sold nowadays. There are a lot of promotions during these days just before the big day.

So, even with those strict regulation, traffic jam is still unavoidable. What about Indonesia which doesn't have those kind of regulations? No wonder traffic jam is everywhere....

Apple's New Products?

There are a lot of rumors speculating about iPad 3 and iPhone 5 since the last few months. It's quite normal since Apple usually release a new product on January. Apple is known to held a press release on late January (source: PCWorld) and many people believe that they will announce a new product at that moment. Meanwhile, other report stated that Apple will announce a new product on February 24 at Steve Jobs' birthdate.

The rumors are getting hotter and hotter each day as the prime time is getting closer and closer. As usual, Apple's spokeperson never give any spoilers to anyone. Only time can tell what news will Apple bring to it's loyal customers.

You can see some of the features that might be included in iPad 3 and iPhone 5. Remember that this is only speculations, based on many sources, but it's not 100% accurate until Apple announced it officially.

Chrome 17 Enters Beta

Google Chrome 17 has entered Beta channel, which means we're one step closer to released version. On this version, the developer are aiming for something that they have done well in the past: speed and security.

Google are doing a great job in enhancing the speed of Chrome. This time, they take one step further by pre-render the URL that was typed within the address bar. Chrome did this by (probably) fetching URLs that you visited most in the past. For example, you used GMail and when you type G, it would try to read ahead gmail's web page and render it to you, so when you completed gmail.com and press the ENTER key, the rendered page gets displayed instantly. Although it's a good technique, but it must also be supported by the Internet connection. What good is it if the connection is poor? Everything get wasted.

As for the security part, Google Chrome enhanced it by adding more extensions to it's Safe Browsing watch list: .exe and .msi. If Chrome encounters those two extensions supplied by the web site to the users (for example a fake anti virus), it will shows a warning to it's users.

We should expect Google Chrome 17 gets released in late January or early February.

Second Visit to Universal Studio

Joy, excitement, and new experiences. These are the three things i got during my second visit to Universal Studio in Singapore today. My first trip to UVS was in October with my wife. At that time, we didn't have any experience on visiting UVS, but luckily, we got almost all of the big shows during our visit.

Today, we went there again with my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, her husband, and her 20-months daughter. We didn't complete all of the places, because there were more people coming with us, so we got delayed for some time, but since we have seen most of the shows, we skipped some of the attractions which we though it wasn't too interesting to see.

We had some new photos with the movie characters that we didn't get in our first trip, such as Po (Kungfu Panda), Frankenstein, Betty Boop, and Joker. I also played Battle of Galactica and Return of the Mummy, two jet-costers attractions which i didn't play previously. It was a fun and thrilling experience. It's not for everyone. It's for those who have good health and brave enough to pump their adrenalin to the maximum level. Honestly, i didn't brave enough to take the blue ride (Cyclon) as it's more aggressive and includes many twist in the air.

I also enjoyed Transformer The Ride, one of the new attractions that were opened last December 2011. It wasn't available when was coming in October. It was a magnificent attractions and i loved the show very much.

All the great experienced was closed by a wonderful water attractions in Waterfront, called Crane Dance. Different with Songs of the Sea, this attraction is free of charge.

In overall, i'm impressed with RWS. One ticket for all (excluding your own expenses on food, drinks, and gifts). I would recommend you to have express ticket to save more time queuing. SGD 30 is worth spent to save you from frustration and time.

One last interesting thing from my second visit was that there was a wedding celebration held in UVS at 7 PM and the couple has booked the whole New York are for their wedding took place. Guess what? They have the same initials as me and wife do, W&M. We took a picture for that.

Ads on Installous

If you used a jailbroken iOS devices, such as iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, and you are using Installous 4 to install "free" apps, you might notice that there's a new CAPTCHA form before the redirector sent you to the download page.

The reason why there's a new CAPTCHA is because Apple was sending a takedown notice to AppTrackr (where most people send their cracked iOS apps and publish it to other people whose devices are already jailbroken) and therefore, the developer had to move the servers outside US so that Apple can't sue them for copyright issues. The problem came along with the funding as moving to another server means more cost to spend and they needed some money to do that. So, they put a safe ads on the CAPTCHA form to raise some money and hopefully it can cover their expenses of providing those services to most users.

Low Cost PC in 2012

Last year (2011), a new computer project called Rasberry Pi started to rise in the community news and it's gaining a big momentum as the economy crisis strucked everywhere, forcing people to tighten their expenses.

It's a tiny computer with ARM architecture which should cost you not more than USD 25 each. So cheap compared to any other vendor-based PC out there. They performed an auction for 10 boards at the end of last year and it has been sold out. Seems the antusiasm was quite high.

Even though it's a low-spec PC, it can handle such quite heavy game as well. Business Insider reported that a man is playing Quake 3 in 20 frames per second at a 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution

Several Linux distributions are looking forward to support ARM architecture, including Slackware. Slackware has it's own official ARM port called ARMedslack. Eric Hameleers and Stuart Winter (the maintainer of ARMedslack) is willing to tweak this port in order to be able to install on Rasberry Pi devices. Eric is now working to add Java support on ARM architecture by sending OpenJDK SlackBuild script which should be installable on ARM architecture as well.

For those interested about Rasberry Pi, please have a look on the video below

Untethered Jailbreak for A5 Devices

Good news for you who owns iPhone 4S and iPad 2 devices, as Pod2g has mentioned on his Twitter account that he made some progress on bringing untethered jailbreak for this devices and he will likely release the results within one or two weeks from now.

He's testing it on more devices to make sure they are working as intended. Let's hope for the good news from them

Scribus Major Release

Scribus, one of the most famous open source application for desktop publishing is now releasing a major release after several years of development. Every users that have been using Scribus 1.3.x series will be happy with this good news since it has more than 2000 feature requests and bugs fixed since the development of this new version started.

I would like to mention some of the major highlight on Scribus 1.4 taken from it's Release page :

• 1.4.0 is based on the Qt4 application framework, thus Scribus now runs equally reliable on all supported platforms.
• Scribus now provides install files for Mac OS X 10.5 or later (DMG or pkg format), as well as a native version for OS/2 Warp 4 and eComStation.
• Feature enhancements to object handling (e.g. transform tools like in advanced drawing programs), with improvements to existing features like the Scrapbook and the Image Manager.
• Many advanced options for text and typography, like character styles, optical margins, or glyph extension. Undo/Redo is finally available for almost all text-related actions, and a new script enables replacing straight quotes with typographical quotation marks based on language settings. Usability improvements include better cursor placement and movement, faster layout on canvas and interaction between linked frames.
• New features for vector objects, like Boolean path operations, vector effects or a line style editor.
• Major improvements to the handling of fills, like pattern fill, more gradient types, support for external color palette formats (AI, EPS, GPL, PostScript, SOC), and many new color palettes, including those from commercial vendors like Resene and dtp studio, as well as national/government standards.
• A new frame type called "Render Frame" allows for rendering (and subsequently export) the output of every program that can create PostScript, PDF or PNG files via the command line (e.g. LaTeX, Lilypond, POV-Ray) inside Scribus.
• Vector import filters: Scribus 1.4.0 provides new import filters for the following file formats: Adobe Illustrator (both EPS and PDF-based), Macintosh Picture (PICT), Windows Metafile (WMF), Xfig (FIG), Calamus Vector Graphics (CVG), Kivio Stencils (SML), and DIA Shapes (SHAPE).
• Handling of Photoshop files has seen many major improvements, like support of multiple clipping paths or PSD layers. The Image Manager has been rewritten, and new non-destructive image effects have been added. Moreover, Scribus 1.4.0 now supports EXIF data in images, and import of Windows and OS/2 bitmaps (BMP) has been re-enabled.
• Among the major enhancements to Scribus's pre-press features, printing marks and the display of ink coverage in the Print Preview are the most important. In addition, Scribus now enables conversion of spot colors to process colors during PDF and PostScript export with a single click.
• Scribus can now export to PDF 1.5, including PDF layers. Another new feature is the option to embed EPS and PDF files in exported PDFs as an alternative to rasterizing them.
• Scribus 1.4.0 now supports both littleCMS version 1 and 2.
• Scribus Team has added a feature to emulate color blindness on screen.
• Hundreds of minor and major usability improvements have been added.
• The included scripts have been updated, including the addition of the "Autoquote" script in the Script menu to convert straight quotes in a text frame to correct quotation marks for many languages.
• Scribus 1.4.0 is being shipped with many more templates than previous versions.

If you plan to compile your own Scribus package on your Linux operating system, please take a look on the Compilation page as they now switch to CMake and leaving Makefile as they now are Qt-based. For Windows and Mac OS X, there's no need to worry as they ship the native format for those platforms.

Playing With JoliCloud

Have you ever wanted to try Google Chromebook but you expected something cheaper than having to buy the whole hardware just to feel the experience of having cloud-based operating system?

Well, you can try Joli OS from JoliCloud which is also free and it's available as a single, independent operating system or for you who can't be separated with Windows, you can try to use Joli OS which can be installed as dual boot option.

One advantages that Joli OS has compared to Google Chromebook is that you can access your system via a browser (via MyJoliCloud) and basically you can get the similar settings in your laptop since every data and settings are synchronized to Joli's server.

You can add apps into your system and it will be available on your dashboards as well (some apps only works locally, so you need to install them on your laptop/desktop).

I wanted to use this operating system as one of the examples in my Operating System course this semester. I hope the students gets a new idea of using an operating system rather than the boring Windows/Linux/Mac thing.

Online Security Class

Stanford and Berkeley university will hold an online Security Class next February with Professor Dan Boneh, John Mitchell, and Dawn Song as the instructors.

In this class you will learn how to :

• Design secure systems 
• Write secure code
• Find vulnerabilities in code 
• Design software systems that limit the impact of security vulnerabilities
• Building secure systems

All of them will be added with several topics such as :

• memory safety vulnerabilities
• techniques and tools for vulnerability detection
• sandboxing and isolation
• web security
• network security
• malware detection and defense
• mobile platform security

More and more universities are offering accredited online college classes on specialized subjects. For those who's interested in Cryptography can also join the Cryptography class which will be hosted by Dan Boneh from Stanford. The class starts in January, so be quick to sign up.

The online class is free!!

Update (March 3, 2012): The class has been postponed until further notification from Stanford due to some technical problems.

Migrate or Not

Blogspot team has been kind to it's user by providing a lot of improvements over time, mostly related with themes by the addition of Template Designer, which allow users to change their layout using a simple and easy to use user interface. They introduced seven new themes in Dynamic Views and that has totally changed many user's opinion about Blogspot. Not even Wordpress would do that to it's users.

I was interested with it and tried to have a look around Dynamic View, but then i reverted it back to the old interface. The only reason why i reverted back was because all of my customization will be lost once i upgrade to the new themes. My friend's blogroll, donation button, twitter's mini sidebar, my blog archive, etc. There were a lot of them and i can't loose them. That's the main reason i'm sticking with the old interface for now.

I haven't played long enough with Dynamic View, so i'm not really sure whether it's customizable or not, but please let me know if it does, so i can try to migrate to the old interface and get my old information available on the new theme.

Happy New Year

It's a breeze Sunday morning and everything looks great here..

Wait.. of course, it's New Year

Please welcome 2012 and say good bye to 2011. It's been a wonderful year of 2011. Lots of joy and sorrow mixed last year, but that's already in the past and never regret anything you have done in the past. The only thing you should do now is look for the future which awaits us.

Happy New Year to You All