One Week Trip

Starting today until next week, i will be considered "offline" from Internet (unless there's a proper Internet connection) since i will be having a short vacation with my family. I'm not really sure that i can find a good Internet connection on the place where i will be going, but if they do, i will probably focusing on replying email.

I don't think there will be something surprising next week, but suppose there is, i may be late of knowing it and pardon me if i don't write it on my blog :)

Linux Kernel 3.6.2 Released

Greg has just released Linux Kernel 3.6.2 along with other stable kernel releases that he maintained (3.0.46, 3.4.14, 3.5.7). He also noted that for Linux Kernel 3.5.x branch, Linux Kernel 3.5.7 is the last release and he didn't plan to make another release and suggest people to move on to Linux Kernel 3.6.

I remembered that when Slackware 14.0 was still in development, some people suggest that Slackware should use Linux Kernel 3.5.x as their base kernel, but Patrick decided to stay with Linux Kernel 3.2.x and somehow his intuition has been proven to be correct. Linux Kernel 3.5.x is no longer supported by upstream developers, so if there's a serious problem in the kernel, Pat would have to upgrade to Linux Kernel 3.6 to get this problem fixed or he would have to apply patches to the Linux Kernel package, something that he rarely do. He wanted to make the package in Slackware bit-to-bit identical with the upstream source.

Somehow, i will skip this version and i will be watching and waiting for Linux Kernel 3.6.3 instead since when i watched the ChangeLog, i didn't see interesting bug fixes.

Online Cryptool

For those who are learning on Cryptography, you can try the online version of CrypTool. It has a lot of content that can be used to learn more about cryptography, including Ciphers (classic, stream, block, symmetric, asymmetric, etc), Coding methods (ASCII, Bacon, Base64, Code39, Huffman, Morse), Analysis Tool (Autocorrelation, Frequency analysis, n-gram analysis), and several highlights that are related to Cryptography in overall.

If you prefer to have a multiplatform application, you can try to use JCrypTool.

Last Day

Today is my last day of working for this half semester since next week, the students will have their mid test exam for the next two weeks. I have prepared the exam questions last week, so i can take some rest for this weekend.

I will be travelling for one full week starting next Monday and as always, i can't guarantee that i will be available online during that time. I will try my best to reply your messages, but please be patient if you don't get replies as fast as it used to be. I need some refreshing time as well. This semester schedule is even busier than last semester since i have a new position as well, so i have more work to do at my office.

Get Firefox 16.0.1

Firefox 16 was pulled by Mozilla after they discovered that it contains one nasty vulnerabilities that allows remote users to expose user's web history and activities. They said that it would release an update within one day and they really do that by releasing Firefox 16.0.1 in their FTP Server.

If you are patience enough, just wait for the automatic update mechanism to get the update for you, but if you can't wait, just get the latest binary and install it on your machine.

HTTPS Everywhere 3.0

It's been some time since EFF released HTTP Everywhere extension for Firefox, but now they just released HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 which adds more than 1500 new sites compared to previous release. You can also download the Alpha version for Google Chrome.

EFF is expecting that HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 will encrypt "at least a hundred billion page views in the next year, and trillions of individual HTTP requests". What a big target that is, but i'm pretty sure it can be achieved since more and more people are getting more aware of security awareness, mostly data security.

Firefox 16 Released

Mozilla Firefox 16 has been released (official announcement will be published within 1x24 hours) in the FTP Server. I have downloaded this version and i'm using it to write this post.

Here are some of the highlights of Firefox 16:

• Preliminary VoiceOver support on MacOS X
• WebApp support
• Two more localization added (Acholi and Kazakh)
• Improvement on Incremental Garbage Collection
• New developer toolbar
• CSS3 Animations, Transitions, Transforms, and Gradients unprefixed
• MD5 no longer supported in hash algorithm used for digital signature
• Opus Codec supported by default

Budget Planning

Since i was appointed as the head of DWTC unit, i had to prepare for budgetting for the next period and i have to give the presentation tomorrow noon with the president of the university. I realized that i didn't have much time preparing it since i was just appointed last week and i had exactly 1 week to prepare all those numbers while i had to learn the new environments, new staffs, new work culture, etc.

Wish me luck for tomorrow's presentation and i could use your support for me :)

GTKPod and Anjuta?

Since i have found my iPod yesterday, i wanted to manage the library collection again, but i'm not going to reboot to Windows just to manage my old iPod. Instead, i'm going to use GTKPod, which is an iPod Manager application that runs on Linux.

The problem is that current release of gtkpod has included Anjuta as their dependency and Anjuta itself has quite a lot of dependencies. One of them is newer vte (0.29 and newer). I tried to upgrade to newer vte without any problem, but it seems that after doing more testing, i found out that it broke the Terminal in XFCE.

After spending almost half a day of debugging, finally i came to a conclusion that newer vte can be installed alongside with older vte, but with a different name, namely vte3. The problem solved and now i can build gtkpod and manage my iPod once again.

Reviving Old iPod

When i unpack my case which i stored in another room, i found my old iPod (1st Gen) which is still clean without any scratch on the body and it's still working, but it ran out of battery because i left it for almost one year. It was moved to another room when my room was prepared for my wedding last year. Then i completely forgot about it.

Since it's unpacked, all i need to do is to clean up the earphone first and then i can try to listen to the songs again. Some people said that 1st Gen iPod has the best quality in terms of sound quality since it doesn't have too many features in it, so Apple was focusing on the sound quality.

LibreOffice Templates

Just short information for those who are using LibreOffice: You can get a lot of templates for LibreOffice from their template-center. You can also get some user-contributed extensions that can be used to enhance your LibreOffice experience.

Some of the old extensions has been integrated inside the main package of LibreOffice because a lot of people are using it and the developer found it quite handy.

Learning SboPKG

Today, i decided to learn more about SboPKG, another automation tool for managing packages for Slackware that comes from SlackBuilds project. It's a handy tool since it can sync your repository with SlackBuilds and decide what to do with your current packages.

You can perform an upgrade to the latest version available in SlackBuilds by adding the queue and process them. You can also remove outdated source which is no longer available on SlackBuilds so that you don't have orphaned or unmaintained packages upstream. It can also perform automated build for you so that you can do something else while it tries to build the packages for you.

With all those features, no wonder many people likes to use this tool on their system. Since i managed my own packages in SlackHacks repository sometimes, they are not tracked by SboPKG and that's fine since usually my packages in SlackHacks are newer than in SlackBuilds.

New Position in UKDW

Today is my first day of visiting my new office since i was appointed as head of Duta Wacana Training Center. I visited my new office to meet with the staffs and discuss about the budget planning that i have to enter next week. Some of the volunteers have known me in the past, so i didn't have any problem with them.

During the first week, i wanted to know more about this unit since this is my first time entering the office and i don't know what happened inside this unit. It may take some time before i can understand all things that happened inside this unit and hopefully it won't take that long :)

Mayan Tee Shirt

Slackware Store has released two new products in their catalog along with Slackware 14.0 Pre Orders. They are the new Mayan Tee Shirt and new Polo Shirt with a pocket. I told this news to Indonesian Slackware Community and asked them whether they wanted to support Slackware Linux by purchasing this items and the responds were overwhealming.

I agreed to be the coordinator and i limit the first batch to be 15 people only due to the limit of my credit card and also to avoid huge package that will resulted to a huge tax as well. This morning, i have ordered via Slackware Store and the ordered has been confirmed. Let's just wait until they came back to me and confirmed my purchases.

When this items arrived, this will be my fourth items that i collected from Slackware Store. Previously, i have bought Slackware 13.37 T-Shirt Limited Edition, Slackware Black T-Shirt, and Serious Slackware T-Shirt. Someday, i will have a complete set of Slackware T-Shirt and Shirt on my shelf.

Thanks to Indonesian Slackware Community members for their support to Slackware Linux Project.

Linux Kernel 3.6 Released

After 7 RC releases, finally Linus decided to release Linux Kernel 3.6 and start the merge window for Linux Kernel 3.7. For those who wanted to know what are the interesting features on this version, just head to KernelNewbies. Here are the highlights:

1. Btrfs: subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diff, cross-subvolume file clones
   1. Subvolume quotas and quota groups
   2. Snapshot diffs, aka "send/receive"
   3. Cross-subvolume file clones
2. Suspend to disk and memory at the same time
3. Support for SMBv2 protocol
4. TCP Fast Open (client side)
5. Bufferbloat fight: TCP small queues
6. Safe swap over NFS/NBD
7. ext4: better quota support
8. PCIe D3cold power state support
9. VFIO: bare-metal safe access to devices from userspace drivers

Go get the source right now and start your engine!!!