After Z1, comes Z2 and Z2 tablet

Two days ago, Sony unveiled their latest products at Mobile World Congress 2014 and they are Xperia Z2, Xperia Z2 tablet, Xperia M2, and Sony SmartWear. Although there has been a leak of information about this on the Internet for few days, it still surprise me that all the rumors were true. Anyway, i'm not really dissapointed as Xperia Z2 is not that much different from Z1. It does have a faster CPU, bigger RAM, and also uses the latest Android release (KitKat), but other than that, it's the same as Z1.

I'm more interested to try Xperia Z2 tablet. I already have an iPad, but still it makes me so curious to try out this tablet since i already tasted Xperia Z1 (phone). I wanted to see what kind of experience will i get when playing with the tablet. More over, it uses Kit Kat which brings many new improvements compared to Jelly Beans.

Anyway, i just asked Sony Xperia Twitter account about Kit Kat availability for Z1 and they don't have a spesific date set for 4.4 rollout, but based on the answer, i think they already have it ready by now. They are just waiting for the right time to release the update. I hope after the MWC 2014 is over, Z1 users should get this update. So, my best bet will be on March.

MATE Testing Session

For the last few days, i have been testing MATE 1.8 RC on a clean VM of Slackware 14.1 and so far, the results were great. No major problems found during quick test and it's well integrated with Slackware 14.1. I would like to give big credit for Patrick Volkerding for giving big support of MSB in Slackware 14.1, so that some of the packages needed in MSB could be integrated in the main tree.

I'm still using MATE 1.6 on my laptop and i will try to upgrade to MATE 1.8 as soon as they are released. I never tested on upgrade process, but i believe the risk is so minimum. The MATE developer didn't make an aggressive or massive update to the packages, just incremental updates, which is something i like. I hate BIG CHANGES like what happened with the latest systemd release: systemd 209. It causes lots of problem for downstream (Linux Distributions) as they have to take precautions about the massive changes and make sure that it will not break their product.

I'm so lucky that Slackware isn't using systemd (at least until 14.1) and hopefully, we will never have to battle against systemd in the future.

Libreoffice 4.2 and Impress Remote

Last week, The Document Foundation has released a new major version of LibreOffice suite 4.2, bringing many many changes to the product, ranging from new UI for the start screen (not the splash screen), new formulas in Calc, better performance, removed old and deprecated APIs, and many more. Along with this release, a new tool was introduced and that is Impress Remote for iOS. The Android version has been introduced since 4.1, but for iOS version wasn't available at that time.

This morning, i checked Apple AppStore and saw that the app has been approved by Apple and now available in their store. I downloaded it on my iPad and start testing it. You can find the online documentation by following this page : http://hub.libreoffice.org/iosremote or use the step by step tutorial on the app itself.

The easiest way to connect is by using the same WIFi network on both devices. Start impress and select Slide Show > Impress Remote. Next start your Impress Remote and start searching for your computer (i tested on my desktop). Try to pair and enter the number showed on your computer on your device and you are now connected. You can start give your presentations using your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch.

Here's an example of it's UI:

My New Phone

My old phone (Nokia E71) started to deteriorate in terms of performance, battery life, and also stability since last year and it's getting worse lately, so i think it was time to get a new phone to replace this one. My quest to find the replacement started few months ago. At that time, there was only two options on my mind, iPhone or Android-based phone.

I actually wanted to get iPhone, but since iPhone 5s is not yet available in Indonesia, i had to buy it from Malaysia or Singapore or i will need to buy it in higher price from third party. If i bought it overseas, then i will face a problem with warranty as Apple's International Warranty doesn't apply to iPhone AFAIK.

So i'm left with Android-based phones. There are so many Android-based phones, but i'm looking for a smartphone that is unique and hopefully long-lasting, in terms of the product support. Few months ago, i read an article about Sony Xperia Z1 (at that time, this product hasn't been released yet) and amazed by it's design and specs. I thought i would like to get this one once it's released.

Last month, i browsed some sites to find this product and i finally found one which is cheaper than other since it's offering a promo for this one and it's the last item for that color (i pick black), so i took it. It was in December 21 and i paid them immediately. On December 22, they confirmed my payment and they updated the status to on process on December 23. Unfortunately, the shipping couldn't be processed immediately since it was a long holiday due to Christmas day, so i had to wait until December 27 before they can send it via TIKI. The phone arrived in Jogja around December 29 and i went to the office to pick it up on December 30. Later on, i went to Grapari to have my SIM card cut to micro-SIM.

When i got home, i unpacked the new phone and switch it on and start configuring it. While configuring it, i noticed that there was an offer to upgrade to Android 4.3, and i decided to move on since it's a new phone anyway. The upgrade went smoothly, but left me one problem that i didn't notice before. During the migration, the SMSC number was changed into "+7", 145, which isn't the correct SMSC number for my operator. I browsed some sites and found similar problem. I tried every solutions but everything failed. So i decided to do a factory reset on customizations and it DID the trick. I lost all of my previous configuration and settings, but then the SMSC number is now properly set, so i can send text messages normally again.

I redo my configuration and also downloading apps that i need for my daily activities and just under one hour, i have the proper setting for it.

I love my new phone and hopefully it can last longer than my previous phone :)

Alysia is 1 Year Old :)

Alysia was celebrating her first birthday party last night with a simple dinner with my family and my wife's family. Time does tick so fast. I remembered, last year, she was just born, weighted around 7 lbs (3.55 Kg), 49 cm in height and now she has turned around 22 lbs (11 Kg). She is now able to walk, even though i had to hold her hand since she's not ready yet to stand firmly and steadily.

Thank you for all your good wishes in Facebook and Twitter for her birthday. I hoped they all came true and wishes the best for her future :)

Progress on 2013

Time flies so fast. It's already December and in less than one week, my daughter Alysia will celebrate her first birthday. I just remembered how small she was last year and now she has grown up so fast while still preserving her cuteness :)

As for myself, lots have happened during this year. On my work, i have passed the national certification for lecturers which was announced yesterday after battling with it few months ago. It was really a perfect gift by the government even though i believed that i would make it long before they announced it.

As for side jobs, i have been pretty busy with Kencana project that completely finished around April, but there was still some maintenance until July. It was one of the complex project that i ever handled, but we (me and my team) managed to finish it succesfully.

I also joined the MSB project along with Chess Griffin to provide MATE packages for Slackware and we released two releases this year: MATE 1.6 for Slackware 14.0 and also 14.1. We are now planning to include MATE 1.8 for Slackware 14.1 for next year.

On November, the SBo admins has asked me to become one of them and i really thanked them for this honor. I also learned lots of things after joining this small team of highly talented people. I also joined the IRC once again, after leaving it few years ago since many discussion happened in IRC.

A new 2 TB of hard disk was installed and i got plenty of space to play with, so i built a new build virtual machine in my local computer for SBo-related work on top of qemu/kvm and libvirt, thanks to Robby and Matteo. I might even use this to my operating system class next semester as i have compiled and installed it on my laptop last night as well.

Oh well, i may not be able to remember all things in 2013, but here's what i'm proud of. Sorry for not being to active updating this blog in 2013, but higher priorities takes place over blog posting quantities :)

New Space Capacity

My computer is already quite old and since it only had 320 GB of space which should be divided for Windows and Linux, i didn't allocate much for Linux during partitioning the hard drive. I only gave 55 GB for Linux, 80 GB for Windows (C), 100 GB for Master (D), and 70 GB for Data (E). Both D and E were shared with Linux since reading/writing NTFS partition is no longer a problem with Linux. At that time, i didn't think of using virtualizations and building so many packages like nowadays.

Things changed when i joined Chess Griffin to work on MSB project, providing MATE packages for Slackware 14.0 and 14.1. The packages must be built on a clean environment, so i had to use virtualization technology to build them. Since it should be built on two arch (x86 and x86_64), i had to make 2 VMs for that. I'm still able to manage things at that point as i only need like 17 GB for 2 Slackware VMs built using a full clean installation of Slackware 14.0 (now 14.1), but i had to clean up some packages which i rarely used.

On November 2013, i joined the SlackBuilds project as the team member after Robby Workman invited me and at that time, i was thinking of buying a new disk for saving the sources and also the files created during build process. Testing a package sometimes really takes a lot of space since sometimes it requires so many dependencies and it takes a lot of space and time to build a single package.

Today, i made up my mind to buy a new hard drive for my desktop at home and i bought 2 TB of hard drive which should be more than enough. I already formatted the disk and prepare all the partitions. Suppose my old hard drive is dead, i can just install the OS onto this new partition and all of my data has been transfered there as backup. I have allocated 500 GB for build partition and another 500 GB for VM partition, which should be more than enough for MSB and SBo project (and probably other future project).

I'm still using my old disk together with the new one and it's already synchronized in most of the data contained, but i still have plenty of room in the new disk.

Shell Commands Explained in Detail

If you happened to came to Linux world, then you must know that shell is considered one of the biggest assets, especially for those who loves automation and also scripting for their daily tasks.

But for some people, learning all those commands (including their parameter/options) will take some time and patience that not everyone has.

There's an easy way to solve that issue. Just visit explainshell.com and place your command there and they will try to explain it to you in detail. Well, basically they just grab the relevant part from the manual page, but it's easier for us to see instead of digging the whole manual pages. They already prepared some examples for you to try out.

Linux Mint 16 and EFL 1.8 is Out

Two interesting projects has released their latest product this weekend and they are Linux Mint 16 (codename Petra) and EFL 1.8, which is a major release since EFL 1.7.

Linux Mint 16 is a results of 5 months of development based on Ubuntu Saucy Salamander and it's available on two flavours, MATE and Cinnamon. More will come in the future (XFCE and KDE).

EFL 1.8 is another interesting project which now tries to combine all elements (Ecore, Edje, Eet, Eeze, Efreet, Eina, Eio, Embryo, Emotion, Ethumb, Evas and Evil) into a single EFL package. They even added another new elements inside: Eldbus, EPhysics, and Escape.

Eldbus a replacement for E_dbus, which is still able to be built in it's 1.7 form but will no longer be updated or maintained, but still functions against EFL 1.8 if you depend on it.

EPhysics is a new library that glues in the Bullet physics engine into EFL to allow you to make use of an entire physics engine easily and simply in your creations. Edje also makes use of this allowing your themes to use it too.

EFL 1.8 features Wayland support, audio support, Async rendering (in Evas), and Office document loading for Generic Loaders.

Source Checker Script

It's been a long time since i wrote a blog post on this one. It's been a busy life ever since i had a baby girl, but i enjoyed it so i am not complaining :)

Anyway, right now i'm making some simple script to test whether an upstream source is still available or has they been deleted or moved to another place and create a broken link on the SlackBuild script at SBo project. For most of the sites upstream, my simple script worked fine, but there are several sites that rendered my script unusable and they are not a simple website. They are big vendors, such as sourceforge and Google Code.

I'm not really sure about sourceforge, but Google Code is clearly not supporting HEAD method, thus making my script failed to download from their site using wget --spider option. It worked fine using a normal wget command, but then i will need to download the file, which is something i don't really need. I just need to know whether the files are still there or not.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem? Let me know if you do :)

Update (November 30, 1: 15 AM): I'm able to check on Sourceforge.net now, but i still need to work around Google Code as some SBo scripts are hosted there as well.

Winamp is Shutting Down

AOL, a big company who have acquired Nullsoft, parent company of a music service Winamp in 1999 has made a big decision by shutting down Winamp on December 20, 2013. This means that after that date, there will be no more Winamp releases and it will be history.

Just before the final date, Winamp has managed to release Winamp 5.66 and i guess this will be their final release before shutting down.

Winamp was one of my favorite multimedia player since i used computer back in junior high school. I followed it's development from winamp 2, 3, and lastly 5. It was a great software, easy to use, and it just worked. I guess it's time to say good bye to all of those and switch to other application that does the same thing.

Cisco is Opening Their H.264 Codec for Free

Cisco has just announced that they will release their H.264 codec for public and it will be open-sourced so that it will boost WebRTC deployment in many other products, such as Firefox who have also responded by making an announcement that they will support it as soon as possible.

Cisco will release a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet and this enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco’s H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. This will surely boster WebRTC implementation in Firefox and hopefully Google Chrome will follow soon enough.

I love it when big organization realize that by opening technology will surely give them more benefits instead of disadvantages.

Go Open Source ......

Upgrading Slackware Machine

Few days ago, i perform my biggest upgrade ever on one of the server running Slackware. It was running Slackware 12.2 and since it will be EOL'ed by Patrick on December 2013, with two months left, i think it's time to move on. I decided to upgrade to Slackware 14.0, and i'm using slackpkg to help me on this one.

Since on that machine i have all the Slackware repository for 12.2 up until 14.0 (and even -Current), it's so easy to do so. I just changed the default configuration of slackpkg to use DOWNLOAD_ALL=on just to make sure everything is downloaded before attempting to upgrade the packages. Next is updating the mirror location to the local files and change it to Slackware 13.0 and ran

• slackpkg update gpg
• slackpkg update
• slackpkg install-new
• slackpkg upgrade-all
• slackpkg clean-system

After all of these steps are done, i reviewed changes on the configuration and merged them and make sure that it still worked. This is the most time-consuming if you have so many customized configuration. Since this is a server, there weren't so many packages installed and most of it are basic applications and libraries.

I continued with Slackware 13.1, 13.37, and finally 14.0. These upgrade steps must be done one by one. You can't jump from 12.2 to 14.0 directly or else you might skip some important packages between those two versions.

There are some packages that will not work until you reboot your system and your kernel is updated with a new one. One of them is apr-* packages which is a dependency of httpd (apache web server).

Right now, the server is running on Slackware 14.0 and i'm planning to upgrade to Slackware 14.1 once it's released (it should be released soon).

Big thanks to slackpkg to make my upgrade process went so smooth :)

Ubuntu 13.10 Released

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) to the public as scheduled. This is their latest non-LTS release before Ubuntu 14.04 which is going to be declared as LTS version.

Canonical is also providing Cloud-based service based on Ubuntu with a new service called Ubuntu OpenStack and for the first time ever, they also released it on the phone with Ubuntu Touch.

Check out the features page to find out more about their features and finally, head to the download page if you want to start downloading the ISOs. I have downloaded all of the ISOs on our campus ISO Server which is located here: http://iso.ukdw.ac.id/ubuntu/13.10/.

LibreOffice 4.2.1 Released

Italo Vignoli has just sent a press release about the announcement of LibreOffice 4.2.1, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats. 

The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.5 (with 4.0.6 expected soon), supported by certified professionals.

List of bug fixes for this release can be seen in the ChangeLog for pre-release version: RC1, RC2, and RC3. You can start downloading the binary and source codes for LibreOffice 4.2.1 in their download page.