Out of Town

Starting today until next Tuesday, i will be out of town and as usual, i will have limited Internet access, so i will be prioritizing and replying most important emails only since i can only do it via my mobile phone (luckily the 3G network is still good).

I hope no major problem happened in many areas where i'm in charge of maintaining it Just let me know if something goes wrong. You know where to send me an email right?

All the Linux repository in UKDW Repo will be updated as usual, but the interval will be according to the crontab i defined, so be patient if it hasn't showed up in your system. At most, it will be there on the next day, since i usually set it to update itself at night.

Flash Player 10.2 Beta

Adobe has released a beta release of Flash Player 10.2, their next flagship flash player for Windows, Linux, and Mac. This release brings another video acceleration, including Stage Video, a new API that delivers best-in-class, high performance video playback across platforms. This is a major improvement after their first 10.1 that were using H.264 hardware encoding.

By using this new feature, Adobe claimed to play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage. This is so amazing and well worthed upgrade for those who loves to watch 1080p HD videos.

For Windows users, they also included IE 9 GPU support, which will make the performance increased quite dramatically when you are using IE 9 (still in Beta at this time).

The announcement and full detail of the release can be seen in Adobe Labs.

Visual Crontab Editor

Have you ever wanted to schedule a process to be donexecuted in certain time? If you do, then i guess you should ever heard of crontab as well. It's a daemon that checks periodically to crontab defined by the users if there's a job to be done. It checks every minute, because the smallest unit is minute.

Configuring crontab is very straightforward and easy, but not for everyone who's not used to with the format being used. Just let me give you what crontab format look like
0 * * * * /bin/bash /home/willysr/rsync_current.sh

This is an example of one of my cron job defined on my crontab. What does it do? Well, basically it will try to launch the rsync_current.sh script every day, every hour on minute 0, like 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, etc. Do you get the point? It's very straightforward.

The common format of crontab is (separated by space/tab):
minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week command-to-execute

Here's the allowed value for each field:

minute : 0-59
hour : 0-23
day of month : 1-31
month : 1-12 (or names)
day of week : 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun)

A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for ''first-last''.

If you are too lazy to think about the command above, you can use a visual crontab editor from Corntab. It uses a JQuery to create a simple and easy to use interface for you to define your own crontab format. Pick on the pre-defined values or click on the date/minutes/hour/days available and the proper crontab format will be displayed in top of the page.

When you are ready to put them into your crontab, just launch a terminal and execute crontab -e and put all your crontab definition on that file and save it. It will be executed when the time defined in your crontab has come.

You can also send the crontab to someone else. Just put the email address and send it. Jobs done and everyone is happy. Now you shouldn't be afraid with crontab anymore, am i right?

Google Earth 6

I didn't read any news about Google Earth 6 being released, but this morning, i accidentally visited Google Earth's website and downloaded the latest version Google Earth 6. I tried to install it on my old laptop running Ubuntu 10.10, but it failed.

I decided to build the .deb package using another package which was meant to build Google Earth. Unfortunately, even after i build the package, it would still failed. Luckily the solution is already in Launchpad. Another Ubuntu users responded and the solution is to install lsb-core first and then it would be fine. It took less than 24 hours to get the solutions

I haven't tried the solution yet, since Ubuntu is not my primary operating system. I only boot to Ubuntu when i have some spare time to play with old laptop. My primary operating system is Slackware

Last Week

This week will be the last week of this semester and starting next week, the students will face the final exam which will be held until third week in December before they can celebrate Christmas and end of year holidays. They will come back for the next semester in mid January.

Don't forget to keep studying for your exams and i wish for your success in your final exams

This morning, i lead a small workshop for Introduction to Internet for teachers in Bopkri Dua. It was a fun session and i enjoyed with as much as the participant. I'm looking forward for the next workshop, hopefully related with Linux and / or Open Source application

OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 RC 7

I don't know what takes Oracle so long to release the next major release of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0, but they have released their seventh RC release by now and the Release Notes is also available if you are curious about what will be included in the next OpenOffice.org 3.3.0.

This will be the first release of OpenOffice.org after some of their developers joined TDF and contribute to make LibreOffice better.

Super Berba

MU has just won a match with a big score today. It's like when MU crushed AS Roma in Champion League few years ago. It's 7-1 and Berbatov took five of them while Nani and Park Ji Sung got the rest of the goal. Super BERBA

It's a great match by MU and now they are in top of the league, waiting for Chelsea to play their game tomorrow. I hope they will slip and MU will take the top position in EPL for this week (and hopefully until the end of this season)

Here's the score sheet

GTK+3 vs HTML 5

The next GTK+3 will support HTML 5 and that means you can run GTK+3 apps in your browser. Very cool indeed. It has been explained on this blog post and you can see the video demonstrations below

For now, it only supports Firefox 4.0 (Beta), but it will work on any browser with websockets in the future.

Gtk3 vs HTML5 from Alexander Larsson on Vimeo.

KDE 4.6 Beta 1

The development release of the future KDE 4.6 has arrived with Beta 1 release just now. This brings a new excitement towards developers around the world, especially when some people are celebrating Thanksgiving holiday.

The beta release will be a good milestone for developers creating KDE apps to prepare themselves before the final version of KDE 4.6 will be released in January 2011 (perfect timing for a new year celebration).

KDE 4.6 will be another release of KDE which tries to move away from HAL and will communicate directly with udev, upower, and udisk. This will be a great achievement as more and more application started to move away from HAL, for example XOrg.

I'm not sure whether this release will be included in the next Slackware release (13.2), but i think Eric will have it ready in KTown in case it's not included in Slackware 13.2.

NTFS-3G Performance

For those who wanted to read/write data from/to NTFS partition from Linux, the best option you can get is by using NTFS-3G, developed by Tuxera. It has community edition which is free to use for public.

So far, i don't have any problem using it. I can read my data or update my data in Windows partition from Linux without any problem at all. The problem started to rise when i used a virtual machine which i placed in Windows partition due to bigger free space. Sometimes, it caused a bad performance reduction until i can't do anything. The system seems to locked up and when i saw the process CPU usage, it rise up to 100%, which means it took all of my CPU only for ntfs-3g process. This is the reason why it would locked up my system.

I'm hoping that future release of NTFS-3G will have a fix for this problem.

Smashing Book 2 is on the way

For your who likes reading about Web development, you mustn't miss the next Smashing Book 2 which will be launched in pre-order starting next January and it will be delivered starting February 2011.

Like in the previous original Smashing Book, this book is written by many people who are working in web design industry and they will enlighten you with the best material about Web.

I have bought the first edition and i'm looking forward for the second book of Smashing Book. It will cost $29.90 and will contain 360 pages long with hard package that covers it. I really like the design of this book.

This book is really perfect for reading. I would recommend you to buy it. Get the first edition first if you don't believe me.

Analyze Before Making Decision

I gave an assignment last week and i asked the students to do early survey on unit testing tools before they decide what to pick. I gave some restrictions that only one tool is allowed to be used in the same class, meaning that each group will have to pick a unique tool for their assignment.

I gave two weeks for the duration of the assignment and guess what? In less than 24 hours, i already got many submission about the tool they wanted to use. I wonder, do they really analyze the tool first? Do they read the documentation included? I though they did, but just few days before the deadline, i realized that my assumption was wrong. They didn't analyze it thoroughly. They finally came to me to ask for another tool due to problems that they should realize before picking up the tools.

Moral story of this: analyze things before making a decision, mostly when it's related to important decision. Take some time to see all possible conditions, including advantages/disadvantages. Hopefully you will not regret what you decide later on.

New phpBB Release 3.0.8

This morning, i also got a surprise from phpBB announcement mailing list saying that there is a new phpBB release which is a maintenance update for the previous 3.0.7-PL1, but it also contains one security fix which relates to BBCodes. The Changelog will list all changes (it contains a number of bug fixes and also improvements since last release) and it's recommended to be read before upgrading.

When i got this announcement, i grab the updated package and start upgrading Indonesian Linux Forum at 5.45 AM in the morning and the process was completed at 6.30 AM. I think not many people have accessed the board at that time, so 30 minutes of downtime will not affect too many people

Anyway, the forum is now back serving all of you and have a nice discussion on the forum

Updating LinuxMint Mirrors

I have missed LinuxMint 10 release date . Even though the repository site is ready to serve Linux Mint 10, but i haven't downloaded the ISOs yet, since i don't read the news when it's released back to it's release date. My apologize for that and i'm downloading the ISOs today. It will be finished probably at noon or evening, so you can start enjoying Linux Mint 10 codename Julia as soon as possible.

I have updated the instructions on the main page of the repository to reflect updates to Linux Mint updated repository. So far, i have only added the Main repository, since there's no KDE/LXDE, and other Linux Mint 10 releases. When they are released, i will update the main page again.

UKDW Nutz! 3.0

Finally, the third Nutz event has been held today in UKDW. This event was postponed due to Merapi eruption, but we decided to held it today and luckily the participant didn't drop too much (even though there were some participant who couldn't attend due to other reason, such as substitute classes).

Some member of Ubuntu Jogja and BlankOn developers were joining us as the speaker and it was a great event. We are planning to held next Nutz event with the Ubuntu Release Party next year on October. On that event, we would like to collaborate with other Linux communities and we would like to see your participations on that event. The format will be like Install Fezt, so you can bring your laptop and you can participate in Linux installation event (most likely users would like to try dual-booting Windows/Linux on their laptops).

Thanks to all of the crew that participate on this event and we are looking forward for next year event in UKDW