Watching 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Finally my download queue for 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony has been completed and i can watch the ceremony tonight with my wife. I missed the opening ceremony since it's not time-friendly for me. My parents would also loved to watch this event.

I must say that my current impression about Olympic Opening Ceremony still tends to prefer the previous event held in Beijing, China. It was so spectacular and at that time, most people will doubt that England will be able to surpass it. We will see that in the next few hours.

GNOME's Big Ambition

GNOME 4 and GNOME OS is being targetted to be released on March 2014, which is less than two years from now according to the developers in GUADEC conference. They also expect to have 20% market share by 2014. Looks too ambitious for me, because they failed to impress most of their users with GNOME 3 up to today.

We can see the most visible fact is that Ubuntu is no longer the most favorite Linux distribution out there. Nowadays, people prefer to use LinuxMint, it's derivative maintained by Clem who happened to be the maintainer of Cinnamon as well. LinuxMint succeed to take over the angry and unsatisfied by Canonical's decision to revamp Ubuntu's UI.

Meanwhile, KDE is looking a stable new release in the next few days and it's growing strong each day. Even with some uncertainty of Qt development sometime in the past, they have managed to struggle and keep going on with the roadmap ahead. They are now preparing the next major release of Qt which should be released by next year. KDE 5 will soon be based on Qt 5. Looking forward to see KDE 5.

KDE 4.9 is Coming

According to the release schedule, KDE 4.9 is coming next week. KDE 4.8 has been a great release and i can't wait for upcoming KDE 4.9 since it's built based on the previous 4.8.

Actually, i have been using KDE 4.9 Beta 1 for some time and so far, i don't see major problems using this version, so i expect no difference when using the final version of KDE 4.9. One thing for sure is that they will have a different splash screen on a final version of KDE releases.

Convert VCD into MP3

My father asked me to convert a VCD (.DAT files) to an audio files which can be transfered to USB-based flash drive because he wanted to hear the song on the car. Unfortunately, it's an old songs, so i don't think there's any digital files of it.

Does anyone can give me hints about what software should i use in order to convert a VCD into an MP3 files? I would prefer to use Linux if it's possible, but Windows-based apps is fine with me.

Interactive Spaces API

Google has introduced a new API called Interactive-Spaces which provides runtime that allows developers to build interactive applications for physical spaces. 

Take a look on the screenshot below. You will see that there's a circle under each person. Well, it was taken as soon as a person enters the floor because there were cameras on the ceilings who are doing blob detection.

Interactive Spaces is written in Java, so it can run on any operating system that supports Java, including Linux and OSX and soon Windows. Additional languages like Javascript and Python are supported out of the box. Native applications can also be run, which means packages like openFrameworks which use C++ are also supported out of the box. Plans are also underway for supporting the Processing language.


This is an initial source release. As the final licenses are finished, there will be a binary release. Please see Downloads for a PDF file for documentation. This documentation is in progress.

One Down, Another One Coming In

Today i went to my friend's house to finish up my project which had a critical bug due to different environment used to deploy the system which i talked yesterday. My team had finally fixed the bug after synchronizing the environment we used with the deployment environment and we were about to deliver the update today.

When i wanted to copy the files, suddenly the electricity went off. I couldn't do anything, so i left to go to the office. I finished up my work at the office and then i picked up my wife and settle other things up. Next, i got a text telling me that the electricity is back (it almost took 4 hours), but since i haven't finished my errands, i couldn't go there at that time.

In the next few hours, i finally go to the same place again and fixed the bug by replacing the files with the corrected one and also adding a stored procedure which was missing when i deployed it yesterday. Finally everything is working as intended.

Let's just hope that no more problems in the future, because starting tomorrow, i will start a requirement gathering and initial discussion about our next project with the same client. This time, it will be much more complicated than the current project.

Windows oh Windows

For some time, i developed a web-based application for my friend's company and i developed it with some of my ex students. We developed it using GIT as our code management and we work on our own environment and so far everything went well.

Today, i deployed the application into our customer's system and it was broken. They used Windows as their local server and it turned out that it caused the apps to be broken in someway. My colleagues also uses Windows, but it was fine on their systems, but when it reached the deployment server, everything seems to blew up. Windows oh Windows.....

Slackware 14.0 Enters Beta

This morning, Patrick Volkerding announced that Slackware 14 has reached Beta level. What does it mean? It's another milestone towards the final release of Slackware 14 which is still unknown by now. But, the good news is that we are getting closer to that release.

With this update, Pat also finally included XFCE 4.10 along with other libraries that were requestes by many people in the past. They are required to build many other applications that depends on that libraries. Some people have started to report bugs about XFCE 4.10. I think they still need to be patched in some places.

Distrowatch has picked this news as well. I believe many other media will publicize this in short time. I think i'm quite lucky to notice this good news in the morning, so i can spend some time writing it on my SlackBlogs.

Linux Kernel 3.5

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux Kernel 3.5 after he was satisfied with the changes after rc7 which is quite small. KernelNewbies has written an extensive human-readable changes that Linux Kernel 3.5 has compared to previous 3.4. Here are the major highlights:

1. Ext4 metadata checksums
2. Uprobes: userspace probes
3. Seccomp-based system call filtering
4. Bufferbloat fighting: CoDel queue management
5. TCP connection repair
6. TCP Early Retransmit
7. Android-style opportunistic suspend
8. Btrfs: I/O failure statistics, latency improvements
9. SCSI over FireWire and USB

If you wanted to see what changes in the driver sections, please head to Linux 3.5 DriverArch

It's time to test this new kernel against the NVidia driver and VMWare.

PHP 5.4.5 and 5.3.15 Released

PHP team has released two new stable release, PHP 5.3.15 and PHP 5.4.5. Both packages only got one RC before the final version got released. These two packages fixed several bugs, including those categorized in security vulnerabilities.

Please upgrade to the latest one to make sure your application stays up to date with the latest version and to prevent unwanted situation where somebody attacked your website due to unpatched version.

YKFS Presentation Done

Eight of my supervised students who took the YKFS program has finally gave their presentations this morning. Although i have known most of their work, it seems that some of their work hasn't been presented before, so it's still new discoveries for me.

All i have to do is give markings to their field work subject and that's it. It's all over :)

I do hope that the leason learned during this field work will not be gone away after the marks has been given.

Blackout Without Announcement

In the last two days, i have had several blackout in my house without electricity. Usually, the authority will give early notifications if there will be some project which need to shut down the electricity during the work, but i guess there were no early notification this time.

My first blackout was last night around 8.30 PM. It lasted until 9.30 PM, but i guess it wasn't a big problem since it's at night and it doesn't cause too much problem for most people since it's not office hour.

My second blackout was today when i returned from office. The electricity went off at the office when i was about to return home. When i got home, the electricity also went down. Luckily i was about to leave to watch Ice Age 4 with my wife, so i wasn't too much affected by this problem, but i guess a lot of people were upset about this.

What is GitHub?

For those who have been working with open source projects, probably you will not be surprise to see a term called GitHub. It's one of the most popular source code management repository that are offered for free (there's a commercial service for advanced user or for those who wanted to make a private repository).

Klint Finley wrote an article about What Exactly is GitHub Anyway? which described what GitHub is about and what technology it's based upon. You might want to learn about it since it's really an amazing service. You will see more and more projects hosted in GitHub in the future due to it's features which facilitates developers to share and collaborate with other developers working on source code.

I personally use GitHub for my SlackHacks repository and so far, it worked well for me. Why don't you try it?

If you need assistance on running GIT, please read the Pro Git, GIT Cheat Sheet or just use the visual GIT Cheat Sheet below

Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1

Even though Firefox 14.0 hasn't been released yet, there are already 14.0.1 on the Mozilla FTP Server. I guess they had a major regression on 14.0 so that they forced the place a new minor release because the mirror site probably have updated their repository.

Here's what changed in Firefox 14:

• Google searches now utilize HTTPS
• Full screen support on OS Lion
• Plugins can now be configured to only load on click
• Awesome Bar now auto-complete typed URLs
• Improved Site Identity Manager
• PointerLock API implemented
• Several other bug fixes

You will get the auto update notification in the next few days i guess. But for those who are so curious, you can just skip it and download the latest version from their FTP Server

Wiping ArchLinux and Welcoming Slackware

I just wiped out my ArchLinux installation on my old laptop and replace it with the development version of Slackware (-Current) which will eventually be called Slackware 14. ArchLinux is a great Linux distribution with a rolling release model, but unfortunately that may not be suitable for me due to some reasons.

I also take this chance to help Slackware by testing the new installation on old hardware and making sure that everything works well. In my case, i used USB flash drive to boot the Slackware Linux kernel because i didn't have Slackware 13.37 DVD at home (i probably left it on my office) using usbbot.img file that are placed under usb-and-pxe-installer. I transfer it to my flash drive and boot using it.

Before i started the setup, i placed Slackware-Current updated repository into another flash drive and mount it locally on my laptop. When the setup runs, i point it to the slackware-current directory which contains all the packages of Slackware-Current per July 15 (the latest version at this moment). So it's basically i'm installing Slackware 14 on my laptop. Everything went well, and now my laptop is already running Slackware 14 on top of it. Sweet.....