2 Upgrades

Today, i got two upgrade from two different organization. First was Speedy, my Internet provider that i used since few years ago. I got an upgrade from 512 Kbps to 1024 Kbps without no additional cost at all. It seems they are performing a mass upgrade after they upgraded their overall infrastructure to increase bandwidth to their users.

The second upgrade was from Google Apps team. Two weeks ago i requested to upgrade my account to Google Apps Education Edition and i got a confirmation this morning from their support team. I had to give some details about the organization, which i did this morning and when i got home tonight, i had a reply from them saying that they granted my request. Thank you Google :)

Almost End of Semester

Next week is the last week of this semester and also for this year. In two weeks, the students will face their final exam and then they will have a not so long holidays until next January.

This means a big task is waiting for the lecturers: creating exam questions, marking, and evaluating all the progress throughout this semester. I have started some of the exam questions and i will continue to finish it by this week, so i can do other things next week.

By December, i will be quite busy as i have to prepare a lot of things for my first baby and December is just few days left.....

Ekiga 4.0.0 Gets Released

A new major version of Ekiga has been released. The NEWS file has all the big changes since previous version and it's HUGE. One good news for you: SBo project has a SlackBuild for previous release (3.9.90) which can be used to compile Ekiga 4.0.0. All you need to do is to compile it's dependencies and probably update to the latest version of ptlib 2.10.9 and opal 3.10.9 before compiling Ekiga 4.0.0.

I have completed building Ekiga 4.0.0 on my desktop and it's working fine here. Anyone wanted to chat via VoIP? :)

Oppa Christmas Style

Early gift for Christmas with Oppa Gangnam Style parody: Perth Christmas Light 2012:

I think this is the best Gangnam Style Parody i have ever seen on YouTube. No wonder Psy's video has beaten Bibber's video to be the number 1 most-viewed video on YouTube.

Linux Kernel 3.7 Coming Up

Well, it's last week of November and if nothing goes wrong this week, i believe Linus will just release Linux Kernel 3.7 and open the merge window for the next two weeks. He then will have plenty of time to get new features gets merged for the upcoming Linux Kernel which will be released in around late February or early March.

A lot of interesting new features are already in pending queue to be merged for Linux Kernel 3.8 and they have been discussed by Phoronix, such as:

• Improved Intel Haswell and Intel Valley display support 
• DMA-BUF V4L2
• HDMI CEC kernel support
• Much improved Nouveau driver
• VMWare Virtualization drivers
• Samsung F2FS File System
• KVM Virtualization support for ARM
• Many more

Many of these new features has been prepared for some time because the merge window is so close with the end of the year, so it's expected that some developers will take their holiday, so i'm guessing they will send a pull request on the LKML as soon as Linus released the Linux Kernel 3.7.

Installing SSHblock

My adventure with my new server continues. This morning, i tried to set up SSHblock which can be used to block users who are abusing the SSH protocol and tried to brute force and gained access to the server.

It's really simple to configure SSHblock since the installation script has done it for you and all you have to do is read the instructions and or warning that came out and fix that and re-run the script again. Even though the script couldn't find the path used in Slackware, but it seems that it will finally place the rc scripts to /etc/rc.d/, which is the correct place in Slackware. That's awesome.

Since it's a PERL scripts, it requires other CPAN module. SSHblock only requires SWATCH to be installed, but SWATCH itself requires 4 modules to be installed:

• Date::Calc
• Date::Parse
• Date::Manip
• File::Tail

Don't forget to install iptables as well since it will be used to block the IP addresses who tried to enter our server.

Working on HTTPS

I tried to enable HTTPS connection on my server today and since this is my first time, i would like to find some reference about this. Unfortunately, most of the reference out there is not updated for the latest Apache 2.4, so some commands and paths are no longer available or working on Apache 2.4 available on Slackware 14.0.

By mixing some tutorial in many places, and some trial and errors, i'm able to finish this simple configuration at no time. For future reference, i'm making my own documentation on this problem, but i will not post it in the short time. You can wait for the tutorial on my SlackBlogs someday (probably on December).

PHP New Releases: 5.4.9 and 5.3.19

PHP team has released two branches of PHP 5.4.x and 5.3.x which includes bug fixes for over 15 bugs since last month. Unfortunately, although the download page has a link to the mirror site, it seems that at this moment, most of the mirror site hasn't catch up with this update and most of the mirror site used will point to a not found page.

I finally decided to use their GIT repository to get faster access to the release as i can clone their repository and match it to the version i have by using the git checkout <branch-name> and compile a newer version even if it's not yet released, as long as it has been tagged.

The ChangeLog for PHP 5.4.9 and 5.3.19 is already updated though.

Power Management Regression?

Recently, i noticed that on my laptop, it didn't last as long as it used to be. I think this happened after i upgraded to Linux Kernel 3.6.x. Previously, i was using Linux Kernel 3.5.4 and it was fine and it could last for 8-9 hours, but now, it only last for at maximum of 5 hours.

Perhaps there was a regression on the Linux Kernel or perhaps i didn't reconfigure my laptop-mode package after i upgraded to the latest version? Well, i need to sort this problem out when i have time. Now is not the time unfortunately :(

Linux Mint 14 Nadia Released

Clem has finally released Linux Mint 14 codename Nadia, one month after their base distribution (Ubuntu Linux) released. As always, Linux Mint comes with several flavors, Mate and Cinnamon and KDE and XFCE will come up next month.

Several new features has been integrated on this release, such as :

• MATE 1.4
• Cinnamon 1.6
• More Themeable MDM
• Better Software Manager with it's own apt client replacing aptdaemon
• MintStick replaces USB-ImageWriter
• More art improvements

Mozilla Firefox 17 Released

Mozilla Firefox 17 has been released by Mozilla team. After reading a news that Mozilla is releasing their update for Android apps, i realized that a desktop version should not be that far from the release and i am right.

They have placed the binaries and source code into their FTP Server, while waiting for mirror sites to catch up and they will announce it to public in the next 24-48 hours at maximum.

Firefox 17 for Android also working for older ARMv6 processor architecture, while previously, it only supported hardware with an ARMv7 CPU.This should make Firefox 17 be compatible with more devices around since there are still a lot of devices that are still using ARMv6.

This version dropped support for Mac OS X 10.5, adds New Markup panel in the Page Inspector, adding sandbox protection for iframes, implementing SVG FillPaint and StrokePaint, and a new Click-to-play blocklisting to prevent vulnerable plugin versions from running without the user's permission.

Congratulations to Mozilla on this release and we are looking forward to Firefox 18 :)

PHP 5.5 Development

PHP 5.5.0 is the next major release of PHP and the first Alpha version has been announced to public on PHP's website. There are several interesting things with this major version. Let's look at the new features:

• support for Generators,
• a new password hashing API,
• support for finally in try/catch blocks
• support for list() in foreach,
• constant array/string dereferencing,
• ext/intl improvement.

This version will also drop support to Windows XP and Windows 2003 which are quite old already and they have been supported for a long time by PHP team. Dropping this two Windows release might release some burden on the developers to test in the old version of Windows.

If you want to test this version out, see the ChangeLog and get the source code here and Windows binary here.

VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 with Linux Kernel 3.7

We might have another good news for those who works with VMWare Workstation or VMWare Player. I found another person, Robert Gadsdon who are testing VMWare Workstation on newer Linux Kernel.

He mentioned that VMWare Workstation 9.0.1 is working with Linux Kernel 3.7-rc without needing any new patches, BUT standard VMware (re)compile/install script vmware-modconfig still doesn’t find the ‘relocated’ version.h in the 3.7 series kernels. He also posted the solution to this problem by creating a symlink from the old location:

ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.7-rc6/include/generated/uapi/linux/version.h \
/usr/src/linux-3.7-rc6/include/linux/version.h

This should be a good news to all Linux users who also VMWare users.

Breaking Dawn

Today, i watched Breaking Dawn part 2 with my wife in XXI and i was so lucky to have the tickets without waiting the long queue line because i bought them using MTIX facility. I took the first show at 12.15 PM.

At first, i thought this movie was for everyone, but after i watched some of them, i realized that this movie is definitely not for kids or even teenagers. It's more suitable for adults as there were so much violence, brutality, and some inappropriate scenes that should be seen by adults, even though it wasn't so explicit.

For parents who would love to watch this movie, please do not bring your kids to watch this movie.

Writing blogpost from iPad

For some time, i have wanted to write blog post using my iPad, but i never got the touch since using the mobile version of Blogger doesn't give me the best experience of utilizing my iPad. It seems that it's not working at all.

The biggest problem for me is picking the labels and also setting the date and time of publication. When using my iPad, the side window always closed all the time. It took some time to be able to set the labels and time.

Today, i just read Mashable's tweet about new app from Google for Blogger which includes support for iPad. I was so excited to try it and here i am, writing a blogpost using Blogger apps from Google from my iPad.

Thank you Google for supporting iPad on version 2.0