make clean, date, look, talk nice, touch, talk, unzip, showmount size, touch, gawk, top less, gawk, strip, gawk, grep, finger, dig, do head, mount, make love, fsck, comm, more, yes, fsck, suspend, fsck, suspend, fsck, comm, umount, do periodic ?, accept, leave beforelight

Requires: Unix & GNU

Sorry, no Windows version yet.
(ask Cygwin for a good time)

Not only it costs American (and other nation’s - hello Britons) taxpayers TRILLIONS of US dollars, it failed to reach its objective; to destroy terrorists. Instead, it creates more terrorists than ever. At more places all over earth.

No wonder Osama keeps on hiding. He can sleep all day, and still there will be more terrorists out there than he can ever dream of creating.

One may be compelled to curse, “Stupid Bush”. But the problem is, Bush is not stupid.

Bush’s family & friends are richer than ever before.

Bush is a war criminal, guilty of illegal wars AND profiting from it. He should be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
But that still won’t be enough to bring back hundreds of thousands who have perished because of these illegal wars….

Menpera / Indonesian Housing Minister’s blog, YusufAsyari.com has been redesigned. Big thanks goes to Thomas, who skinned the new template in just a few days.

Behind the scene, the blog now also has a new team maintaining it. The previous one got caught up in other priorities, so the blog was rather lagged behind in updates. Now the blog is more often updated, and hopefully will continue to be so in the future.

And pak Yusuf still reads his emails and reply to comments in his blog. So what are you waiting for ? Go comment there on your housing issues. Although his department’s budget is severely limited, and it’s very hard running projects when it require inter-department co operation; rest assured that he will try his best. Let’s give us our support too.

I have built a few edge servers using squid, one was discussed here. I just realized that I haven’t wrote down how I did it. So here it is :

note: squid 2.6 introduce a new syntax for httpd acceleration. This guide is specific to squid 2.6 or later. (httpd_accel directives are not used in this guide)

1. Install squid

Prefereably using your distro’s package management software (example: “aptitude install squid” on Debian-based distro, or “yum install squid” on Fedora)

But in certain cases you may wish to download the latest version, which you may download from http://www.squid-cache.org/Download/
When I wrote this, 2.6 is the latest stable version.

But you may wish to install version 3.0 instead, for example; if you’re going to install squid as a proxy server, and you wish to save bandwidth by making all of its outgoing requests to specify compression.
However, at this time, squid version 3.0 is not of production quality yet. You have been warned.

Anyway, if you install squid from source, it’s usually as easy as :

mkdir /usr/local/squid
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/squid
make all
make install

## prepare directories
mkdir /usr/local/squid/var/cache
mkdir /usr/local/squid/var/logs
## setup the correct permissions
chown -R nobody:nobody /usr/local/squid/var/logs/
chown -R nobody:nobody /usr/local/squid/var/cache/

2. Setup squid.conf

Here’s the minimum settings required to make squid work as an edge server :

http_port 80 accel defaultsite=www.myaccelerateddomain.com vhost
cache_peer www.myaccelerateddomain.com parent 1234 0 no-query originserver login=PASS
http_access allow all
icp_access allow all
### Disk cache: 4096 MB, 16 top directories max, 256 second-level directories max
cache_dir ufs /usr/local/squid/var/cache 4096 16 256

You may need to change more options, but in most cases, these would be enough.

Some optimizations :

== cache_mem 512 MB : set the cache memory to 512 MB. Adjust to your own situation.
== collapsed_forwarding on : imagine when there are 50 requests for the same page that’s not in the squid’s cache yet. Normally, squid will pass all of them to the webserver. But with this option turned on, squid will pass just one request to the webserver, get the result, and then reply to all 50 of them. Very nice.
== maximum_object_size 4096 KB : More than this, and we’ll be using up the cache disk space faster than we’d like.
== maximum_object_size_in_memory 1024 KB : More than this, and we’ll be using up the cache memory faster than we’d like.
== access_log /usr/local/squid/var/logs/access.log combined : this gives most details in the logfile, but will eat up disk space faster

3. Move webserver from port 80

In the squid.conf above, we specified that the webserver will be listening on port 1234 instead.
So make the necessary adjustments to your webserver’s settings.

4. Restart webserver, and then start squid

Restart your webserver, and then start squid with :

## create the cache directories first
/usr/local/squid/sbin/squid -z
## start squid
/usr/local/squid/sbin/squid

5. Done !

That’s it, now squid will be answering all the requests for your webserver, and will only forward the requests to the webserver if necessary.

Enjoy.

6. Problems ?

• Some Linux distros by default can only have max 1024 files opened simultaneously. When you have squid running in a busy server, this limit can be very quickly exceeded. When that happened, your server will lock up in a rather spectacular way. Yes, you definitely don’t want this to happen to your server.

  Fortunately, this can be easily fixed, by typing ulimit -n [some numbers]. Example; ulimit -n 4000 will increase the open file limit to 4000.

• Make it all automatic : To avoid doing these again and again, insert the following lines in the startup script (probably /etc/rc.local or something like that) :
  

  ulimit -n 4000
  /usr/local/squid/sbin/squid

• Squid still will NOT cache your pages?
  Sometimes this can be caused by lack of any hint from webserver/PHP, making squid unsure whether to cache this page or not — and to be on the safe side, it default to NOT caching the page.

  To assure squid that it’s okay to cache, put the following lines in the right place of your Apache configuration file :

  <IfModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 week”
  </IfModule>

Finally, enjoy ! Your server will now serve incoming slashdotting / digg / other kind of massive incoming traffic without breaking a sweat.

I just realize that there’s a version of Google Earth for Mac. So I downloaded it and had fun browsing around Jakarta & Indonesia.

Then I tried to find Aston Villa FC stadium. Found it here.
Since it’s located right next to the backyard of my house in UK, I browsed a bit to see if I can see my house there.

To my surprise, I even managed to found my car in the photo, a red Toyota Estima Lucida X 2.2 liter (Turbo Diesel) 4WD, 8 seaters MPV. Yay !
(I’m so helplessly geeky)

Here’s the screenshot of Google Earth, in case they updated the photo (which will erase the car from the old photo).

The Toyota Estima is a joy to drive. Smooth, stable, easily takes over other cars despite its bulky size (hey, it’s a 8 seater), fits the whole family with room to spare (massive cabin size), rotating / folding seats (you can even set the backseats to face each other). Will easily pass over the speed limit if I’m not careful.
On the roads with no speed camera (such as Scotland’s highland / countryside), it takes no time to get close to its maximum speed, thanks to its automatic turbo capability, while still a joy to handle (low centre of gravity, heavy weight, excellent power steering).

I have an especially fond memories of its 4WD (seriously) capability — at a time, Birmingham was under a snow storm, and the roads are covered with thick, (very) slippery ice. I was trapped in the traffic jam in the middle of the road, while we need to see my wife who just gave birth to our 4th daughter.

After telling the kids to brace themselves, I activated the 4WD switch, went over the lane separator, and over into the icy, snow covered fields just next to the lane. We quickly arrived on an empty road leading to the hospital, and arrived there safely.
On the way back we went offroad in the city again, and arrived home in no time.

In the morning, people told stories on how they were trapped on the road for hours, some for 12 hours, some were even trapped until the morning. Told my story, and people were having problems believing that an 8 seater is a 4 wheel drive; much less the in-city offroad adventure that night.
Whatever

Anyway, my house is located not far from where the car was parked. It’s right here.

Loads of fun. And not only that, I’ve started to got projects which will be using Google Maps extensively. More in a few months time inshaAllah.

Watching horror movies, much to my wife’s dismay, I usually complained incessantly about everything; cheap “special” effects (especially in indonesian horror movies), the stupid victims that do things exactly the opposite ways, the unbelievable plot, etc. I was complaining so much when watching Apocalypto, we stopped the movie halfway.

But [ this one ], oh my, it made me cringe. And felt the fear, that it will happen to me someday.

Please God have mercy. Don’t let it happen to me. Just let me laugh at them.

On November 2004, I wrote this short post. Saying :
“Me, number #1 on Google ? Ha !”

Then google.co.id showed up. This blog got PageRank upgrade several times. And a few other things I don’t really know / understand.

Then, the impossible happened.

I really, really suck at making predictions

Save As Image is a little-known Firefox plugin/extension which is very, very useful. Last time I checked, there’s only 27 webpages pointing to it. But if you’re a web designer / developer, you’ll be able to save precious time by using this small plugin.

Part of your work as web designer / developer is to take screenshots of website and then present it to your client as mock-up, or to quickly point out errors, etc. But most of the time, the website won’t fit on your computer screen.

Usually you’ll take a screenshot, scroll down a bit, take another screenshot, scroll down again, and so on. At the end, you’ll have to stitch the screenshots together into a single file.

No more such hassle with this plugin. Just install, and then you’ll be able to generate the whole webpage screenshot in a snap.

For Firefox 1.5.x users, you can download the plugin from here.

After the confusion when synchronizing my document repositories using rsync and SMB, finally I’ve had enough. I think this is a good time to give SVN (Subversion) a try.

Pretty simple in Ubuntu, as usual :

sudo aptitude install subversion
sudo aptitude install subversion-tools

Create the repository :

svnadmin create /home/harry/svnrepo
svn mkdir file:///home/harry/svnrepo/docs

Before we can run the server, first we need to edit /home/harry/svnrepo/conf/svnserve.conf and edit as necessary.
(hint: anon-access = read, auth-access = write, password-db = passwd)

And then don’t forget to setup the usernames and passwords in /home/harry/svnrepo/conf/passwd.

Now we can run the SVN server :

svnserve -d -r /home/harry/svnrepo/

Import my documents into the just-created SVN repository :

svn import /home/harry/documents svn://192.168.1.88/docs/ -m "initial import" --username sufehmi

That’s it ! Now you have a fully functioning SVN repository and have it host your documents.

Good reading on the subject :

1. THE Book on Subversion
2. Subversion Cheatsheet
3. Subversion FAQ

That should do for now. Gotta run.

Saya sangat tertarik ketika menemukan bahwa kini sudah ada emulator Macintosh Plus, dan cukup mudah instalasinya - bahkan bisa dijalankan dari Flashdisk. . Setahu saya, ada banyak aplikasi yang bagus di platform ini. Salah satu yang ingin saya coba adalah HyperCard, untuk mengenalkan anak-anak ke computer programming.

Proses instalasi berjalan dengan cukup lancar. Dalam waktu yang tidak terlalu lama, di Ubuntu telah berjalan Macintosh Plus dengan memory 4 MB dan hard disk 1 GB

Awal proses instalasi :

Up & running. Perhatikan bagaimana di komputer keluaran tahun 1986 ini sudah ada perhatian untuk orang cacat, fasilitas sharing file via network (bahkan fasilitas monitoringnya juga), dan bahkan special effects - ketika window di maximize / minimize maka ada efek zoom nya :

Rencananya nanti disk image yang dihasilkan akan saya sharing disini. Stay tuned. Atau mungkin sudah ada yang selesai membuatnya? Share lah

Can You Say $1,000,000,000,000? That’s the current cost of Iraq’s invasion, and it can easily ended up more than double of that.

Let’s see how that amount of money can REALLY improve the ordinary American’s quality of life, and/or others :

…note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan “No child left behind.”

A… time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

Another way to get at the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq War is to note that the Treasury could have used the money to mail a check for more than $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the United States. The latter alternative would have an added benefit: Uniformly distributed and spent in this country, the money would have provided an economic stimulus that the war expenditures have not.

Alternatively, if the money was spent in an even more ecumenical way and a global mailing list was available, the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs.

Of course, … (these) isn’t quite appropriate when trying to come to terms with the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the 20,000 wounded, and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. The latter number is staggering, whether you subscribe to the figures put out by Iraq Body Count or those published in Lancet or to other even higher estimates.

While at it, we must not forget Cheney the Joker, who might be seem to be funny with his comment below; although somehow I suspected that he actually meant it from the bottom of his (bottomless) heart :

Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney’s recent hallucinatory comment that “we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes” in Iraq.”

John replied :

At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.

Well said, John.

Drinking Lighter Fluid, Eat Chicken McNugget : If you’re feeling crazy sometime, try eating McDonald’s Chicken McNugget. It’s like drinking the lighter fluid, only tastier.

According to a new study, alcohol & tobacco is worse than drugs.

Quoted :

Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

“This is a landmark paper,” said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. “It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs.”

Found this little gem by accident - an online multiplayer FLASH game.
With chat.

Hilarity ensued !

Kill ‘em all :

Be a communist :

(Turned out he’s a Jew. Ended up threatening to kill me)

Perawan di sarang penyamun :

Needless to say, do NOT play this game when you don’t have much spare time. I have learned my lesson.

Commodore was part of the home computing revolution back in the 80s. Their C64 was a big hit back then, because of its low price and high capabilities. C64 owners were enjoying their games in the fast hardware-accelerated graphic and high quality sound from its 3-channels sound chip. The sound chip was said to be so good and produces unique sound, it has quite a dedicated community, and even a special product based on it.

Another phenomenon on the 80s was the demoscene. I think it’s safe to credit C64 for starting this.
These guys produces stunning graphic demos, by pushing the hardware to maximum and utilizing undocumented features. These demos are usually accompanied by no less stunning music. The music is so good, I’ve read news where they’re plagiarized for commercial artists’ songs.

C64 isn’t only good for games though. About 10.000 applications were available for it, including business software. Quite impressive for a console-like computer.

The next of Commodore’s success is Amiga. Its main edge over the competitors are various custom co processors - a chip for each task; graphic, sound, etc. This enable Amiga to perform much better than others, sometimes spectacularly so. This machine was way, WAY ahead of its time; there’s still communities based on it. A lot of famous artists / public figures are keen Amiga users. And many TV series / movies are utilizing Amiga for its production.

Then Commodore went bankrupt. I don’t know the details, but it seems that Commodore wasn’t able to market it effectively, and got lost in the competition over PC makers. The loss was mourned by many.
Several attempts were made to revive it, but none made it as a world wide success. Now, a bunch of people are giving it a try again with Commodore Game PC.

Commodore XX is its current top of the line.
Featuring : Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core processor QX6700, ASUS® P5N32-E motherboard, 4GB Corsair® Dominator memory, and 2 (two!) NVIDIA® 8800 GTX SLI graphics cards. True to its Commodore roots, it’s also preloaded with a C64 emulator, containing more than 50 classic games.

Commodore was known as an innovative company, and the new Commodore is continuing this tradition with the C-Kin. Currently there isn’t anything really stunning in its choices, but I’m sure overtime we can expect some awesome designs making its way to the C-Kin collection. Also C-Kin may not seem to be much of an innovation, but one can hope that this is the start of a torrent of wonderful ideas from the new Commodore.

The PC scene is getting more and more interesting nowadays. I’d like to be among the first to welcome the comeback of Commodore.

One can hope - and this latest news from La Jolla looks very interesting indeed.

Quoted from http://www.ljpc.com/pressrelease/0308_07.html :

SAN DIEGO, MARCH 8, 2007 – La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company (Nasdaq: LJPC) today announced positive interim antibody results from its ongoing double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized Phase 3 trial of Riquent® (abetimus sodium), its drug candidate for systemic lupus erythematosus (”lupus” or “SLE”). Analyses of interim antibody data indicate that patients treated with 900 mg or 300 mg per week doses of Riquent had greater reductions in antibodies to double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) than patients treated with 100 mg per week or placebo. The results showed a significant dose response when comparing all Riquent-treated patients to placebo-treated patients (p < 0.0001), and each Riquent dose group to the placebo dose group (p < 0.0015 for 100 mg, p < 0.0001 for 300 mg and 900 mg).

A conference on this was held on 8 March 2007. Thankfully it’s also available as a Webcast here.
But click quickly since they’ll made the Webcast available for several weeks only.

About Riquent :

Riquent is being developed to specifically treat lupus renal disease by preventing or delaying renal flares, a leading cause of sickness and death in lupus patients. Riquent has been well tolerated in all 13 clinical trials, with no serious Riquent-related side effects identified to date. Riquent’s only known biological activity is the reduction of circulating levels of anti-dsDNA antibodies. Increases in these antibodies are associated with an increased risk of renal flare. Although clinical benefit has not yet been proven, Riquent treatment has significantly reduced these antibody levels in all clinical trials where they were measured.

What is SLE (Lupus) anyway ?

Lupus is a chronic, potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease. About 90% of lupus patients are female, and many are diagnosed with the disease during their childbearing years. Approximately 50% of lupus patients have renal disease, which can lead to irreversible renal damage, renal failure and the need for dialysis, and is a leading cause of death in lupus patients. Latinos, African Americans and Asians face an increased risk of serious renal disease associated with lupus. The current standard of care for lupus renal disease often involves treatment with high doses of corticosteroids and immunosuppressive drugs that can cause severe side effects including diabetes, hypertension and sterility, and may leave patients vulnerable to opportunistic infections. To date, no lupus specific drug has been approved in the U.S.

The experiment and tests on Riquent has gone for 10 years though, and I have no idea how long it’ll be so before it’ll be available for sale. If you want to be kept up to date on this, you can register on their press release update service.

We have several of our friends suffering from Lupus, and it is a very distressing problem to those who have it. Hopefully someone will find this information useful.

Mr. Romi, founder of IlmuKomputer.com (IKC), yesterday asked me to help optimize this website. A bit about IlmuKomputer.com, it means “Computer Knowledge”, and contains a lot (and I mean it) free high quality computer tutorials.
As you can easily guess, the website is very popular. On peak hours, it’ll usually become overloaded, and will become unresponsive.

I’m only too happy if I can be of assistance to IKC’s team in their good cause. So I started working on it with help from one of my staff, Yopi.

Turned out that what we’ll be doing will be very different with what most others do. Anyway, IKC is a very popular website (and “slashdotted” daily, by leechers), so what works for most others doesn’t work for us.

The Bottlenecks

A bit of background - IKC uses WordPress as its CMS. It’s a very nice CMS, and makes your life easier. I’ve used WP myself since version 1.5.x. However, being database-based, there are a lot of points within its a WP-based infrastructure which can become a potential bottleneck. So if your website started to become popular with this CMS, you will need to start optimizing it.

After examining the situation for a while, it’s clear that MySQL was THE bottleneck. Output of top shows it using at least 8 times of CPU time than other service. Mr. Romi also told me how it kept on falling down on peak time.

Apache (and PHP, since it’s compiled as Apache module) is the next one; with each of its process using more than 10 MB of RAM. This may seem insignificant at first, but multiply that by (potentially) 150 processes - and you’ve got quite a memory hogger here.
Also CPU-usage wise; I’m quite surprised to see that each incoming request will cause the particular process’s CPU usage to spike to more than 50%.

Initial actions

I asked Mr. Romi to increase the size of MySQL’s internal cache size. He did, but the machine still fell down in daily basis.

He has also implemented caching on the app server (PHP) by way of wp-cache plugin. Still no joy too.

The Edge

I decided that we need to go straight to the “edge”, and stop the load there.

I proposed that I setup Squid in HTTP Acceleration mode. This way, most of the requests won’t even touch Apache, much less MySQL. Squid will bear most of the load, but since it’s very efficient, it should be able help a lot in making the website perform better.

Since I’ve got a few things to do myself, I asked Yopi to setup Squid in our test machine.
I just gave him pointers now and then, yet he managed to finish testing the setup and implement it in IKC’s server in just about 3.5 hours.

Then I showed him “tail -f /log/squid/access.log”, and we watched in amazement on how quickly the TCP_MISS lines are changing to TCP_HITs.
After about 12 hours, I increased the cache_mem size, and the TCP_HITs are slowly changing to TCP_MEM_HITs.

The result

Squid is working as we expected.

Average server load dropped from 30% plus to about 3%. While squid’s CPU usage increased from 0% to an average of only 2%. A very nice trade off.

After about a month, I checked the website’s logfiles, and saw some very nice numbers — traffic to IlmuKomputer.com has doubled ! Needless to say, Mr. Romi is very happy with it.

I also found that everyday there will be people downloading the contents using crawler software - such as Teleport Pro, wget, etc. I asked Mr. Romi if he’s got problem with it, and he says no. It is his mission to spread knowledge for free after all. So I let these leechers alone.

Come to think of it, it’s possible that these crawlers are the ones causing IKC server to fell down at peak hours. Example, Teleport Pro is able to download 10 links simultaneously at the same time. Then once any of it is finished, it will instantly start download the next one. When all 10 downloads access the database, and many crawlers at the same time, not many servers will be able to stand up to it. It’s like being machine gunned wearing just a simple leather cloth. If you have had the experience of having your website linked from Slashdot or Digg, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

In this case, squid acted as a thick titanium armor, and taking most of the hits for your server. I suspect now the number of crawlers has increased than before, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

MySQL is a bit strange though. Sometimes its CPU usage can be as high as 160%. Thankfully this is very rare, so it’s probably just some internal clean-up routine.

One day, after happily watching the low load on the server for a while, suddenly everything froze. Even my SSH connection. Attempts to reconnect to the server failed.
After a while, I was finally able to connect again. Looking around, I noticed there’s some sort of bandwidth limiter daemon running on the server. After consulting with Mr. Romi, I killed it. The problem stopped.

Happy ending ?

I’m still monitoring the server as we speak for glitches. For example, squid seem to hang from time to time. This can be caused by anything from bad memory to problem with specific hardware configuration; so for now I’ve setup a cronjob which will restart it in certain intervals.
It seems to help, so I can troubleshoot the problem in peace.

Anyway, I’m sure that with the increased availability, even more people will visit the website (Ed: confirmed!). Then at some time in the future, we may find the server overloaded again.

In that case, there are still many things which we can do to keep IKC up & running in just one server :

• Coral-ize internal links : Coral is a global cache with servers all over the world. It has proven to help people with overloaded servers to lighten their load (when slashdotted, digged, etc). With the Coralize plugin, all of your internal links will point to its Coral cache.

  Actually, for most people, this may be the easiest and the best step they can do. I can setup Squid because IKC has its own dedicated server. Not everyone does, I personally also own a (shared) webhosting account. Coral CDN (Content Distribution Network) is a very nice & easy solution to us. It’s rarely mentioned though, so here you go.

  If you’re not using WordPress, you can still utilize Coral CDN easily ! Just append .nyud.net:8080 to your links. For example, if you access http://harry.sufehmi.com.nyud.net:8080, you’ll actually access a Coral server, serving a copy of my website from its cache.
  I did say that it’s very easy, didn’t I ?

• RAM Upgrade : This will enable Squid to have bigger memory cache size, therefore increasing its effectiveness significantly.
• Roundrobin Edge servers : If the load is so high that even Squid is overwhelmed by it, then we can implement a cluster of Edge servers. People can volunteer their servers and have it act as the edge server for IlmuKomputer.com.

  The incoming requests are spread over the edge servers by way of Roundrobin DNS feature. It’s not the best way to do it, but it’s very easy and the cost is almost nothing.

• Use lighttpd : Apache is a rather heavy webserver. I personally like its (amazing) flexibility (there’s a reason why it’s called the Swiss Army Knife of Webserver), but at times you’ll need something else. From my experience, lighttpd + fastcgi is very nice alternative to Apache + PHP. The features are now quite similar to Apache’s, but it’s much more lightweight. Its community is also quite helpful and happy to help a newbie within reasons. Recommended.
• And many other ways

Last, we’d like to say thanks to Mr. Romi for giving us the opportunity, it was very interesting ! Hope IKC will become even more successful in the future, therefore benefitting even more people. Well done pak.

Funny stuff - advertisers, you’d do well to heed the warning.

After using it for several weeks, I noticed that my PowerBook’s battery capacity has decreased sllightly. Where it used to be able to run for about 2 hours and 15 minutes after a full charge, now it rarely able to stay on for 2 hours.
I’ve been guilty of running it for hours while plugging it to the power socket though.

Then I thought, let’s see if this thing can run without battery, just like my previous laptop (Lifebook). So I rebooted, then while it’s on the logon screen, I turned the battery lock *plop* there goes the battery, and the laptop is still running happily.

I’ll still buy a spare battery later, but now I’m no longer in any rush. Very nice.

The number of people getting married has fallen to the lowest level since records began in 1862, figures revealed yesterday, noted The Sun. People are also getting in married in older age; figures from the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed that the average age for men to marry in 2005 was 36.2 and for women it was 33.6.

However, age maturity doesn’t equal behaviour maturity. Survey shows that married couples have about 182 arguments a year.

Bloody hell. No wonder people are avoiding from getting married.

The Dr. Khaleel Mohammed pronounced that inter-faith marriage, even when the husband is non-muslim, is allowed.

I hate to burst his bubble, but I can already spot a flaw in his reasoning - there may be no more of this “people of the book”, whose women are the only non-muslims allowed to marry the muslim men.

The people of the book is called so because they still have the same fundamental believe as Islam - the believe in one God and, of course, have the original book. One like Waraqah, Khadijah’s uncle.

However, such Jews or Christians is pretty much non-existant today. Calling today’s Christians or Jews as the people of the book is a gross ignorance for a highly educated scholar like him.

I just can’t sympathize with people who mislead others like Dr. Khaleed. Why mislead when there are other options ??

In reality, Dr. Khaleed is not doing the right thing either. Marriage is already hard enough as it is - the joining of two totally different creature, man & woman. It’ll be harder when they are of different cultural background. And it is the hardest when they are of different religion.
I’ve personally seen the cases, and it’s not pretty, especially for the kids

Anyway, I’m sure other experts will be able to point out other flaws of his reasoning, but I’ll stop here.

Medieval Muslim made a stunning math breakthrough, says Reuters. A very complex tile pattern in a mosque in Iran was later realized to be a complex mathematical figure.

Quoted :

Magnificently sophisticated geometric patterns in medieval Islamic architecture indicate their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars, scientists said on Thursday.

By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be “quasicrystalline” designs, Harvard University’s Peter Lu and Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science.

Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry.

“Oh, it’s absolutely stunning,” Lu said in an interview. “They made tilings that reflect mathematics that were so sophisticated that we didn’t figure it out until the last 20 or 30 years.”

What really scares the mullahs ?, that’s the question on International Herald Tribune today. The US navy armada showing up near Iran ? Nope - it’s the diplomatic might and fear of sanction.
The mullahs even backed up from the holocaust propaganda. This is good, because then we can start looking at it rationally again, instead of inviting shadowy figures like the guy from Ku Klux Klan, and instanly lost whatever credibility they have.

Re: holocaust - the holocaust did happen, but the Zionists are blowing it WAY over and over again. There are many even in USA who’s sick of their cry on this, while themselves implemented apartheid-style policies over the Palestinians.

Anyway, hope the stupid cowboy (GW Bush, yes, I’m looking at you) have someone holding his itchy fingers. A single missle launch - and the whole Iran WILL revolt and retaliate to as many Western targets as possible.
While with this diplomatic approach, a peaceful compromise is more possible to be achieved.

Circumcision’s anti-AIDS effect found greater than originally thought.
Very nice ! 50% to 65% chance of avoiding AIDS. Quoted :

If we had an AIDS vaccine that was performing as well as this, it would be the talk of the town.”

Even better, introduce them to Islam, and see the AIDS growth rate plunges even further as more people abstain from careless and free sex. Let’s hear it for AIDS-free Africa, yay.

Since I was a kid I’ve been observing Islam with great interest. It’s my religion anyway.
At first I noted how my elementary teachers and our adults are preaching something, but doing entirely different things. Also we’re taught that Islam is all about dogma. There’s almost no compassion on it. There is no joy. The religion seems to be all about mumbling on prayers in language that we don’t understand, five times a day. And anyone dare not doing it may face public humiliation and/or physical punishment.
The Ramadhan was especially tormentous - we couldn’t eat nor drink during the hot days (30 - 35 degrees celcius). The night prayers are 11 rakaat, and followed by a very long (and very boring) sermon.
Nobody cared to really explain to us what’s all these about. We’re just supposed to do it without asking any questions.

These are the traditionalists.
Islam is just believing, no thinking. You just do. Don’t ever ask.
I asked once, and the teacher ended up stuttering and scolded me for it. I don’t ask again after.

It’s enough to make some kids lose faith and care about Islam, but I held on. I think, there’s an explanation to these, and I shall make the journey to find it.

When I’m older, in my high school years, I found out about Islam’s sects. With open mind, I joined one after another, most interested in widening my horizon. I noticed though that many of them are not good to be in for long term.
In the beginning, they will be nice to you. You’ll be called brothers and sisters. For those who didn’t find love at home, bullied at school, and so on; this is pure joy. Suddenly you feel needed, and wanted.

But after a while, they will try to draw you into their community. Locked you in, and started the weird part of their teachings.
Each sects have their own peculiarities - getting as much money for the sect using any (and I mean any; cheating, stealing, killing) way possible, made you swear an oath of allegiance, teaching irrational hatred for people (even Muslims), brainwash you, allows prostitution, make their syaikhs (gurus) close / to the same level of a prophet or even God, and many other horrible things.

All of them are the same in this regard - they all claim to be based on Quran and hadits, but interpret it to their own wishes. They’re extremist in this regard.

Anybody who dare to question their sect will be excommunicated from the group. This may seem trivial - however, after years of intense involvement in the group; most will find themselves suddenly alone in the world. Their old friends and families have long gave up on them. It’s truly heart breaking.
The fear of this kept many as the member of the group, even though the inner heart are crying.

Indeed not all groups are like that. A few are good and on the right path. But sadly, they seem to be the minority on the scene, and can be quite hard to find.

Then I went to UK, work there for 5 years, and found something else - the Liberals.
At first they seemed good - they preached upon tolerance, open-mindedness, equalities, justice, and critical thinking.

However, digging deeper, I found troublesome things.
They preached upon tolerance, yet they will get rid of their opposition and have no hesitation on silencing their voices whenever possible.
They preached critical thinking, yet they’re cherry-picking verses from Quran and Hadith to support their claims. Many times, they’ll just plain lie to you. If they can have the opportunity to assassin your character, they will.
And just like the sects, these liberals claim to be based on Quran and hadits; but they interpret it so liberally; it’s as if they’re telling you that an apple is really an orange. They’re just as extreme as the sects, but worse since they claim to be of a superior intelligence.

I don’t like to be taken as a fool, so I distanced myself from them.

Found myself alone again, with weird people around me. I continued my journey. I tried to find more about Islam, with my limited time and capability. I worked hard to filter the wacky interpretations, and goes straight to the source and original interpretations. And what I found have made the journey worth it.

Islam : is all about compassion, good behaviour, and love to others. The prophet stated that his mission is to make us better in our akhlaq. That is it.

I’ve been presented with spins from Liberals & Islam-haters, trying to rebuke it. But I always managed to find out every single time the truth behind it - some are not presenting the whole picture, some are presented without its context, some are misinterpretation from the original language, some are very liberal translation, and some are downright lies.
Many of the Islam’s problems they presenting are actually really Muslims problem. And they dare claiming to be the superior thinkers ? I don’t think so.

Islam : wants their believers to think and use their brains. The command “Afala ta’qiluun” - have you think about that ? It’s written many times in Quran.
My journey was emotionally and intellectually painful. I’ve had to wade through so much crap and non-sense, sometimes even from people I thought would know better. This command kept me going, enduring the pain.

The result is, not perfect, but definitely a better me - one who finally understood the essence of his religion, and at ease with it. The old cliche is still true - no pain, no gain.

I also found several inspirations from some other good people :

1. Amar Ma’ruf Nahi Munkar : This is the principle of da’wa / calling people to Islam, meaning “call people to good, and prohibit them from bad”.

   Notice how the call for good is mentioned first. Then I noticed that the most successfull preachers are those who busy themselves in calling people to the good - with sympathetic words, understanding of people’s problems, and positive attitude in helping people to get over with their problems — instead of just criticizing people on their faults.

   People become attracted to the good, and automatically, they leave their bad side.

   These preachers solve problems, instead of adding more of it.
   I shall try to do the same.

2. Care for others : This must begin with your closest ones. If you claim you care for others, while neglecting your own family, I’ll call you a hypocrite.

   When people care about others, Islam will be able to fulfill its promise as the rahmatan lil ‘alamin - a blessing to the world.

I’ve realized now that the problem with Islam is really the problem with Muslims. Many are ignorant, led by ignorant (or downright evil) ulama / syaikh / community leaders.
We need to awaken them by tapping on them gently and using kind words. Not kicking and screaming on them - and later wondered why they ended up beating you into a pulp. The way of Islam is the middle path - kind, gentle, soothes, and most importantly, enlightens.

So I begin my new journey. May God look upon me kindly and strengthen this weak shell and its soul for this journey, which shall not end until my death.

One of the most asked questions I got from customer, in relation to their planned migration to Linux, is “Will Linux runs our legacy application ?”. And, 90% of the time, that legacy apps will be a VisualBasic 6 application. They feared that it won’t run on Linux, and their business will suffer.

I’ve always told my customers that “technical problems are not a problem“.
I can always help them find a solution for a technical issue. It’s the political ones that’s sometimes proved impossible to deal with
For example, once I met with a Canadian consultant, who happily informed me that he has been successful in making legacy apps running in older-than-dinosaur servers to talk with the web-apps on Linux, by creating a wrapper for these oldies. My inner geek bowed and saluted his hacking wizardry, and again my faith in our ability to overcome technical issues is strengthened.

Back to VisualBasic, what I did then is to observe their current situation. Each customer is unique, and a solution won’t always work for each of them. After the fact-finding session, then I usually able to prescribe the best solution for them.

Today I found one other possible solution for this.

Found a discussion on Slashdot, where it was noted that RealBasic is almost 100% compatible with VisualBasic and will run on non-Microsoft platform (even on Mac OS X).
Many will find its price (US$ 500) is way cheaper than to redevelop their corporate application.

Although not the solution for all, but it’s always good to have yet another choice, especially at this medium price range - it’s a clean solution and still affordable.

Just another reminder why I still check Slashdot from time to time — it’s not for the news, but the comments.
You guys rock. Thank you.

And to those looking to develop their corporate application - go web-based guys. Tying yourself to a single, proprietary, platform may prove very costly later.

And always, again, ALWAYS get the source code. Do not deal with a developer which will develop your corporate apps but won’t give you the source. Period.
You will thank me later for this, and when that happens, you may feel like transmitting a huge amount of money to my bank account. Don’t worry, it’s absolutely normal. In that case, just comment in this post, and you shall find my account details in your email in just a few minutes.

OK, gotta code !