Bali has been quite devastated, physically and, also importantly, economically, by the bomb blasts. Tourists are, understandably, avoiding Bali. People there ended up suffering because less tourists means less income.

To help the people there to recover, the government has worked with other parties to bring Bali back to its previous situation. One of the result is bali.my-indonesia.info, a website designed to introduce Bali again to the international audience.

Help spread the word and make a buzz, post it in YOUR blog. It’s easy to do, yet is most helpful to the Balinese.

Better yet, you can also win one of the 4 diamond pendants. Simply by emailing your friends about the website, and Cc-ing that email to contest@my-indonesia.info

What are you waiting for ? Do the blog and send that email now !

RetailMeNot.com

If you like to shop on Internet, you’ll be well advised to visit RetailMeNot.com before you actually purchase anything. You may save big by doing so, because in RetailMeNot.com you can find many coupons for online shopping websites, shared by other fellow shoppers. For example, you can find 30% discount coupon for O’Reilly books there. Not bad.

Why the Microsoft – Novell deal ?

I knew Steve Ballmer is a bully with a big mouth, but I never expected that he will confess so SOON about the real reason behind the Microsoft – Novell deal.

Quoted :

“In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux ‘uses our intellectual property’ and Microsoft wanted to ‘get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation.'”

So, my guess was right – after SCO is no longer able to become Microsoft’s pawn in killing Linux via litigation process, it looked for other prospective pawn; and found Novell / Suse.

I have steered away from Suse just out of reflex, and stuck with Fedora/Debian/Ubuntu/other completely free (as in “freedom”) distros. I guess my subconscious has predicted this event way back then, and steered my away from it.

Novell has always sucked since I first knew it (3.12), OK it managed to be better with its eDirectory and ZENworks, but this (deal) has stripped little remaining respect I had for the company.
But indeed corporations are shameless and are all about making money.

Just say no folks. Let’s kill Suse now just as we killed SCO back then.

The record is currently held by Ang Chuang Yang, which managed to type a 160 characters SMS in 41.52 seconds.

Big deal. Turned out I can do that in about 38 seconds 🙂

Wanna try ? Here’s the official text provided by Guinness Book of Records :

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.

Good luck in beating me up !

MochiKit

After reviewing LOADS of Javascript libraries (my head still hurts), I think I’ll settle with MochiKit.
Pros: It doesn’t hack the Object.prototype, seems to interoperate well, very-well tested, reliable & proven, Free (MIT license).
Looking forward to test it with a live website soon.

Dedicated Server for US$ 29 / mo

These guys gotta be kidding, check it out : AMD 2 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, 200 GB b/w = US$ 29/mo.
I thought it was a VPS, but turned out that this is a real, physical server. Very nice.

Proxy @ Lighttpd

I was trying to utilize Lighttpd’s mod_proxy module, when I realized it’s unable to proxy incoming request to another webserver’s directory.
Example: proxying request for http://harry to http://sufehmi/harry/

However, it seems that the latest version will be able to do this – and more : http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/07/18/mod_proxy_core-commited-to-svn

Time to upgrade I guess.

I’m developing a PHP script for a client which processes the biggest amount of data I ever dealt with (on PHP).

I’m running it on a server with dual-core Xeon 2.8 GHz (= 4 CPUs), 3 GB RAM, and it’s still struggling with it. The PHP script itself require about 250 MB of RAM – this is after much tweaking; previously it kept on crashing due to running out of memory. However, it also accesses the database heavily and transfer a lot of data into it.

And this script is supposed to be run daily. I don’t think more tweaking is possible, so a more powerful server is probably in order here….

Wicked.

As a lot others experienced as well, I’ve been flooded with spam this month.
I think I’ve lost some important email because of it (deleting legit email by accident, spam filter trashing non-spam email, etc).

I’ve migrated my mailbox to another server which (hopefully) has stronger and more accurate spam-filtering capabilities (no, not Gmail).

If you sent email to me and I have not answered it, do please resend it again.

My apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Why indeed. From a writer’s point of view, XHTML is a pain, because it’s stricter than HTML. And a few (or many, depending on whether it’s XHTML Transitional or Strict) rules changed too.
All these for what ?

Even the crowd in Slashdot seems to be having problems getting a clear answer to this.

However, XHTML actually does have a huge benefit (in addition to other benefits listed in the discussion above) — it makes your website viewable on mobile devices.

PDA and smartphones nowadays are no longer a rarity. From teenagers to corporate executives, they’re now have and use them on daily basis. And browse the Internet with them.

And only more of them will browse the Internet from their mobile phones.
Even here in Indonesia, I can browse the internet freely using my Nokia 9500 with flat monthly fee of just about US$ 25. And I do browse a lot from my mobile phone

You definitely don’t want to alienate these people.

Adhering to XHTML makes it easy to make your website viewable from mobile devices; actually, pretty much from any browsers. You can even change the whole layout completely in a snap, literally.

So many websites nowadays are not getting traffic from us, mobile Internet users. Their websites are beautiful in Internet Explorer, but shows utter crap or plain nothing on our smartphones.
Don’t let your website to be one of those too !

I was trying to setup a “Save This” link so visitors can easily save any article into their del.icio.us account. However, it didn’t work.

After checking on Firefox’s Javascript console, I saw this error message : “missing ) after argument list“, pointing to the encodeURIComponent() function. It must be me, because after I contacted del.icio.us support, they said they never encountered error like this before. I probably should have informed them that I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Ubuntu, it might be specific to this configuration.

Anyway, the solution is to use these code instead :

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_permalink())) ?>&title=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_title())) ?>” target=_blank><img src=”http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif”> Save This Page</a>

Hope it helps someone else out there.

Another interesting comment — it’s funny, but may also contain some truth in it. In any cases – spam suck.

Quoted from comment #16672295 :

Right now, spam goes past spam filters by including a large amount of random nonsense text that resembles English language reasonably well. So we will get spam filters that detect large amounts of random nonsense text. So spam will include text that makes actual sense. Give it twenty years, and your average spam email will consist of 300 pages of text that is better than anything Shakespeare has ever written, followed by two lines begging you to buy viagra. Thirty years, spam will be two hour Quicktime movies better than anything you can watch in the cinema today, with the hero using viagra bought from the spammer in the right places.

Anyway, the real solution to stop spam is to use multi-tiered filtering system.

Bayesian filter, captcha, blacklists, user-submission etc are no longer effective when used on their own. But when combined (example: SpamAssassin, Spam Karma 2), their effectiveness will goes up surprisingly high.

You’ll need to pay attention on the order of deployment though — incoming email should be received by the blacklist filter first. This will cut the number of spam tremendously, so other filtering engines (which are also more resource-hungry) won’t be overwhelmed / won’t overwhelm the server they’re on.
User-submission (example: razor) should be last, you don’t want to annoy your users too much really.

Cheatsheet (CS) is a / several page(s) of condensed information on certain topic, which acts as a quick reference. It’s very handy because it’s just a page with most of the information that you need already there. Remember your cheatsheets back then when you’re still at school ? Amazing isn’t how much information we all managed to cram on so little piece of paper 🙂
It’s basically the same, but these cheatsheet are not for school exams – they’re for life exams : our daily job.

Note that creating a good cheatsheet is no easy task. Some authors have donation links put up on their pages. Therefore, if you found anything useful (eg: saved you lots of time / it’s a lot of convenience / actually saved your butt), consider donating. The authors deserves it.

Here I’ll try to list all (good quality) cheatsheets on IT. If you see something missing, please feel free to comment, and I’ll add it. Thanks.

Continue reading TCCO : Cheat sheets :: IT →

At a glance, Annisa Rania Putri doesn’t seem to be a special girl. Born on 1999, there was nothing special on her birth as well, except that she was born though Caesarian operation. However, when she spoke on an audience on Tuesday, 17 October in Jakarta, everyone’s jaw was on the floor.

To see an Indonesian speaking fluently in English, especially at an age of only 6 years old, is quite something. But I’m sure you’ll say “impossible !” when I declared that this girl also speaks Korean, Arabic, and Dutch. Yet, this is the case here.

In Padepokan Toha, Jakarta; hundreds of people were mesmerized by the speech delivered by this indigo child. She advised people, decades older than her, to fast (this was the month of fasting for Muslims, Ramadhan). This is because fasting will cause people to love each other. As it spreads, peace will prevail. “With fasting, we can get rid of our negative energy, and develop the positive energy which is love”, said Annisa in English.

In her childish style, she continued her messages. People must not lie, she said. To those who already had this as a habit, they must try to be honest from now on. Fasting can help too with this.
“Do not lie, because once you lied, you will keep doing it until you’re old”, she said.

Delivering awesome speech is not her only special ability. She can also design house — she designed a 4 story house in Kelapa Gading area, Jakarta. With no formal education in architecture whatsoever.
She can also build her own computer and operate it.

Accoding to Mrs Yenni, her mother, Annisa’s special abilities began to show around October 2002. She claimed to see a big flower close to their home, but Mrs Yenni couldn’t see anything.

Annisa then started to call her by her name (this is highly unusual in Indonesia).
“(It’s OK,) I’m older than Yenni anyway”, said Annisa.

Hopefully the future will be only even better for Annisa. Congratulations to her family !

Source: Tribun Timur newspaper

From this comment :

Remember: There are only two tools in life. WD-40, for when something doesn’t move, and should; and Duct Tape, for when something is moving and it shouldn’t.

The reply is even more clever :

So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?

I hope nobody will try to do that for our own sake !

It’s 05:30 and I’m already working… ok, let’s start with something light then.

Riyo of Bedeng.com told me yesterday about a website, which I have let my browser opened on since; Vetusware.com. It brings way too many memories from the past.

Back then, BannerMania was dominating the banner-creation scene. Pretty much all banners created by computer back then will either be created by BannerMania, or PrintMaster. It hurts your eyes after a while though, so Broderbund’s PrintShop (and much later, Microsoft Publisher) was a welcome change.

I gained fame in my university after writing an article for campus’ magazine in Assembly language, compiled with Turbo Assembler. It was a small utility written to park hard disk’s read/write head to a safe place, so it won’t crash on a data-laden sector when the computer is shut down.
A lot of my friend was amazed to see first-year student already coded in Assembly. I don’t, since high school I have seen others (high schoolers) doing it for years. Some people are really bright, it’s quite scary.

With help from PC-Tools, I’ve managed to extract data from unreadable floppies. Since floppies still uses FAT12 data structure, it was quite easy to salvage data from it using direct sector access. Still, some people thought I’m some kind of wizard or something, heh.
I prefer PC-Tools v4.23 though (the link above is version 6.0), it’s simple, does the job with none the bloat, and very small at about 100kb (I think).

Being a Pascal hardcore, I was quick to obtain a copy of Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows when it was released, and started coding in it. However, like Wordstar for Windows, it’s pretty buggy, and I had to abandon it.

Not many people know this, but Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a God-send (or, for Bill-haters, Satan-send). A lot of PC was first interconnected via network with each other with this. It was more stable as well than Windows 3.1 (surprise!)
In my previous job using this, we were able to purchase less printers, and started sharing them instead via network. It resulted in a lot of yelling though, “Is the printer ready yet ??”, “Hey, insert some paper there will you”, and so on – until we introduced them to WinPopup. Then people started to annoy each other with it *sigh*.
Well, at least only us knew how to SPAM the WHOLE network,especially when we’re pissed off. Respect mah authoritah !

When VisualBasic 3 showed up, I quickly realized that I can code multimedia applications easily with it. I recorded a few nasyid into WAV files, photoshop-ed a few graphics and photos; resulting in a (back then) jaw-dropping multimedia-rich interactive demo. With lots of buttons, of course.
I donated the demo to the Islamic society in my campus for use in the campus fair (where each society presented themselves to new students). I think they had a lot of new students signed up with them then.

Before WinAmp, we had trackers. Modplay was one of it. It’s really, really amazing to hear your computer playing polyphonic sounds from the internal speaker, which usually only sounded the boring *beep*.
Later I bought Soundblaster’s AWE32, and midi files suddenly sounded so awesome.
Then MP3 came, and everything became obsolete. *sniff*

GIF2ANSI ? What the heck is that ? Well, on the “black screen” (DOS), ANSI was the graphic for the (otherwise) boring console. Believe it or not, just by using text, people managed to create astoundingly great art. GIF2ANSI makes this process simple and a no-brainer for a, well, no-brainer.

ASCIImation is where you can watch StarWars in ASCII. “Awesome” is not descriptive enough to explain it.
And in ASCIImator you can find lots of modern ASCII arts.

Right, I REALLY have to start working now. Enjoy !

I just realized that Akismet marked 4 legitimate comments, today, as spam. That’s too much false positive for one day, no way I’m gonna wade through 24000+ spam to find out the other false positives.
So I installed Spam Karma 2 instead.

So far, looks like this is one quality WP plugin. I just unzipped in plugins directory, activate it, and it works straight away. Most will find no need to change the default settings, it’s already good enough.

Kudos to Dr. Dave for the excellent work. Also thanks to Eko for introducing me to SK2.