IndonesiaMatters.com against muslim ?

In English, Islam

At first I was happy to find another website that blogs in English and informs the outside world about Indonesia. However, when I started to read more of its article, it reminded me of muslim-haters such as faithfreedom.com and such.

A few examples:
[ The Crusades and Liberal Islam ] (see comments by Patung, its owner)
[ Tennis Team won’t play is Israel ] – (quoted: “The Indonesian refusal to recognise the existence of Israel rears its ludicrous head again”)

It’s absolutely Patung’s rights to express his/her opinions. But with “Indonesia” in its website title, while the articles doesn’t reflect what many Indonesian think; well I was just hoping that he’d be able to be more neutral.
Or at least makes it clear that the website contains his personal opinions; which may not necessarily represent most Indonesian.

I’ve dealt with many muslim-haters before; some are just mislead / misinformed, some have flawed logic, but some intentionally use any way to destroy Islam. I’ll engage in a discussion here in my spare time, and we’ll be able find out who’s who.

Playboy Indonesia #3

Islam, Parenting

Ternyata tidak perlu menunggu lama untuk mulai melihat hasil dari teori Jendela pecah sehubungan dengan Playboy Indonesia – di edisinya yang ke tiga saja, majalah ini sudah semakin syur dibandingkan dengan edisi-edisi sebelumnya.

Dan seperti biasa, kembali dijual di jalanan dengan bebasnya. Sesuatu yang tidak akan bisa terjadi bahkan di negara asalnya sekalipun. Memang Indonesia ini luar biasa.

Jadi, kapan nih kita bisa mulai menikmati wanita yang telanjang bulat 100% di Playboy Indonesia ? Edisi kelima ? keenam ? Wah sudah tidak sabar nih 🙁

Indonesia, land of disaster….

In English, It sucks, Teknoblogia

Today is again a very sad day for Indonesian. An earthquake and tsunami combo has hit from south of Java. Death toll has surpassed 100 mark, but it’s quite certain that it’d climb to much more than that.

The quake can be felt from Jakarta (north of Java). The tsunami was reported to be as high as 18 feet / 5 meters.

I read today’s newspaper frozen in shock, finding it hard to believe that it’s happening again to us in such a short time – tsunami in aceh, violent quake in yogya, landslides in many places; and now this.

Indonesia seem to be the place for experiencing off-the-scale disasters.

On 1851, Tambora mountain erupted.
The explosion shot so many ashes to the sky, it blocked much of the sunlight. Year 1815 ended up known as the “Year Without Summer”. Tens of thousands people died from famine, because crop failed to produce. The exact details of the explosion could never be found out, because all population around the mountain was killed on the event.

On 1883, Krakatoa (Krakatau) erupted.
The explosion was so violent, the mountain itself and the island it was on got destroyed in the process. It also produced the loudest sound in recorded history – reaching 180 dBSPL in places 160 km (100 miles) away, heard from Australia (3500 km away) and Island of Rodrigues (4800 km away).
There were no survivors on the island of Sebesi, about 13km from Krakatoa. Many other settlements were also destroyed so thoroughly; some, like Ujung Kulon, was never repopulated. Human skeletons still found washed up on east coast of Africa up to a year after the explosion. Worldwide temperature didn’t return to normal until 1888.

Welcome to Indonesia.

The curse of my praise

In English, Teknoblogia

Just a few days ago, I moved the mailboxes of a client to Dreamhost while praising them for their technical support (they act very quickly and knows what they’re doing). For good measure, I also told my client how big Dreamhost is, and that they should be able to provide us with a very reliable email service.
I said that because email is vital to this client, since almost 100% of their businesses are done via email.

Then Dreamhost experienced what might be among the worst incident they’ve ever had in their history. Ouch.

Beginning since 15 July 2006, only now (18 July 2006) their services have started to be running again.
My client was already breathing very heavily just behind my neck, with all intent to kill me very soon; which he cancelled when suddenly we got our email back. Phew.

Then I remembered many years back, when I was still a junior staff at Takaful Indonesia. I just managed to secure the takaful.com domain, then hosted it with my friend at Indoglobal.com.
After a while, I said thanks for their service and I’m sure our website would be very secure in their hands. My friend was humble and realistic enough to politely said that (in summary) there’s no such thing as 100% secure server on Internet.

A few days later, Indoglobal got hacked pretty bad.

I’ve learned my lesson – from now on, I’ll stop praising my webhosters, and just enjoy their exceedingly good service for me 😀

Note that the incident re: indglobal happened years ago. I know that they’re much better now in regard to security; but I’ve promised not to praise my webhoster any more, so I’ll stop right here 😀

Backing up in Linux

In English, Open-Source, Teknoblogia

I’ve been managing many Windows and Unix servers in the last 10 years, and this I know for sure – backing up in Windows can be a painful experience, and most of the time it require significant investment in special backup software (which tend to cost thousands of dollars, usually more).
Even then, the software will become buggy once you start setting up complex backup scenario.

In Unix/Linux however, you have powerful scripting tools at your disposal, usually already included in the package. These tools are very flexible, enabling you to develop almost any kind of backup scheme.
It does require some sort of programming skill. Point-and-click admins will have a hard time at first, but let me tell you, do give it a try. You’ll find that it’s very much worth the trouble.

Both require investment in time & effort to develop a good backup strategy.

Before we progress, first here’s a few rules in regard to backup :

  • You can never have too many backups.
    I backed up my personal data to several locations – my other PC, and also my brothers’ PC. So in total, I have 3 copies of it.
    One day, the hard drive in my main PC broke down. So I came to my brother, and asked him to copy my data which is in his PC. To my surprise, he said that his hard drive just died too. I ended up with only a single copy of my precious data.
    I quickly replaced the dead hard drive, restored the only copy of my data there, and made a new backup script for it. Nowadays, my data is usually available in 5 or more locations.
  • Automate all of its processes.
    If it require even the tiniest amount of manual intervention, believe me, it will end up not being executed. For once of twice, you may still willing to intervene. But when you need to do that everyday, it just won’t happen.
  • Check your backup.
    Check the result / logs everyday. Try restoring the backup about every week. Do NOT skip this, or you will find out that the backup is actually not restorable when that very important server died on you.

These are the most important ones, and I confess to have suffered from one or more of it in the past.
You don’t have to, but it’s your choice.

Anyway, here’s a sample script to get you started backing up in Linux.

Backing up the whole hard drive, over the network.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /mnt/backup
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/backup
chmod 777 /mnt/backup
cd /mnt/backup
/usr/bin/rsync -avuz --progress --rsh="ssh -l root -i /root/.ssh/id_dsa" 192.168.0.1:/ /mnt/backup

The 1st line is important – it tells the computer that we’d like this script to be processed by bash. Different shell has different syntax. So we need to be precise about this.

The 2nd line create the directory for mounting the backup drive. 3rd line mounts /dev/hdb1 (first partition of second IDE device) to /mnt/backup. 4th line gives full access to the drive. the 6th line does the actual backup process, copying only changed files on 192.168.10.101 to /mnt/backup.

It may seem simple at first, but make no mistake, rsync is one powerful tool. For example, quoted from rsync manual:

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network connection, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.

This capability has enabled me to backup a 200 GB hard drive, over 100 Mbps network, in under 2 hours.
Without disturbing the 15+ users which are on that network as well. Simply amazing.

The next one is probably the kind of backup script you’d more often encounter – backup, compress, store to a safe location.


#!/bin/bash
tar cvf /backup/accounting-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar /home/accounting
bzip2 -9 /backup/accounting-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar
/usr/bin/scp -2 -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa /backup/accounting-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2 smith@192.168.0.10:/data/backup/

The 2nd line bundles up the whole content of /home/accounting into a single file named /backup/accounting-(today’s date).tar; example; /backup/accounting-20061230.tar would be the resulting file if this script is run on the 30th December 2006.
This trick needed to avoid the backup replacing the same file everytime it runs. This way, we’ll have multiple backups over time, instead of just one.

The 3rd line compresses the file above, as strong as possible (with the -9 switch)
The last line copies the file (now with .bz2 extension after compressed by bzip2) into directory /data/backup/ in a server with IP address of 192.168.0.10, as user smith.

The last example is a more complicated backup script.
I developed this to backup groups.or.id‘s (kinda like Yahoogroups) member database automatically, everyday to servers on different countries. Therefore, in case of disaster, the administrator can quickly restore the service on another server with little problem.

Backup member database, over the Internet.


#!/bin/bash
daftar_milis=( $(ls ~/) )

for element in $(seq 0 $((${#daftar_milis[@]} - 1)))
do

echo "---- MILIS: ${daftar_milis[$element]} ----" >> /backup/daftar-member-$(date +%Y%m%d).txt
/usr/bin/ezmlm-list ~/${daftar_milis[$element]} >> /backup/daftar-member-$(date +%Y%m%d).txt

done

/usr/bin/bzip2 -9 /backup/daftar-member-$(date +%Y%m%d).txt
/usr/bin/scp -2 -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa /backup/daftar-member-$(date +%Y%m%d).txt.bz2 harry@mydomain.com:/home/harry/backup/groups.or.id/

exit 0

A bit of background, the server uses ezmlm as the mailing list software, which is usually controlled by user “alias”.

2nd line is already interesting. Basically, we execute ls (which shows the content of directory) ~/. What is directory ~/ ? Well, the tilde character (~) is a shortcut for our home directory. So, when running this script as alias user, the “ls ~/” actually means “ls /var/qmail/alias/”
The result (list of files and directories) will then be stored in an (array) variable named “daftar_milis”

4th and 5th line sets us up for a looping. It will loop as many times as there are data in “daftar_milis”.

7th line will output a line, which is “—- MILIS: (current data in “daftar_milis”) —-“, and append ( >>) it into a file named /backup/daftar-member-(today’s date).txt

8th line runs ezmlm-list, which will list the members of the mailing list, and store in into the same file as above.

When all the data in “daftar_milis” has been processed, then the 12th line will be executed. It will compress the backup file with bzip2 compression.
Note that this compression algorithm is much more complex than standard Zip compression, therefore on a slow processor it may take a very long time to finish.

The 13th line will copy the backup file to a server somewhere on the Internet, on a secure tunnel encrypted with SSH2 protocol.

So there you are, a few examples to get you started backing up in Linux. Hope you find it useful.

Hati-hati dengan kartu kredit

It sucks, Sosial, Teknoblogia

Dengan prihatin saya membaca kisah Andersonite yang mengalami masalah dengan tagihan credit card dari Standard Chartered, sampai dia diteror oleh mereka.

Yang lebih mencemaskan lagi adalah sebuah komentar di posting tersebut :

waktu kamu di indonesia, pasti sering kan dapet penawaran membership atau kartu kredit lain? aku sih curiga ada ‘sindikat jual beli data cardholder’ deh. lagian, ngakses data cardholder buat beberapa orang gampang kok 😉

Apakah memang security kita sedemikian tidak amannya di tangan mereka?
Yang jelas, adik saya sudah pernah kena charge yang fraudulent dari perusahaan kartu kreditnya. Kebetulan waktu itu dia di Inggris, dimana hukum berpihak kepada konsumen. Dia kemudian selamat dari tagihan tersebut.
Kalau dia ketika itu sedang di Indonesia, kemungkinan ceritanya akan berbeda….

Tapi masalah terbesar dengan kartu kredit adalah pada “irresponsible lending”.

Barusan ini BI mengeluarkan peraturan yang melarang seseorang untuk memiliki lebih dari 2 kartu kredit. Seorang staf senior BI pernah berkata kepada saya, bahwa BI akan lebih ketat mengawasi sepak terjang berbagai provider kartu kredit di Indonesia. Kelihatannya sudah menjadi kenyataan.
Tetapi ini bukannya berarti BI tidak menyukai cashless payment, justru sebaliknya, terutama ketika uang kertas mahal biaya cetaknya.

Contoh salah satu dari berbagai masalah kartu kredit, selama ini banyak bank yang memperlakukan kredit biasa dengan kredit dari kartu kredit secara berbeda – singkatnya, pinjaman dari kartu kredit diberikan tanpa kehati-hatian / memperdulikan resiko. Hasilnya, banyak pelanggan kartu kredit yang jadi menunggak.

Tetapi, karena biasanya tunggakannya ini jauh lebih kecil daripada pinjaman biasa, maka masih bisa dicicil; walaupun dalam yang waktu lama. Dimana ini tentu saja menguntungkan bank (karena bunganya menjadi sangat besar), dan merugikan konsumen.

Masalahnya terus berlanjut, dimana kemudian bank biasanya menggunakan jasa debt collector untuk menagih tunggakan yang macet. Celakanya, debt collector di Indonesia seringkali menggunakan cara-cara yang sewenang-wenang dalam operasinya.
Saya kira inilah faktor terbesar yang membuat BI marah dan memutuskan, “enough is enough“, dengan para provider kartu kredit. Apalagi ketika ada kasus sampai dimana ada seorang guru dengan gaji kurang dari 2 juta/bulan, menunggak sampai 50 juta lebih, dan dizalimi habis-habisan oleh para debt collector.

Regulasi yang ketat dari otoritas akan membantu mencegah & mengurangi kesewenang-wenangan dan eksploitasi terhadap konsumen seperti ini.

Regulasi yang ketat ini, secara sekilas, akan terkesan mempersulit customer. Seperti, syarat-syarat yang ketat (tidak sembarangan orang bisa mendapatkan kartu kredit), dll. Namun pada akhirnya, semuanya ini adalah untuk melindungi kita sendiri.

Anyway, bagi yang belum menggunakan kartu kredit, sebaiknya tidak usah. Saya punya kartu kredit pun karena diberikan oleh bank; itupun saya gunakan hanya untuk bertransaksi online (convenience), bukan untuk berhutang.
Mungkin kita perlu mengembalikan budaya melihat hutang sebagai “last resort”, dan bukannya sebagai tindakan yang pertama kali dilakukan ketika menghadapi masalah.

Saya pernah bercerita kepada seorang kawan di Inggris, bagaimana budaya keluarga kami sejak dahulu, yaitu membeli (komputer, mobil, dll) hanya ketika mempunyai uang di tangan/bank. Dia tercengang, sepertinya sudah bertahun-tahun tidak mendengar hal demikian. Saya akui kepada dia bahwa ketika tiba di Inggris, memang saya sempat syok melihat bagaimana budaya berhutang adalah suatu yang sangat wajar disana.
Dan bahkan pada masyarakat yang telah memiliki budaya berhutang tersebut, regulasi kredit sangat ketat, dan memihak konsumen — tetap saja ada banyak kasus keuangan pribadi karena jeratan hutang kartu kredit.
Apalagi di Indonesia, yang kebanyakan kita belum memiliki keahlian private finance management, regulasi kredit masih longgar, dan nyaris tidak ada perlindungan konsumen.

Memiliki kartu kredit di Indonesia masih merupakan sesuatu yang berbahaya bagi kebanyakan orang. Hindari saja jika Anda bisa.

Modal paperclip, menjadi rumah bertingkat (!)

Entrepreneurship, Teknoblogia

Contoh kreativitas yang luar biasa 🙂 Kyle MacDonalds, seorang pengangguran, memutuskan bahwa sudah saatnya dia memiliki rumah.

Berbeda dengan orang lain yang akan berusaha mencari pekerjaan di kantor, dia justru mulai berdagang – dengan modal awal sebuah paperclip.

Paperclip tersebut ditukar oleh seseorang dengan pulpen,
pulpen tsb kemudian ditukar dengan pegangan pintu,
yang lalu ditukar lagi dengan kompor,
yang ditukar dengan generator,
yang ditukar dengan … er, pajangan ?
yang lalu ditukar dengan motor ski,
yang lalu ditukar dengan paket liburan ke Yahk,
yang lalu ditukar dengan mobil van,
yang lalu ditukar dengan tawaran rekaman,
yang lalu ditukar dengan tawaran tinggal di Phoenix selama setahun,
yang ditukar dengan acara satu hari bersama Alice Cooper,
yang ditukar dengan snow globe KISS,
yang ditukar dengan tawaran bermain film,

yang akhirnya ditukar dengan sebuah rumah bertingkat di kota Kipling.

Wow 😀

Selamat untuk Kyle atas keberhasilannya, dan salut untuk kreatifitasnya.

Internet memang membuka pintu ke berbagai peluang-peluang baru. Mudah-mudahan fasilitas Internet di Indonesia akan terus semakin membaik, demi kepentingan kita semua.

Sekarang, saya ada punya 3 (bukan cuma satu !) buah paperclip. Mau ditukar dengan sebuah rumah. Siapa yang mau ?! 😀

Team buying

Sosial, Teknoblogia

Atau, “yuk kita keroyok sang penjual”, kini mulai populer di Cina.
Singkatnya, para peminat suatu benda / jenis barang berkumpul di suatu forum online, dan kemudian saling berjanjian untuk membelinya di tempat & waktu yang sama.

Maka, pada tempat dan waktu yang telah disepakati tersebut, kemudian bisa muncul ratusan orang, membeli barang / jenis barang yang sama. Di bawah godaan ini (panen besar !!!), sang pedagang biasanya kemudian akan rela untuk menjual barang-barangnya dengan harga yang jauh dibawah harga pasaran.

So, kapan kita bisa mulai ini di Indonesia ?

TCCO – MySQL tuning

Teknoblogia

Here you’ll find links to various MySQL tuning guides.
If you have the money, you may wish to buy various books on the subject. But if you can’t buy the book, or in a hurry, then this post is for you.

If you know any other article which is not here yet, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks.

  1. How to monitor MySQL Performance : Indeed, how can you optimize when you don’t know that something needs to be optimized.
  2. My previous post on the subject
  3. From ProfitPapers.com – when you need MySQL to perform under much bigger load.
  4. MySQL Performance Blog : as the name says, read it from beginning to the end to gain huge insight on the topic.
  5. Top Performance Tips : 1. Index. 2. Don’t index everything. 3. etc. Good stuff.
  6. MySQL @ BSD tuning guide (thanks dikshie)
  7. “Change threading, from NPTL to Linux Threads; by specifying LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.0” (thanks Priyadi)

TCCO – Quran Gratis

Islam, religion

My friend once told me about muslims in a corner of Russia looking for free quran, because they’re so poor and can’t afford it – yet they really would like to study it. I knew there are institutions giving Quran for free, but I wasn’t able to find it at that time.
I only found it out after a few months. It was too late.

So to avoid that, I’ll try to gather all information about free Quran in this post.
Hope it’ll help anyone who needs it.

If you know any other resources which is not yet here, please comment, so I can include it.
Thanks.

Free Quran (book)

  1. Information from Converts To Islam.com
  2. CAIR : Explore the Quran (USA residents only)
  3. Free Quran.org
    (non-USA residents may need to pay the shipping cost)
  4. Free Quran.ca (Canada residents only)

Free Quran (software)

  1. Quran in 27 languages

Free Quran (mp3 / audio file)

  1. Juz-Amma (the 30th chapter) – recited by Syaikh As-Sudais
  2. From quran.mangga.com (the whole book)

Free Quran (for mobile phone)

  1. Juz-Amma (the 30th chapter) in AMR format

Menristek mencari informasi seputar Speedy (sebelum 7 Juli)

Teknoblogia

Bagi yang ingin berbagi pengalaman mengenai Speedy (suka / duka), silahkan komentar disini. Nanti saya akan bantu sampaikan kepada beliau.

Salut sekali lagi untuk Menteri yang mau membuka dirinya terhadap masukan dari luar, dan tidak cuma yang ABS saja.
Semoga makin banyak menteri kita yang seperti ini.

———- Forwarded message ———-
> From: Kusmayanto Kadiman
> Date: Jul 5, 2006 2:42 PM
> Subject: [technomedia] Peluncuran Speedy — Telkom
> To: Technomedia

Kawan-kawan,

Saya baru saja dapat surat dari Dirut Telkom untuk hadir dan meresmikan
Peluncuran Produk Telkom Speedy pada hari Jumat 7 Juli 2006 pkl 16 – 17
di Main Stage Hall B Pameran Festival Komputer Indonesia.

Ada yang punya pengalaman manis/pahit tentang layanan Speedy ini?
Mohon kesediaan berbagi cerita untuk saya sampaikan pada saat peluncuran
nanti.

Jabat erat,
KK

www.puskur.or.id hacked

Teknoblogia

Pagi ini saya mampir ke website Pusat Kurikulum Online milik Balitbang Diknas, untuk mendapatkan materi KBK (Kurikulum Berbasis Kompetensi) untuk homeschooling anak-anak saya (ya, tidak perlu beli; ternyata disediakan oleh pemerintah secara cuma-cuma).

Ternyata situs Pusat Kurikulum Online telah di hack oleh “Shadow”, sebagai bagian dari unjuk rasa anti kekerasan & pelanggaran HAM yang dilakukan oleh pemerintah Amerika di Guantanamo.

Situs Pusat Kurikulum Online untuk sementara ini [ bisa diakses dari sini ]

Sepertinya, puskur.or.id menggunakan CMS Mambo / Joomla versi tua, sehingga bisa dibobol oleh hacker tersebut. Saya sedang berusaha mengkontak Puskur untuk memberitahukan mengenai hal ini.
Mudah-mudahan saja mereka punya backup dari website tersebut, dan bisa pulih segera kembali.

Juragan Ayam Potong dari Godean

Entrepreneurship

Dengan keuletannya, Tujo Hadi Sumarto merambah dari pengumpul ayam menjadi pengusaha besar ayam potong yang sukses.

Terik matahari menyengat kulit. Namun, di depan deretan toko di Jalan Godean Km. 7,5, Yogyakarta, kesibukan beberapa pria mengangkati kantong pakan ternak ke atas sebuah mobil pikap tak menyurut. Di antara mereka terlihat seorang lelaki setengah baya yang ikut bermandi keringat membawa zak-zak itu sambil menghitung tumpukan yang sudah berada di atas mobil, siap dikirim ke para pembeli.

Mengenakan kaus oblong, celana panjang, dan sandal kulit imitasi, ia tak berbeda dengan para pengangkut lainnya. Suaranyalah yang membedakan. Dengan tegas ia mengomandani aktivitas di siang itu. Dialah Tujo Hadi Sumarto, 50 tahun, satu dari pengusaha besar perdagangan ayam potong dan pakan ternak di Jogyakarta.

Setiap hari, Tujo, yang lebih dikenal dengan nama kecilnya Paidi, bisa menjual 25 hingga 30 ton ayam potong ke Jakarta, Bogor, dan beberapa daerah di Jawa Tengah dan Jawa Timur. Untuk menunjang usahanya, ia memiliki 20 truk besar dan Colt pikap, serta 10 buah sepeda motor. Tersedia pula gudang seluas 4.000 meter persegi dan tiga lokasi kandang dengan kapasitas sekitar 4.000 ekor ayam. “Untuk melanyani pembeli di sekitar sini,” ujarnya.

Uang yang berputar dalam bisnis ayam potong itu ditaksir rata-rata mencapai Rp. 200 juta per hari. Dari ayam ini, Tujo telah memetik hasilnya: dua rumah besar jadi tempatknya berteduh — salah satunya yang bernilai Rp. 850 juta baru dibangun di atas tanah seluas 550 meter persegi. Mau ke mana-mana ia tinggal menstater tiga mobil menterengnya, dua buah Baby Benz dan satu buah BMW.
Cerita Paidi bukanlah kisah Cinderella. Keberhasilan pengusaha ini bisa ditiru siapa pun yang punya tekad sekuat Tujo. Hanya lulusan sekolah rakyat (setingkat sekolah dasar), lelaki ini membangun bata demi bata istananya dengan sikapnya yang menghalalkan kerja keras, tekun dan berhemat selama bertahun-tahun.

Continue reading Juragan Ayam Potong dari Godean →

A control panel for your webhosting business

In English, Teknoblogia

A few years ago I was looking for a control panel for one of my server. This server is gonna be shared on the Internet, and many of its users are non-techies. So a control panel (like Plesk, cpanel, etc), will help them help themselves.

However, I was not able to find anything which suits me. The show stopper most of the time are either lack of an important feature, or the fact that the control panel software messes up your machine pretty good (cpanel, I’m looking at you).
Finally I understand why big webhosters tend to develop their own control panel.

So I gave it up, and administered it myself manually, with a few helper software that I cooked up myself. Still, it’s not ideal.

A few days ago I was looking at ISPconfig, because I’m interested to install it in a new server with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. For a free control panel, I must say ISPconfig is pretty sweet.
But then I stumbled upon InterWorx-CP.

Interworx looks even better. For only about US$ 300, you get these: fantastico-like installer (user can install various web-app in one click), no-mess instalation (InterWorx is basically a bunch of php scripts), cluster-ready (sweet), and more.

If I need a commercial control panel in the future, InterWorx will be the first that gets evaluated.

Menjalankan bisnis – 2/3

Entrepreneurship

“Menjalankan bisnis muslimah”, artikel ke 2 dari 3 seri merintis usaha muslimah, yang telah dimuat oleh majalah Alia. Terimakasih kepada redaksi majalah Alia yang telah mengizinkan publikasi ulang artikel ini disini.

Menjalankan usaha muslimah – bagian I
Oleh: Helen Sufehmi

Kata orang, memulai sesuatu adalah yang paling sulit. Pada edisi yang lalu, kita telah membahas mengenai cara untuk memulai usaha kita sendiri. Betapa berat dan pelik berbagai urusan yang perlu kita persiapkan.
Tetapi begitu usaha telah mulai berjalan – banyak orang yang terjebak. Dikiranya sudah bisa merasa lega dan mulai hidup tenang.

Kenyataannya, pada saat ini sebetulnya kita seperti seorang pendaki gunung yang sedang berada di kaki sebuah gunung. Perjalanannya masih panjang, dan penuh dengan bahaya. Jika ia lengah di perjalanannya disini, maka bisa-bisa dia terjerumus ke dalam jurang.
Demikian pula dengan kita yang baru memulai ini – sekarang belumlah saatnya untuk bersenang-senang. Pendakian kita baru saja dimulai, maka kita harus mempersiapkan fisik dan mental kita untuk suatu petualangan yang melelahkan. Yaitu menghadapi segala tantangan di perjalanan, untuk mencapai puncak gunung tersebut, dan menjadi penakluknya.

Jadi, sebetulnya apa sajakah yang perlu kita lakukan di petualangan yang satu ini ?

I.Pembukuan

Percaya atau tidak, ada banyak sekali orang yang menjalankan usaha tanpa melakukan pencatatan, yang biasa kita kenal dengan istilah pembukuan.
Akibatnya seringkali cukup mengenaskan.

Satu contoh; ada sebuah usaha dagang yang beromset milyaran rupiah, yang tiba-tiba hampir bangkrut.
Ketika diteliti, ada beberapa hal yang ditemukan :

1. Cashflow (perputaran uang) tidak lancar, karena:
a. Pembayaran kepada supplier : cash / tunai , tetapi :
b. Pembayaran dari customer : bertempo / hutang beberapa minggu
c. Lalu, sisa uang yang ada terlalu banyak tertanam di proyek-proyek “mercusuar” – ekspansi usaha yang melampaui batas kemampuan, tapi bergengsi tinggi.
2. Piutang (hutang customer) terlalu banyak yang tidak tertagih / macet.
3. Gaya hidup direktur terlalu mewah

Apakah perusahaan tersebut menjalankan pembukuan ? Ternyata ya, pakai komputer pula. Tetapi – pembukuan tersebut hanya berupa sekedar pencatatan, tidak dijadikan pedoman untuk mengambil keputusan-keputusan / mengawasi situasi perusahaan.
Walhasil, banyak tanda-tanda masalah terlewat begitu saja – sehingga terkesan bangkrutnya itu mendadak.

Nah, usaha yang menjalankan pembukuan saja masih bisa bangkrut dengan cukup spektakuler. Bagaimana kira-kira yang tidak menjalankannya ?
Bisa kita bayangkan sendiri.

“Pembukuan itu kan rumit sekali”, ini alasan yang sering kita dengar. Memang, pembukuan yang ideal, General Ledger, bisa sangat memusingkan dan merepotkan. Bahkan bagi akuntan yang berpengalaman sekali pun.
Tetapi, esensinya sebetulnya mudah – yaitu mencatat pergerakan uang. Dan ini hanya berupa 2 hal; uang masuk, atau uang keluar.

Berangkat dari sini, maka kita bisa buat pembukuan yang sederhana, khusus untuk UKM (Usaha Kecil dan Menengah).

…..

Artikel selengkapnya bisa di download dari sini.

Textamerica.com goes paid-members only, old freebie accounts will be deleted

Teknoblogia

From Boing Boing :

Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard. From *Janet on June 8, 2006 2:30am

This is indeed their rights, but it’s not a nice thing to do. BB seems to agree with me on this as well.

TA.com may said that they’re having problems footing the bill for the heavy-users, but the average Joe User is not aware at all – and suddenly they got the kick.
For this unaware (and light users), TA should at least offer a cheaper subscription, or help them migrate to other moblog site (option like “download all photos as a single ZIP file” would be really nice). But no, TA.com treated everyone the same.

So I’ve had enough – I’ve setup my own gallery, and moved my photos there.
I had to left a lot more photos at TA.com due to lack of time to move them to this new one, so yes, I’m still bitter.

Got myself an account @ Dreamhost.com for about the same price of TA.com’s subscription fee; and a whole lot more – hosting facility for my blogs, websites, emails, mailing lists, loads of space which gets bigger every week (yes you read it right), and so on. A much better deal indeed.

But what’s more important is the fact that Dreamhost is probably the biggest webhoster in USA, and you can bet that they have the resources to give you the best & reliable service. My own experience is that usually I found out about a problem from their status website – not by experiencing the problem myself. This is a very nice change.

If you want to sign-up to Dreamhost, just click here.
I’ve also got a special promotion deal with them, so if you enter HSS8888 as the promo code when you sign up, then you can get discount up to US$ 50. Making it actually a cheaper deal than TA.com.

What if you want a freebie moblog service ?
Well there are quite a few, but you need to keep in mind that they can turn back against you at anytime just like TA.com. That said, the folks at Moblog.co.uk promised that they won’t do that, and if you need help to move your photos from TA.com, you can give this software a try.
Am I nice or what ?

OK I’ve wasted enough time because of this, so gotta go back to work. Hope this helps a few of you out there.

Old sk00l

Teknoblogia

A few days ago I met with my cousin who’s still in his early days at university. He’s a nice chap, socialize quite a lot, and it’s hard for anyone not to like him. We talked about a lot of things, and in the middle of it, the topic changed to FPS (First Person Shooter) games.

He mentioned a day when he played in a gamecenter, when suddenly others gathered around him in confusion. Somebody then commented, “Why the mouse movement is inverted? It’s very confusing”.
He had the “invert mouse” settings enabled. He started to observe the others, and realized, that today, nobody uses this setting.

We laughed until it hurts. Then I vaguely remember that when he’s much younger, I’ve sneaked them (him, his brother, my brother) to my office, and we played Quake I multiplayer together. It was a load of fun — and since I played it with “invert mouse” setting enabled, so did he. From then on, he played FPS games with the “invert mouse” setting enabled.

I commented about a game I found in their computer, I think it’s called True Crime. Tried to play it, but the game has no “invert mouse” setting. My aim was totally screwed up because of it. We laughed again.

The whole conversation reminded me about a proposal we made for Sampoerna. In 1999, the Indonesian Quake II community was approached by Indo-Ad about the possibility to do a multiplayer gaming competition for their client, Sampoerna. We gathered and quickly submitted a proposal. I was not able to further followed it up because I already moved abroad, but I think the plan didn’t go forward.
Before that, I was also approached by Indosat on the possibility to create online game community and events. I have had meetings with their contact person, but then I had to move to United Kingdom, and the talks stopped.

I took a quick look around my backup – and turned out that I still got that proposal for Sampoerna. So [ here it is ] for your enjoyment, a blast from the past.

Hobury – minuman yang sehat

Retail

Sudah beberapa lama ini kami dikejutkan dengan Hobury, minuman sehat (bukan minuman kesehatan) yang laku dengan sangat cepat. Padahal harganya termasuk cukup mahal – Rp 6500 untuk kemasan botol plastik 350 ml.

Beberapa kelebihan Hobury dibandingkan dengan minuman-minuman lainnya :

1. Tanpa bicarbonat, tanpa pemanis/cita rasa/warna buatan. Natural 100%
2. GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) free
3. Mengandung spirulina, kiwi, madu, klorofil
4. Dalam kemasan yang praktis dibawa-bawa

Apakah Hobury akan menjadi pendobrak munculnya niche / pangsa pasar baru, yaitu minuman sehat ? Bisakah menjadi pendobrak yang selevel dengan kasus Pocari Sweat ?
Sebelum Hobury, sebetulnya minuman sehat juga sudah ada. Ada produk minuman lidah buaya hasil kerjasama MQnet dengan Universitas Indonesia (Kavera), ada minuman tradisional (sirih, kencur, dll), dan lain-lainnya. Tetapi, selama ini belum ada yang grafik penjualannya melejit seperti Hobury.

Apakah Hobury adalah trend sesaat, atau bukan? Mari kita saksikan bersama-sama.