And more of the user interface.

Looks good, doesn’t it? But it has a big weakness that might prevent it to success, it needs to be online to have it working. For a country like Indonesia where internet is still not covered everywhere and without a decent speed, it is probably not an OS for us. It is also not an OS for people who use the PC for everyday work, let’s say designer and programmer is out of the scope of the OS can handle. Too bad…

But for a tiny OS, that you will need only to check mail, internet, etc, it might be more than enough. Well, actually, what is the point of having a tiny OS in a full powered net-book? I mean, if you want to check email, internet, etc quickly, then didn’t your gadget is more than enough (especially that is powered with Android)? And net-book these days have enough spec that can work with a more powerful OS, even sacrificing one or two minutes didn’t hurt at all and then you can do more.

Another point that Google might forgot is, net-book is basically targeted to developing country which internet is still something rare, especially for a good quality one. So Chrome OS just lost the battle in these countries. It is not a joke if we want to do a simple document we need to connect internet all the time just to use the Google Docs.

Cloud concept is good, but it just not that ready yet for everyone. Maybe when internet is cheap enough and can covered everywhere, then it might be a good solution, but unfortunately we don’t see it coming very soon, at least in here Indonesia.

Also, we know many people didn’t like their information stored online. It is not that we can’t trust Google (at least they are a trustworthy company until today) but still, by having our data all stored in Google it is not comfortable at all. After all, we use internet only when we need to share something, and nothing more.

Good or bad, Chrome OS still provide something new. It still worth a try. Review is later…

The first day – upgrading the current Xubuntu

So at the start, I have a well working Xubuntu 9.04. Updates for 9.10 came in October 29, but I do upgrade on the next day. My internet was running slowly -it probably just my connection to Ubuntu server, since I got a great download speed on others- to download all of the updates (which surpassed 800MB), that takes more than 12 hours to complete. Well, during that time, I can do everything in my PC until, the upgrading process which takes another hour to complete, at this time it loads heavily and almost impossible to do anything. It seems everything run smoothly and it asks me to reboot.

Before I reboot, everything is still fine. But I can’t wait to reboot to see what have changed in my new Xubuntu, so I reboot immediately. My feeling is getting worse when there is some weird text with broken graphic came up before the splash screen, if I recall, it is the same screen while the Ubuntu is checking the disk drive, except that it happens in blink and the graphic is broken, then the splash screen load. It was all fine until I got into the login screen, and login also fine. Oh right, I have removed my Wacom Bamboo before that since I read some issue of it on upgrade notes.

Then, weird errors pop up on the screen, Xfce is loaded slow, and I got a repeating pop up that said the trash applet error. I can’t go anywhere, the pop up keep repeating, and no menu is working, including the shutdown, so that forced me to push the reset button. Next, I loaded into Gnome session, there is still some error pop up, but I can get rid of it. The Gnome is working fine, but I can’t enable any effects and actually, it is slow (well, fast since there is no effect, but when I got into a more heavy task, it is too slow). I tired so I just go sleep. That’s the first day…

The second day – reinstall the Xubuntu

On the second day, I decided to reinstall my Xubuntu using a fresh installation. My install procedure is from Wubi, then I move the installation to a dedicated partition. This way, I will get a two working Xubuntu which the Wubi one can be used as backup if somehow I messed the installation again. Downloading 600MB more for the iso is quite painful, since, it is downloading in the same speed as when I upgrading, but fortunately, thanks to torrent, I can get full download speed. It still takes 3-4 hours though.

Installation from Wubi is going smoothly, it is also working well after installation. So I just setup everything I have before, simply by using the Read marking menu on sypnatic that was saved before. I ended up downloading 600MB files, again, with slow speed. That is another 10 hours or so. But everything was working great, I can finally get the same feel as I have in previous installation -that messed up-, except that the screen resolution is working on maximum 1152×864, while I usually use 1280×1024. But that’s fine as long as it can work. Then I reboot to see everything is going well and will move it to dedicated partition.

But another disaster came up, yes, disaster. After I reboot, I can’t load the Xubuntu (that installed from Wubi) anymore. The error that came up now is kernel panic. The reason is unable to mount the rootfs, if I can remember correctly. Trying Google around, but none of the solution worked. I even defragment my disk drive, since I read it was the solution somewhere, but no effect at all, and that cost me another 2 hours or so. Then, I gave up, too tired of it (after setup everything and….) so I go to sleep, that’s the second day.

The third day – reinstall the Xubuntu again

The third day came. I decided to reinstall the Xubuntu again, but now, instead of using the Read marking, I just choose only the necessary application to install. Right now, everything is working. Rebooting also have no problem. Then I move it to a dedicated partition. At first, I used LVPM. The process was going smoothly until the end, it asked for reboot. So I do, but after reboot, I can’t find the Xubuntu from the grub -in 9.04, I use the grub from Wubi-, I tried everything I could, adding the menu.lst and so, but none of them works. Now I just realize that it is now using a different version of grub.

After giving up with LVPM, I tried the wubi-move-to-partition script that I taken from here. This one also going well. Reboot and then, I just saw that my grub is installed in my main drive, so I lost the Windows MBR and even, there is no Windows options anymore there! Oh, another disaster. It doesn’t happen in LVPM, in previous 9.04 version, LVPM add the menu to my Wubi grub menu, but it doesn’t work this time, and now I lost the MBR… another Googling time. Oh, well, the good thing is the new moved Xubuntu is working fine.

Next mission is to restore the Windows MBR and use the Wubi grub menu instead of installing the grub. Oh, forgot to mention it, my Xubuntu, both from Wubi and partition is installed in my external hard disk drive. Sometime, it just doesn’t load fine while power up, ended up with error 22 of grub. Also, it is not always connected to PC, so that’s why I need the Windows MBR back, if not, I will always need to insert my external HDD only to load grub. Before that, I want to make sure that my Windows is fine, so I inserted the line for Windows on grub menu list, fortunately it is fine, that light me some hope.

I managed to restore my Windows MBR by this:

sudo apt-get install mbr
sudo install-mbr -i n -p D -t 0 /dev/sda

Yippe, I got my Windows MBR back. But now I just back to where I begins. Nowhere to access my partition installation of Xubuntu. Finally, I managed to add the menu in grub by editing the grub.cfg from Wubi installed Xubuntu. I have done it before actually, but no success. Now, since I have the menu.lst from the partitioned Xubuntu, I can copy and adapt it to the grub.cfg. And yes, it is working! Finally………..!

Next one, is to configure the Wacom calibration and the screen resolution. For Wacom calibration, I just use the same .xinitrc file as before, but need a little change on device identifier. Bad thing is the wacomcpl didn’t work anymore, fortunately I have found the best setting for me so it is not a big deal. For screen resolution, I finally able to add the 1280×1024 resolution by editing the xorg.conf file. Here is the final xorg.conf file from me:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Driver      "intel"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Modeline "1280x1024" 109.62  1280 1336 1472 1720  1024 1024 1026 1062 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth 24
		Modes "1280x1024"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Hopefully, that is the end for it. The new Xubuntu is also working faster than before. This is the third day, really feel tired of it, will gonna got a sleep after posting this. lol. What a long post…

One of the feature I missed while migrating to Ubuntu Linux is the fully functional Wacom tablet. Good things is with Ubuntu 9.04, it has pre-installed Wacom driver, so it works out of the box for my Wacom Bamboo. However, not all features we have on Windows (and Mac) are available on Linux, the only one I missed is the stylus scrolling (by default, in Windows, when we hold the stylus button and drag, the scroll event occur). Since I do browsing all the time, sometime it is hard to allocate the scrollbar, especially in a looong page, that is painful. Up until now, I use the keyboard to scrolling that looong page but it is not efficient, and finally I found the solution by using Mouse Gesture add-ons on Firefox to emulate it. I love Chrome better though, but the only solution I found is with Firefox.

So this is how I do it. First install the add-ons called Mouse Gestures Redox on Firefox. Next we setting it up.

Open the preference, select Tools, then Add-ons, navigate to Extension tab, then choose Mouse Gestures Redox and finally click Preference. The new window will come up. Select the Middle button on the Make gestures with, like shown in the picture

Next open Edit Gestures. Edit the Scroll Down, Scroll Right, Scroll Left and Scroll Up. New window like this will show up when you choose Edit.

Click on the button Recognize Gesture (right from the Gesture code), then do the gesture you want (for scroll down, I drag to top). Or you can just use the same Gesture code as I am. Next, remove all gesture you didn’t need, for me, I remove all of them. If you want to keep them, make sure you don’t have a conflict with another gestures. This is how my final settings look.

Now, I can emulate the same behavior as I have on Windows. Even though, it is only on Firefox. Well, the cons is we don’t have a nice smooth scrolling, but well, at least, it works better than using the scrollbar. You can play around with the configuration and see what working best, for example I feel better by decreasing the minimal gesture size to 5 pixels.

Anyway, GIMP, Inkscape and another software, especially the imaging software already worked well with my Bamboo. Also, others Wacom tablet has equipped with mouse, so this trick will probably needed for the classic Bamboo user. Oh, other things, Wacom Bamboo Touch has launched now. I would like to upgrade, but still, I wonder if it can works well with Linux.

Aptana Studio is a powerful IDE for web development. It supports HTML, CSS, Javascript and the server side script such as PHP, Ruby and Python. Even more, it support a wide variety of Javascript library. It based on Eclipse and available as a standalone application or as a plugin for Eclipse. Aptana Studio is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. And the best of all is, Aptana Studio is free. Here I will post how I install the recent version of standalone Aptana Studio, 1.5, on 32 bit Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

First of all, download the Aptana Studio on http://www.aptana.org, choose the Linux and 32 bit version, or change it accordingly to suit your machine. Before we start installing the Aptana Studio, we need to ensure we have installed the sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-plugin. To do that, simply type this in terminal

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

To install Aptana Studio, first create a directory /usr/local/aptana or simply type this in terminal

sudo mkdir /usr/local/aptana

Next, unzip the Aptana Studio archive you downloaded in the first step to /usr/local/aptana directory.

cd /usr/local/aptana
sudo unzip /home/keaglez/Aptana_Studio_Setup_Linux_x86_1.5.1.zip

Change the /home/keaglez/Aptana_Studio_Setup_Linux_x86_1.5.1.zip to the complete directory of your downloaded Aptana Studio archive. The installation is done, now you can run Aptana Studio in Terminal.

cd /usr/local/aptana/Aptana\ Studio\ 1.5
./AptanaStudio

If it succeed, now you can see Aptana Studio running. At first, it will ask you to install additional plugin. I actually failed several times when installing some plugin, the Aptana Studio just keep crashing while installing the plugin. So I just try to install the plugin one by one, and keep only the plugin I needed. Finally, I’m able to install PHP and jQuery plugin.

The final step is to create the launcher for Aptana Studio. To do that I simply right click on desktop and choose Create Launcher, then I fill every field like in the picture. Oh, btw, I’m using Xfce desktop or also known as Xubuntu, but I’m installing Ubuntu at first and change the desktop after that.

Also here is a short review of the Aptana Studio. Beside of the several crashes on installing plugin, the Aptana Studio runs quite slow in my machine. My machine running on 2 gigs of RAM and old Pentium 4 processor, basically it passed the system requirements from Aptana Studio. However, the fact that it is powerful can’t be denied, even though it runs much slower than an average text editor (I was using Geany before). Well, it is not only a text editor, but a complete all in one development environment, so a sacrifice in speed is worthed.

After all, there is still some way to improve the performance, and as for me, instead of running Gnome, I chose to run the light-weight Xfce instead, it is proven to have a better speed and more stability (right, I was changing to Xfce just to use this IDE ). I run Google Widgets, Screenlets, Avant Window Navigator, XMMS and some application I used all the time, and of course Aptana, and it still run in an acceptable speed.

The cool things is it has an internal browser to review inside the Aptana Studio, the Linux version has only Firefox, while Mac version has Firefox and Safari, and Windows version has Firefox and the ugly Internet Explorer. It also has a wide variety of Javascript library which I found great. The debugger and on time validation is also cool. Another great feature is, it recognized the Javascript and CSS script inside an HTML document.

The only feature I missed is the inability to hinting the method name of a static classes and objects that returned from a function (correction: static methods and properties from class will be showed there if defined correctly ). However, it does great for the object itself.

That’s all of it, I’m still not finished exploring all of the Aptana feature. But it is a great and powerful IDE indeed.

The above picture is the oDesk Prepaid Debit MasterCard that is powered by Payoneer. As you might know already, Payoneer offered a prepaid debit card for every member of its partner company. I got mine from oDesk. Here is my personal experience for using this card and also there is some comparison with Paypal regarding the fees.

Yesterday, I finally received my oDesk Debit MasterCard. It takes approximately 3 weeks from approval into arrival. FYI, I got my card approved in 4 days after registration and it sended through regular mail. Once it is arrived, I activate the card immediately and withdraw my remaining oDesk balance into the card. I was withdrawing $50 into the card.

The fees itself is quite high. From oDesk, the withdrawal fees is $2. The funds will be loaded to the card in 2 business days or less, but there is a choice for immediate load which cost another $2.5 and it will loaded in less than 2 hours. I choose the second option, so I paid $4.5 for withdrawal, the funds is loaded in less than 10 minutes, which is pretty fast. Then, from the first load, it charged an activation fees for $9.95. Well, it is $14.45 already so the available balance I got in final is $36.55. That is the calculation, when it just loaded, the fees is hidden and it still show $48 balance ($50 minus $2 from oDesk withdrawal fee).

Next, I’m going to find an ATM to trying it out. First, I’m going to BCA ATM, which is available almost everywhere here and it support MasterCard. I insert the card, enter the PIN, and trying to take some cash out. But, unfortunately, it failed, the ATM said it is unable to process the request or so. Okay, I’m trying to find another ATM. Now, I’m in BNI ATM, and as usual I inserted the card, enter the PIN, take some cash out….and yes, it succeed! I wonder why BCA didn’t work, since I heard some peoples have succeed with it, but well, whatever. MasterCard ATM is easy to find too.

About the ATM withdrawal, each withdraw will cost $2.15 fee and it will converted to the local currency immediately, but if it is failed, it will cost $0.9 fee.

Here is the details for withdrawing funds from oDesk to the Debit MasterCard.

First time (with immediate load)
oDesk charge                  : $2.00
Immediate load              : $2.50
Activation card               : $9.95
ATM withdrawal charge : $2.15 (each)
Total                            : $16.60 or $14.10 without immediate load

Next time (with immediate load)
oDesk charge                 : $2.00
Immediate load              : $2.50
ATM withdrawal charge : $2.15 (each)
Total                            : $6.65 or $4.15 without immediate load

This hasn’t included local ATM charge (if there is one). And since most ATM here has withdrawal limit to maximum Rp 1,500,000.00 (approximately $150) for each transaction, so if we want to withdraw more than that, we need to withdraw twice and that means, the ATM withdrawal charge will apply twice as well.

How is that compared to Paypal? For the fees, Paypal is definetely costless. The oDesk only charged $1, and withdraw funds from Paypal to local bank is only Rp 16,000.00 (approximately $1.6) for funds lower than Rp 1,500,000.00 and free for funds bigger than that. So it is $2.6 only, compared to $4.15 fees from Payoneer without immediate load. The cons is, while the oDesk to Paypal is instant, but from Paypal to the local bank isn’t, it will need 3-5 days for the funds to be available on the bank. Personally, I haven’t tried withdrawing from Paypal yet, so I can’t decide which is better for now. I will get into more depth when I tried Paypal.

Oh right, above calculation didn’t include the exchange rate and some fees that might apply to it.

Revision October 21, 2009:
- Payoneer immediate load from oDesk is $2.50 and not $3.00, the article has been corrected and recalculated.

Well, I will bring an unusual topic today. Even though I love anime, but I never post a single post in this topic, but this interesting series makes me want to post one. This anime -which is quite underrated- is surprisingly turn out very well. For some people, it might be boring, but for me, it is interesting since the characters emotion was made real, as well as the earthquake.

The first episode introduce the main character, Mirai and her little brother, Yuuki. Mirai was a pessimistic middle school student, while Yuuki is strong and always give courage to her sister. The story started with Mirai, from school, back to home, and then with Yuuki, both without their parent going together to robot exhibition. The first episode ended when the earthquake happened and Yuuki was still traped inside the exhibition building.

It is not recommended for you to hit the read more, if you haven’t watched the series.

The second episode is pretty good, it shows how the impact of the massive earthquake and how Mirai bravely go to the half-collapsed building to search for her brother, Yuuki. At that time, she met Mari, who help her to search for Yuuki. They finally found him and decide to go together to home.

The next episodes is the story of their journey to return to their home. Mari protected the two children and lead them. One interesting episode is when the Tokyo Tower collapsed due to many aftershock. During time, the Mirai character is developed (which is one of the interesting part) and finally the plot-twist.

Yuuki was dead and Mirai, who can’t accept that reality started to hallucinate that Yuuki is still with her (or he really turn out into ghost? well, whatever). Since then, by time, Mirai started to realize the reality and started to cry without reason. The two last episode was well done, emotional, sad. I actually cried for the last episode, especially when Mirai united together with her parents and when Mirai gives her mom the birthday gift that Yuuki chose.

The only bad story for the whole series is when Mari reunite with her family. Why? Well, because the anime tried to troll us that they was died, Mari was so sad and sitting in front of two unknown corpse (she doesn’t have the courage to identify the corpse yet). And then, thanks to Mirai and the “ghost” Yuuki, they found out that her family (actually her daughter and her mom) are survived and still healthy, even though her mom is hospitalized but nowhere near to die. lol

But the ending helps the whole series, I give the perfect rating for the series. One of the best anime I have ever seen, so much reality (from the earthquake into the humans attitude) and the sadness to lose someone precious. The graphics and animation was well done too. Definitely worth to watch.

There is three problem that it is needed to be solved. The problem A is pretty simple, we can just change the pattern to Regular Expression and it’s done. I do it this way, but a little slower on large data. The B case is completely blank for me, never have run into this kind of problem before and I can’t finish it. For the C case, I can finish the small data, but not for the large data. It seems, I still need a lot of practice for better algorithm. But at least, I’m advanced to the next round. Let’s see how long I can stand in this competition.

But that was a big mistake I made, if you just take the data, let’s say

SELECT floatdatafield FROM whatevertable

you will get this 9.99998e+006 value, and no matter what you do in PHP, you won’t be able to get the exact value, 9999975. So for the solution, we need to use the SQL function, ROUND(). So instead of just select everything, we can do this

SELECT ROUND(floatdatafield,2) AS floatdatafield FROM whatevertable

This will round it to have maximum 2 numbers digit after the decimal point and it will return 9999975.00, exactly what we need.

Another solution is to use decimal data type instead, or by defining the number of digits before and after decimal point of the float.

However, the solution is actually simple, by increasing the timeout so the download can be completed. Once it is, the updating will going smoothly. So this is how to do it, in manual way..

Open /wp-admin/includes/file.php with your favourite text editor.

Find the following function

/**
* Downloads a url to a local file using the Snoopy HTTP Class.
*
* @since unknown
* @todo Transition over to using the new HTTP Request API (jacob).
*
* @param string $url the URL of the file to download
* @return mixed WP_Error on failure, string Filename on success.
*/
function download_url( $url ) {
//WARNING: The file is not automatically deleted, The script must unlink() the file.
if ( ! $url )
return new WP_Error(’http_no_url’, __(’Invalid URL Provided’));

$tmpfname = wp_tempnam($url);
if ( ! $tmpfname )
return new WP_Error(’http_no_file’, __(’Could not create Temporary file’));

$handle = @fopen($tmpfname, ‘wb’);
if ( ! $handle )
return new WP_Error(’http_no_file’, __(’Could not create Temporary file’));

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 60));

if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
fclose($handle);
unlink($tmpfname);
return $response;
}

if ( $response['response']['code'] != ‘200′ ){
fclose($handle);
unlink($tmpfname);
return new WP_Error(’http_404′, trim($response['response']['message']));
}

fwrite($handle, $response['body']);
fclose($handle);

return $tmpfname;
}

Okay, notice the line we need to change?

Yep, this one

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 60));

By default it is set to 60 seconds, so we can increase it depends to our downstream. For me, I only able to download 800 kB or so in 60 seconds (as shown when the update failed), so for Wordpress package that usually more than 2 MB, I need to multiply it to at least three times. But for playing safe, I multiply it to five, or 300 seconds. Then, I change the above line to this

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 300));

Upload and replace the old files. Try to do update again and it should proceed smoothly now.

Please notes that when the update finished, this file will be changed as well, so when you trying to update next time, your timeout will back to default set by Wordpress developer. So, when you want to update next time, it is recommended to repeat this step, and in future version, this function may be changed as well, so it is preferable to don’t use the copy of the older version you have changed this time.

Well, I hope Wordpress developer will add this to configuration, so we don’t need to change the files manually anymore. Thanks for reading, hope it useful.