Apatar, F/OSS Visual Data Integration

About 5 years ago I turned my lazy brain on its wheels around to help me create decent parsers to processes GSM switches configuration and traffic data. Anyone has ever deal with those data must have known the fun we could have in interacting with them.

I was a fool back then (now is not any better, I've become more foolish then ever), not knowing how things worked and fueled by young-man's passsion, I decided to create them by myself, hand-written using C, the "best programming language" ever created by mankind. :-)

I didn't just jump to pure C, though, I remember that I had first thought to create them using bison and flex (UNIX techies: they are free-software implementation of yacc and lex). For this, I studied those wonderful things about language grammars, stomata, recursive descent, right-recursive, left-recursive, the Backus-Naur Form, and many other things that I've now -ofcourse- forgotten about :-)

Apparently my learning was not enough or I was just simply to stupid to grasp the whole concepts or both. I manage to create some parsers, but they turn out to be so complex for me that I couldn't easily debug and adjust them everytime there are errors or updates.

So I turn to C. Just C this time. I even bought Peter van der Linden Deep C Secrets book. A really great and recommended book for learning C. I have some good laughs from there, too. (This reminds me, where is that book now? Hello?)

From the book, I got valuable lessons about finite-state machines. I use this knowledge to create my parsers using C, and succeeded in doing so. I could even understands the code at the time, although since it has never failed me yet, I've also forgotten about it :-)

I do remember that those experiences was while thrilling and enjoyable at the same time also hair-pulling and nightmarish. Something that I'm not sure I wanted to do again if the fish is not worth it.

Nowadays, I learn that people use these things called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools for the kind of work. And so many software vendors has it now. ETL tools that can, at least in theory, read any data in any format and transform it to any format you wanted.

Remembering my past experiences, I'm amazed and thrilled to know that there is also such a tool in F/OSS world called Apatar (http://www.apatar.com). Apatar even has a visual-drag-and-drop-touch-and-go-you-name-it ability to create ETLs that they called DataMap. Many DataMap are already available in their http://www.apatarforge.org forge-site.

If only I have known about these tools back then. May have saved me some sleepless night.

Or not.

World's 3 Richest Men

I just got this from slashdot: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/322239_richest04.html?source=mypi.

So, now the 3 richest man of the world are the ones who have fun in these fields:

1. Telecommunication Network
2. Software Engineering
3. Investment Business

So happens, those are the fields of my current interests.
Hmm. Should not be a bad path afterall.

Just need to make it works for me :-)

Fast notes

It's been a long time, life's great but I've got many things to work on and so little time.

Classic, huh ?
Oh well, now is also only for passing by.

I need to note these important files/directory for me to handle an "unstable" Debian:

- /var/lib/apt/lists
- /var/lib/dpkg/status
- /var/lib/dpkg/available

Kept forgetting about them.

Menggambar garis miring di monitor

Perkara mudah kah?
Seperti banyak hal lainnya dalam dunia komputer, ini adalah perkara yang sepertinya mudah namun kenyataannya sulit sekali.

Untungnya sudah ada yang memikirkannya dan hasil formulanya disebut dengan Bresenham's algorithm. Hint: Go to Wikipedia for details.

Kalau liat gambar disamping itu, bisa liat kan ketika pada posisi tengah ternyata kita perlu mewarnai 3 pixel, instead of 2, untuk mencapai kemiringan yang diinginkan.

Dan ini baru bicara grafik raster. Kalau vector, wah gak kebayang dech.

Hiks.

RI-1 Gunakan 3G Video Conference

Dalam acara peresmian proyek percontohan pembangunan Rumah Susun Sederhana, Presiden Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono yang berada di Pulo Gebang menggunakan fasilitas 3G video conference Telkomsel untuk tanya jawab dengan penanggung jawab proyek di empat titik lokasi berbeda, yakni di Cakung, Klender, Cipayung, dan Cawang.


Btw, blog ini dan blog lainnya dariku yang terkait dengan Telekomunikasi di Indonesia akan juga tersedia (mungkin lebih banyak) di http://arief.telkom.us yang keberadaannya dibantu oleh Mas Koen yang ruarrr biasa.

UNIX is Simple

... that's what Linus said in his "Just for Fun" book.

Come to think of it, I agree with him.

UNIX. Simple. Small. Beautiful.

But don't let it fools you,
Simplicity is a show-off for elegant ways in solving problems.

And you could only be elegant thru experience and wisdom.
To realise and accept that nobody's perfect, and that you _will_ made mistake.

Hmm, it reminds me of a saying:
"Nobody's perfect. I'm nobody. I'm perfect."

:-)

Dalam 1 bingkai

Gak nyangka bisa ketemu beliau.

Despite all the controversies around him, dengan santainya beliau bersama keluarga berjalan-jalan disalah satu pusat perbelanjaan terbesar di KL. Tanpa bodyguard pula. Well, paling gak, gak ada yang keliatan.

Kayaknya gak banyak orang besar atau mantan orang besar bisa berbuat seperti beliau.

Etch!

... finally released.

Congratulations to all Debian Developers and everybuddy that helps releasing another version of my most favourite OS.

Suddenly this day doesn't seem so bad afterall.

:-)

Our Boundaries

This one taken from thoughtful blog of Eric Sink [http://www.ericsink.com/]

---

Just inside the gates of heaven, St. Peter sits at a desk checking people in.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

The man at the front of the line says, "Lutheran."

Glancing at his clipboard, Peter says, "Room 33. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The process repeats itself with the next person in line:

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #2: "Catholic."

Peter: "Room 17. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

The next person moves to the front of the line with a look of curiosity on her face.

Peter: "Welcome to heaven. What religion?"

Person #3: "Methodist."

Peter: "Room 54. Be very quiet as you pass room 6."

Person #3: "Why do you keep telling us to be quiet as we pass room 6?"

Peter: "Because the Baptists are in room 6, and they think they're the only ones here.

----

More on his thought about this here: [http://www.ericsink.com/articles/Boundaries.html].

So, have you been out of your boundaries?
If you never done so, how could you absolutely positively sure that you are now in the right place?

A bit late, but better than never!

I finally understands what π (pi) really is!
(Hmm, do I?)

Poor me.


(the nice image is taken from wikipedia.org)

What is it so bad about lying?

Click on the title link to see the whole blogpost.

A quote:
"What is so bad about lying? We currently live in a culture that cumulatively lies our asses off on a nearly daily basis. We lie to get out of trouble. (I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t realize how fast I was going.) We lie to avoid doing something we won’t enjoy. (I’d love to go to your party; it’s just that I already made plans.) We lie to get attention (Oh man, I am feeling so sick today) and we lie to get people to like us. (I love your new haircut!)"

A very intriguing question to me, too.
If the world is now full of liars, why do we keep telling our children (and therefore lying to them), that they should not lied?

I think I have an answer, but I'm curious,
what do you think on this matter? please kindly write your thoughts in the comment.

Ubuntu Bug of the Day

I've just found out that Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn Herd 5) is completely uninstallable in a laptop with 250MB of memory. Its "Scanning disk..." dialog may be a nice coffee time companion, but it sure is a pain in the b?tt for users trying to install the beast.

This is a __very__ disappointing experience for me. Even Debian and Slackware could be installed easily nowadays.

The main source of problem seems to point to Ubuntu's decision of making the Installer and the Live CD into one CD and did not provide any installation mode at boot time. This forces user to install from inside Live CD's desktop and thus limiting installable system.

I know Ubuntu's great once you installed it, my desktop is doing fairly fine with it since 5.04 released.

So, to Ubuntu developers, and to Mark Shuttleworth,
I really hope that you'll consider the rest of us in this part of Earth who still need to use "low-powered" computers.

Orang-orang hebat ada di Indonesia

Kemarin hingga tadi pagi, aku baca soal bapak Ali Alatas.

Salah satu orang Indonesia yang bukan hanya Bagus dalam rupa dan tutur, namun juga sikap dan ilmu. Beliau termasuk orang yang tetap dihormati di Indonesia selama pergantian masa terjadi di negeri ini. Beliau juga salah satu orang Indonesia yang dihormati dan disegani oleh dunia internasional.

Prestasinya? mungkin sudah tak terukur lagi.
Jasa beliau sungguh berlimpah, mulai dari membantu memulihkan citra Indonesia, hingga membantu proses perdamaian dan rekonsiliasi negara-negara lain.

---

Tadi malam aku juga liat Chris John di acara tv yang format acara-nya ku gak ngerti. Chris John-nya sich aku tahu, walau baru kali itu aku lihat bagaimana ia pribadi.

Chris John sungguh punya banyak hal yang membuat manusia menjadi manusia. Rendah hati, ramah, luwes, meski juga tampak kekuatan dan keberanian terpancar dari dirinya.

---

Mereka berdua adalah sedikit dari manusia-manusia langit yang ada di bumi Indonesia.

Cahaya yang bisa menembus mendung paling gelap sekalipun.

HALOhybrid

This one is yummy.

Another great innovation from the Company (warning: flash required).

Though, I’ve been thinking and asking for something like this since the first launch of simPATI.

Nice to know it finally realized.

About tech support

Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame, blog about the best tech support he had so far on his wonderful blog: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Mar-01.html

Reading his experience, I'd agree that's how tech support, or customer supports center in general, should perform.

a Database Design Software

Making software is a hard job. Making a good software is harder.

Making a good software that works right instead of blowing apart is even harder. Making a good software that works right and maintainable is __unbelievably__ hard.

Joel even once said that "Good software takes 10 years. Get used to it".

Now, at the heart of this huge task, there is at least one poor person who has to turns all specs, requirements and design documents to code that works. You might imagine what kind of pressure this poor person feels.

So, for this person, a good helper utilities, editors, compilers, IDEs, or maybe a nice comfortable chair and desk (that could also work as a bed) will be highly appreciated. With a better editors (such as vim!), "syntax errors" would be spotted earlier and would prevent nasty bugs that may later became very impossible to track.

One of the tools that is really helpful in the process of creating a database-backed software is a database design software. And for the last weeks, I have manage to found a _very_ good database design software that suits my needs perfectly. It is called DbWrench from Nizana system (http://www.dbwrench.com).

DbWrench can do lots of nice things for me, it manage to "reverse engineer" my databases perfectly. You change something from inside the database server itself? No problem, DbWrench can synchronize the changes. What if you do changes inside DbWrench? Well it will help you to "forward engineer" the changes to the database server.

DbWrench has support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and MS-Access databases. And it also has this very-very nice diagram relationships editor. If that's not enough, the diagram is also exportable to PNG or JPG. A perfect tool for helping not only in database designing and application development processes, but also in documentation processes.

Only downside of it, is that it is not (yet?) a free/open source software, it's build using Java (which might costs you extra memory, but hey, your memory is more important, right?) and the license costs quite a bit. But if you work on a software development company that needs a good database designing software or in badly need for such a tool, then DbWrench is highly recommended.

Turun Untuk Naik

Para suhu di kuil Dairin menyadari, kemampuan dan potensi Chinmi terlalu besar untuk di-kungkung dan hanya belajar kung-fu di dalam kuil Dairin saja.

Mereka pun menghadapi dilema. Apakah mereka akan mengajarkan Chinmi semua ilmu yang mereka miliki dan berharap Chinmi akan mampu memahami semuanya dan mempelajarinya hingga ke level yang lebih tinggi atau mereka perlu melepas Chinmi agar ia belajar dan mendalami kung-fu langsung di dunia luar walaupun belum banyak yang mereka ajarkan.

Tetua yang bijak memahami bahwa mengekang Chinmi dengan segala macam aturan kuil akan berakibat negatif, Si bocah lincah dan cerdas itu pun dilepas. Para pendekar dunia persilatan biasa mengenal hal ini dengan istilah turun gunung.

Ternyata keputusan para suhu tidak salah, walau selalu membawa embel-embel Kuil Dairin dalam petualangannya, Chinmi berhasil mempelajari ilmu-ilmu baru. Pemahaman-pemahaman mendalam akan hakikat kung-fu pun ia dapatkan tidak hanya dari petarungan-petarungannya melawan musuh-musuh yang hebat, namun juga dari pengalaman-pengalamannya langsung hasil interaksinya dengan masyarakat.

Ketika kembali untuk mengajar di Kuil Dairin, bocah konyol itu telah berubah menjadi seorang yang memiliki kung-fu tinggi dan juga bijak, cerdas serta memiliki kepahaman mendalam akan makna alam semesta.

Chinmi berhasil meraih sesuatu yang sulit didapatkan para pendekar kang-ow dengan jurus pamungkas tanpa tandingan sekalipun.

Sang tetua bijak pun tersenyum penuh arti dan kembali kedalam perenungannya yang tiada habis untuk menikmati dan mensyukuri hidup dan kesemestaan.

Tentang Routing

Teknologi maju.

Orang pun bisa berkomunikasi tanpa perlu bertemu. Hal-hal sederhana tapi (mungkin) bermakna seperti mengucapkan selamat pagi, menjadi begitu mudah dilakukan. Dari antar kelurahan hingga antar negara. (Mengapa hal-hal ini tidak dilakukan lebih sering dari sebelumnya tidak akan dibahas disini, paling tidak, tidak sekarang).

Lalu untuk mempermudah, daripada bikin kabel-kabel tersambung dari satu rumah ke rumah lain, atau dari satu orang ke orang lain, Sentral-sentral telekom pun dibangun. Dengan begini, tiap orang tidak musti punya kabel ke tiap orang lainnya, cukup ke 1 sentral saja (ada banyak cerita tambahan soal ini).

Masalahnya sekarang, seiring bertambahnya orang, kota dan negara, jumlah sentral telekom yang dibangun pun meningkat. Kalau mau diitung, mungkin jumlah sentral sekarang di seluruh dunia, sudah sama dengan jumlah orang seluruh dunia dulu waktu jaman pak Bell baru menemukan telpon.

Lalu kita punya masalah yang sama seperti dulu. Bagaimana menghubungkan antar sentral satu dengan yang lain? Demi menghindari keperluan koneksi kesemua dari semua (meshed) maka dikembangkanlah konsep hirarki sentral dan routing antar sentral.

Dengan konsep hirarki, sentral bisa berfungsi ganda, selain sebagai penghubung ke pelanggan (interesting to note that nowadays "pelanggan" gak selalu orang) juga sebagai penghubung ke sentral lainnya. Ada yang punya fungsi salah satu saja, ada yang dua-duanya.

Kemudian untuk menghubungkan panggilan antar sentral yang bisa berbeda hirarki, atau bahkan jaringan, itu konsep routing pun dikembangkan.

Supaya mudah, orang mulai dengan konsep Static Routing. Tabel-tabel tujuan-tujuan beserta kemungkinan-kemungkinan arah sambungan disusun. Ada prioritas 1, 2, 3, dst. Tergantung keadaan jaringan, perubahan-perubahan konfigurasi, bahkan kadang-kadang, mood si administrator, isi tabel ini bisa berubah.

Masalahnya sekarang, keadaan jaringan sangat rentan. Mbah Erlang dari dulu sudah sadar bahwa adalah sangat tidak ekonomis bila kita mencoba menyediakan jaringan komunikasi untuk semua orang. Lebih dari itu, Mbah Erlang juga menemukan bahwa, selama kondisi beban jaringan dipersiapkan pada angka tertentu, maka dengan ijin Allah (yg ini beneran perlu ijin Allah lho), kita akan punya kapasitas jaringan yang cukup untuk semua orang.

Namun Mbah Erlang hidup di jaman waktu orang masih sedikit. Ketika orang sudah banyak seperti sekarang ini, dengan beragam kemauannya, seringkali Allah tidak mengijinkan kecukupan kapasitas jaringan itu tadi. Dan Static Routing pun tidak selalu bisa memecahkan masalah ini.

Kemudian orang mulai berpikir, hmm... kalo gitu Routing ini harus bisa dinamis, dia harus bisa mengatasi perubahan mood para pengguna maupun administrator, dia harus bisa merasakan. Harus bisa bereaksi, bahkan pada saat-saat tertentu, harus bisa mengantisipasi.

Eh... kayaknya posting ini udah kepanjangan... lanjut nanti dech.

Symfony 1.0 Released

Hmmm... another yumm-yumm on the block.

Seriously, I think this is one of the best php framework existed nowadays. Hopefully it will improved over time.

Congrats to the developers.

Jakarta Kebanjiran

... di Bogor, tanah longsor.

Ada angka-angka, ada statistik, namun itu semua lagi gak menarik, paling gak, tidak dari sisi biasanya.

Yang menarik justru, ketika menyadari betapa besar dan padatnya Jakarta. Bahkan dalam segala macam peristiwa ini, masih banyak orang yang punya, dan atau harus menjalani, segala macam aktivitas. Sedemikian sehingga mereka rela melakukan beragam macam akrobat, memeras otak dan berkeringat, kadang juga basah-basahan, demi sesuatu itu.

Lebih menarik lagi, gak kalah banyak orang yang tidak mau melepaskan kesempatan bersenang-senang di hari-hari ini. Pagelaran-pagelaran musik dangdut masih penuh dan membludak. Ini dulu aku pandang tragis. Sekarang, mungkin cuma keliatan sebagai ironi. Atau komedi. Komedi hitam yang lucu, tapi pahit. Kayak kopi n3sc4f3 tanpa gula dicampur susu kental manis. Manis nggak, pahit iya, susu juga.

Sementara itu, di belahan benua lain, ilmuwan berkumpul dan meminta aksi secepatnya dari dunia untuk mulai mengurangi hingga menghilangkan penyebab-penyebab global warming, yang mereka indikasikan sebagian besar sebagai akibat ulah manusia. Penggunaan bahan bakar fosil disinyalir sebagai penyumbang utama.

Global warming bila dibiarkan, akan menyebabkan beragam bencana, mulai dari banjir yang semakin mem-bandang, seribu juta topan badai, mencairnya es-es kutub, dan bencana-bencana lain yang bisa seseram mungkin disampaikan oleh para ilmuwan.

Menarik untuk berpikir, bahwa meskipun mereka telah punah ribuan-jutaan tahun yang lalu, Dinosaurus masih merupakan ancaman bagi manusia. Hi..hi..hi... eskapis!

Oh well.