Phoenix Mendarat

Image taken from: http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/
This rendition of the Phoenix lander was created by artist Corby Waste of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As the Mars program artist, Mr. Waste has created artwork for several Mars missions.


Akhirnya setelah menempuh sekitar 680 juta kilometer dalam kurang dari 300 hari (kecepatan rata2 sekitar: 100rb km/jam ?) Phoenix akhirnya mendarat di Mars.

Misinya masih sama, meneliti apakah mungkin/dimungkinkan ada kehidupan di planet Mars. Mungkin itu artinya apakah sudah ada kehidupan disana, dimungkinkan itu artinya apakah bisa membawa kehidupan kesana.

Kalau memang suatu saat Mars bisa dibuat hijau seperti Bumi "dahulu", pertanyaannya adalah, mungkinkah manusia tinggal disana tanpa mengulangi kesalahan-kesalahan mereka di Bumi?

Suatu hal yang percuma, sebenarnya.

Tapi aku harus tulis disini.

Beberapa waktu lalu ada yang membuat gugatan class action (karena gak penting, maka aku tak mau tulis disini soal apa gugatannya, and no, bukan soal bbm) dengan mengatasnamakan seluruh rakyat Indonesia.

Dan rakyat Indonesia harus "memilih untuk tidak ikut" untuk tidak diikutsertakan dalam class action itu. Something that I really think as an intellectual harrasment (baca: pelecehan intelektual).

Absurd.

Ganti caranya, bukan tujuannya

Membaca blog Seth Godin [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/] membawaku membaca cerita langkah baru dari Borders disini: http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy/2008/03/borders-reducin.html (gambar diatas juga diambil disitu).

Kutipan yang menarik:
"Borders did some customer research at its front-facing prototype store and learned customers perceived Borders as having more books, not fewer, with this new display strategy"

Mengingatkanku untuk terus-menerus berkreasi. Maju. Berkarya.

Langkah pertama mewujudkan mimpi kita adalah: Bangun.

How high can you go?

Mistakes are something that we as human do.

And there is nothing wrong with them. Make mistakes. Make a lot of them.

In fact, I don't think we should ever think to stop making mistakes, we will do it no matter what.

Only, one thing we should always do after making mistakes: make it right. Don't just fall, get on your knees, get up and heal. Learn from our mistakes. Be a better person.

As always, it doesn't just stop there. Do not think that you are free to do all the mistakes in the world, well... actually, you are free to do them, but there will be consequences you must face. Sooner or later.

Even worse are when we make mistakes and repeating them. Without getting into the process of healing and learning. We'll soon be trapped and by then it would be next to impossible to return.

Let me show a graph:
It's a very simple graph, huh? It's created by Gnumeric, one of the best spreadsheet software in the world :-)

I get acquainted with the graph during my study of the Erlang distribution several years ago (oh how time flies). This simple graph is actually a very interesting graph in telecommunication engineering as well as in this blog entry.

How so? Well, first of all, it gave us a limit. The fine pink line that is. Second, it shown us the point when we are crossing the limit, that is when the pink meets the blue. Watch the blue line for the third point. The blue line will eventually goes over the upper boundary and does not seems to have any plan of coming down. It will just fly.. up.. up... and away.

I called the area below the pink line as the area of "windows vista" (you may called it area of affordable mistakes). And above it are the "adam air" area (you may called it grounded and bankrupted area). The crossing of pink and blue is the point of time for one of those critical decisions of our life.

Sadly, not all of us are aware of our own limits. I think many do not even realize that we have such a limit. I'm here to tell that the limit does exist. It will not be at the same point for each of us. For Microsoft it may lies in USD. 5-10 billion dollar. For most of us that are not so lucky (or so unlucky?), it may be much, much, closer than we thought.

It doesn't have to be financial limits. It may not even concerns money. It may be about our way of life, our thoughts, our acts.

"I'm a brave stud, I cross limits all the time", I hear you say. Well, sure. You could cross many limits in your life, but if you choose to cross this one, you will just not be yourself anymore. You will change to something else (SCO, anyone?). You could turn from an angel to cursed ones at a fingersnap.

Note the word choose above? There are two other things we could also see from the graph. One is the fact that the limit is not hidden. We could learn about it, we could even work to move it another point above. Another one is that the blue line is actually giving us hints and signs of where we are going. So, we could actually choose to prevent it to cross the limit, or we could choose to stop a moment and correct ourselves.

How to solve the problem and make correct decision is an exercise we all have to meet.

Me getting drowned?

Great.

Right after saying that my notes were getting boring and I should've had written more "insightful" or "interesting" or "funny" notes, I stopped writing.

I guess that's just life, it's everything happenings when you're busy making up plans :-)

Well, life has been interesting these past two months. Meet new people, facing new challenges, (trying to) getting more things done.

Me become boring?

Been reading my own blog one night, and I've suddenly realize that I've written boring or too complicated stuffs with my not-so-perfect english.

It has become so lame that I manage to get my self fallen a sleep while reading them :-)

Me blog got to have the fun elements back.
That's why I wanted to blog in the first place, and that's what I think blogs should be about. Fun, uplifting stories (well, gotta admit, also need a bit of self-praising and full of ego at moments).

Hey, that could be one of my resolutions for 2008 :-)

2007's been an overall good year, let's work and hope that 2008 is a better one.

Happy 2008, everyone.

How do you install Adempiere with PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu?

Having to repeat these steps over and over again (to help friends, I myself don't know anything -yet- about Adempiere or ERP in general), I better put this down here.

I know that there are great clues from adempiere's wiki (http://adempiere.com/wiki/index.php), but these steps are what is convinient for me, most are the same as in wiki.

First thing's first, download Adempiere package from sourceforge. I got this one:
Adempiere_331b

Install sun-java5-* packages (hint: aptitude install sun-java5-*, I choose to install all packages)

Configure pljava support for postgresql:
- Download the precompiled binaries package:
for postgresql-8.1: from pgfoundry.org
for postgresql-8.2: http://www.posterita.org/share/pljava.zip

- Configure so that postgres user is trusted (edit pg_hba.conf and do postgresql server restart after) While you're at it, remember to also configure adempiere user access in pg_hba.conf (I just set it to trust for local access)

- Copy pljava.so and pljava.jar from the pljava package to /usr/lib/postgresql/VERSION/lib

- Link libjvm.so (without it, pljava install will fail, I choose linking than adding entries to ld.so.conf) :
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so /usr/lib/libjvm.so

- Add the following lines to end of postgresql.conf :

custom_variable_classes = 'pljava'
pljava.classpath='/usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib/pljava.jar'
pljava.statement_cache_size = 10
pljava.release_lingering_savepoints = true
pljava.vmoptions = ' '
pljava.debug = false

- Then to environment (/etc/postgresql/VERSION/main/environment)

JAVA_HOME = '/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun'

- Copy install.sql to /tmp, for run by postgres user (hint: su to root then su - postgres), so that we could just run it by:
psql template1 -f /tmp/install.sql

while we're at it, remember to also create adempiere user:
createuser adempiere

- Restart postgresql server

Now after postgresql preparation ready let's go to adempiere. I usually just prepare an Adempiere directory on user's home. And make this setup:

/home/USER/Adempiere/Server
/home/USER/Adempiere/Client

Also do this:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun
export ADEMPIERE_HOME=/home/arief/Adempiere

and remember to put those lines on the end of ~/.bashrc too.

Then I extract the Adempiere package to the Server directory. Then copy and extract the AdempiereClient.zip (you may get it from Server/lib/AdempiereClient.zip) on Client directory.

on Server, I do:
chmod 755 *.sh utils/*.sh

Then execute: Server/RUN_setup.sh

On the configuration setup screen, I usually setup webserver port to: 8080 and 4433, so that I could run Adempiere as regular user. For database, don't forget to set it to postgresql. If on testing the configuration you failed to connect to the web or database, try changing the host to '127.0.0.1' or localhost or your computer name and re-test.

If test all passed, you can save the config (click the Save button) then just wait for the setup to finish.

After setup we can now import the database structure (also with some demo data) by running:
Server/utils/RUN_ImportAdempiere.sh

If all's fine with the postgres-pljava setup, we should move along just fine here. And when it's all done. We could start the Adempiere Server with:
Server/utils/RUN_Server2.sh

And then we could start client by:
Client/RUN_Adempiere.sh

at first run it will ask for configuration. Just fill it the values you put on the server setup.

After that, Client should started up and showing nice graphs and dashboards. This is where I get amazed and confused and pressed the Quit button :-)

Oh, for easier launch, I usually add these two files:

/home/USER/Adempiere/server_start.sh
/home/USER/Adempiere/client_start.sh

With contents like these:
#!/bin/sh
# server_start.sh
#
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

cd /home/USER/Adempiere/Server/utils/
ADEMPIERE_HOME=/home/USER/ADempiere/Server /home/USER/Adempiere/Server/utils/RUN_Server2.sh

#!/bin/sh
# client_start.sh
#
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

cd /home/USER/Adempiere/Server/utils/
ADEMPIERE_HOME=/home/USER/ADempiere/Client /home/USER/Adempiere/Client/RUN_Adempiere.sh

Then I could create nice launchers for them and put it on panel or desktop. Remember to set to run server_start.sh inside a terminal.

Hope I didn't missed anything.

Telecomm network service management

This is going to be a heavy one :-)

As telecomm network technology grows, the amount of complexities in systems and subsystems involved grows also. This may not be such a big deal if we are still focusing our attention at the network level. Only, we don't have that privilege anymore.

Telecomm subscribers has also growth and changed, the people learned to demand more, in quality and quantity of services they have. The word "subscriber" itself is a bit ambiguous nowadays, because it could point not only to people but also to other businesses, or even to other networks or equipments.

So, operators started to think about the problems from the Service point of view. By taking the view up one level it helps them to think more clearly about the problem at hand. But this also brought in another layer of complexities. In Network point of view, a problem may be located and fixed in just a node in a subsystem. In Service pov, things get alot more complex, service problems may be caused by several points in the network, in different subsystems.

The growth of network complexities and the ever demanding customers need to be taken cared of in a smarter way. When not so long ago we can limit telecomm services as just Voice services and may easily identify and fix a problem in the service, currently we talk about different kind of services with different requirements and different parts of network.

When in PSTN we only talked about Switchings and leased circuits, then in GSM we had increased complexity of MSCs, VLRs, HLRs, BSCs, BTSs, VAS, etc, and now in 3G we have more interesting things (Node-B, RNCs, new interfaces, etc) to play with and the trends will keep went up in the next years in the next generation networks.

Funnily, errr or is it sadly..??, I notice that network designers/engineers seems to be unnotified or ignorant about this issue, they keep designing and engineers "new-and-better" networks with extended complexities in each new release and still (atleast seems to me) putting this service quality issue behind.

In service quality management world, OSS (should) played much more important role than before, and people has seems to acknowledge about this, equipment vendors have started to think about this, third-party consultants started to said alot of things, some have also started to present "solutions" to help overcome this problem.

Note that it's almost always a "solutions" not a ready system/product. That's because this is still an area with most complexities, usually people tend to stay away from this kind of issue when they can. Some operators has started projects to handle the situation, some manage to get good results (or so I've been told), some are still striving to get it done.

Personally, I think that a "network and service quality management" solution is close to impossible to be implemented correctly. There simply not enough budgets and resources for this in many operators. But I still think that there are many un-explored ways to solve the problem.

... to be continued ...

Human Computation

Just learn about this great idea from Dr. Luis von Ahn presentation here. The presentation is based on his PhD theses. I want to try to describe here, briefly, what he is doing. His idea has turn on lots of bulbs in my brain.

He start by telling the story of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart). We all should by now probably know about CAPTCHA, and how does it help preventing spammers to get millions of free email account.

CAPTCHA is a computer-generated product that currently only human can solve but not other computer program. See the paradox? This is the basic idea of Human Computation. There are still areas where humans do better job than computers. And we do it well, way better than computers currently capable of.

What some of us may not know is that spammers have found a way to solve CAPTCHA. There are 2 basic ways (I myself knows about the first way, but only learn the second way from Luis' presentation).

First, spammers pay people to actually solve CAPTCHAs. But this has turn out costly for them. Second clever thing they done, is by using p*rn-sites. Spammers create p*rn sites that when visitors want to see more, they would have to enters words of a CAPTCHA (which behind the screen will then be submitted to Yahoo's email registration form). Being passionated p&rn lover, more often than not, those visitors will as fast as the can typed in the CAPTCHA :-)

The second example taught us a very interesting idea (in my words): We can use human computational power to solve computer-unsolved problems in a way that's actually "fun" for them, plus we don't need to spent a lot of money to pay them :-) And to know just how many wasted cycles of human computation is, Luis gave a figure: In 2003 estimated that there are > 30 billion man-hours wasted on playing the game Solitaire.

So what kind of problems that we may solve? Turn out there are a lot of them. Luis gave example of giving better descriptions to images on the web, so that a search for images could give better results.

To solve that problem Luis created (not another p*rn site, no!) 2 kinds of game he called symmetric and asymmetric game. One of the game he has created basically just ask people to put on words that describe images. The results are then used by google images search to help them provide correct images to people when they are searching for, say, 'cat'.

But that would take long time, right? you may ask. Well, you gotta see Luis' presentation to learn much about interesting statistics, shortly I can only say it does worked!

You can see, and try, the games at www.espgame.org and www.peekaboom.org. I just checked espgame site, and there it shows that they have been giving > 33 million image labels since October 2003. Wow.

Luis himself seems doesn't just stop there. He continued to do research on how to solve more interesting problems.

I noted one interesting question in the video: Would it be possible that for every boring job we do, we could create fun ways to do it? Of which Luis answered, I don't know, it would be great if we could figure out how to do this for every problem. But yes, this is an open problem.

An interesting open-problem,
So let's use up those wasted computation cycles :-)

Google Android

Just watched this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg.

What... can... I ... say... ?

a Good Software?

Joel (the on-software guy) has been doing marketing tours of his company's FogBugz version 6, a project management with all kinds of "thingamajiggies" software.

I noted two things:
First, his marketing strategy is very good. By giving free product demo and presentation all over the world.

Second, FogBugz 6 is a _very-very_ good software. That's what I would think how all software with user-interfaces should behave. Four thumbs up for Joel and team.

Info: You could watch a video recording of Joel presentation in Austin here: http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/24austindemo.html

If you have slow internet connections or some crazy proxy that won't let you enjoy the video (it's 265 MB big), I've found out that you could wget the flash video here: http://media.fogcreek.com/Joel-Austin07.flv

Admittedly, I've learned a lot.

Update: I should have said I've learned at least 3 things, the other one is the Evidence Based Scheduling system FogBugz have. Always have wondered about tracking and estimating time on my projects (by projects I really mean those are all the things/stuffs that require me to actually DO them).

Back to Fitrah :-)

Please... forgive us.

Happy Ied Mubarak 1428 H.

may Allah always be in our path.
Here and after.

Arief - Rizka - Aga - Nadia - Ghifa
... and all the rest of the team...

64 (virtual) Processors on your desktop?

Taken from a great article by Ulrich Drepper on http://lwn.net:

"... Red Hat, as of 2007, expects that for future products, the “standard building blocks” for most data centers will be a computer with up to four sockets, each filled with a quad core CPU that, in the case of Intel CPUs, will be hyper-threaded. {Hyper-threading enables a single processor core to be used for two or more concurrent executions with just a little extra hardware.} This means the standard system in the data center will have up to 64 virtual processors. ..."

Suspend-Resume in OLPC Laptop

Jim Gettys of X windows fame, share a story how he and OLPC team (CMIIW) got the laptop doing suspend and resume on hundred-thousand cycles.

Read about it here.

To C or To C++

This one from Linus, surely is my kind of comment :-)

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

Indonesia Earthquake Informations

Just got this done 2 weeks ago, but only roughly. Then I've improve it by showing historical data also.

It's accessible on my website (http://arief-mulya.com/gempa.php).

All data are taken directly from BMG EWS server. I use wireshark to help me find out what are the protocols used to get the data. I don't think my implementation to have the data is yet the best way. And it doesn't currently handle warning cancelations informations (such as tsunami warning cancelations, etc).

Don't have the time to improve it again for now, but I've plan to put a "latest-only" link and rss feed also there. If anyone knows a free web-to-sms services, please let me know, I'd love to put the ability of giving sms warning there also.

Linux Power Consumption

Intel has created powertop [www.linuxpowertop.org], a power consumption watch utilitiy that work very similar to `top` program but this is to watch processes that takes much of your laptop battery life.

In Debian unstable I could just apt-get install powertop to use it. It also has the ability to give many (useful?) suggestions how to save my power. After implement some of them, I get to save a few watts and extends my battery life.

What's also interesting to me, I've learn that accessing gmail from firefox seems to contribute a lot to my laptop power consumption. Heavy javascripts? Don't know, but this may results of me not standing by gmail all the time from now on.

GNOME Online Desktop Project

An interesting project.
I think it suits me quite well.

Considering that I spent most of my computing time nowadays through a Web Browser (for all my application needs) and a Terminal (for programming and quick and dirty work).

Next Step Plan

Your list of things TODO, is actually a list of things you _cannot_ / _will-not_ do.

Not until you actually plan what needs to be done for each of the mumble-mumble you identify as "TODO".

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.