The Malaysian Free and Open Source Community Speaks!

Colin Charles: Unexcited by Apple Music event announcements

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:41:05 +0000

Today I installed iTunes 10. Apple has stopped requiring you to reboot your computer the moment you get an iTunes upgrade – I consider this a plus point. Its now sporting a new logo, and things look a little more polished in the application.

Noticing no Ping, which seemed to be all the rage in the morning, I wondered what the cause might be. Quite clearly, you don’t get in on Ping, Apple’s new social network, if they don’t run an iTunes Music Store in your country! The moment I made the change to my US-based iTunes account, all seemed to be OK, and I could start playing around with Ping.

Then it became clearer why they didn’t want me to use Ping. “Each time you purchase, review, rate or like music on the iTunes Store, it will appear here” (so it said on my profile). At the moment, Ping does not fit my use case – I rip audio CDs that I purchase, and they have information within iTunes thanks to the CDDB database it syncs with. I have never purchased music from the iTunes Music Store, because I cannot be bothered with using a foreign credit card or looking for iTunes gift certificates.

Does this in any way hamper last.fm/AudioScrobbler? Probably a little, considering Ping is built-into iTunes. Plus you can follow your favourite artistes ;-) Does this mean people will quit last.fm for Ping? I find it highly unlikely. But last.fm is probably on their toes now, since there’s some overlap – concert recommendations, etc. Ping also is run within iTunes, you can’t use a web browser. There does not seem to be any API either.

Then, people got excited with Apple’s new Apple TV. I didn’t. Its not international. OK, not international enough. I can still buy the old Apple TV from the Malaysian or Singaporean Apple Store. The new ones seem to be available for sale in Australia, UK, the US, and probably a few other countries where you can rent/buy movies from the store.

The iPod Touch? Some good changes, but the camera isn’t all that hip. Good enough for FaceTime. Speaking of FaceTime, it is apparently based on open standards. Steve Jobs said something like it will be open. When will Apple release some information about how others can independently implement FaceTime? Or inter-operate with FaceTime?

Game Center looks interesting. Social gaming is going to be big (also, big in iOS4.1). The new iPhone 4’s don’t have iOS4.1 yet, but when the update comes (next week?), you will get Game Center too. And the iPod touch should be fast – sporting an A4 chip. Apple has successfully made devices do multiple things (iPod touch: music player, game machine, video conferencing tool, etc.). Would I buy one? I’m still too smitten with my iPad, so much so I haven’t used my 1st generation iPod Touch since April 2010!

The new iPod Nano looks cool. Its a pity they’ve removed the camera. And the shuffle, well, its a shuffle – I’ve never owned one.

So the Apple Music event turned out to mostly be a bummer, unless you live in a country where the iTunes Music Store is available.

Harisfazillah Jamel: Pengenalan Kpd Linux

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:05:38 +0000

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Pengenalan Kpd Linux

View more presentations from Harisfazillah Jamel.

Mohammad Hafiz bin Ismail: Ubuntu 10.04 fix for USB Drive not mounting on pc with Floppy Drive

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:46:40 +0000

Here’s a quick fix for an Ubuntu 10.04 bug that prevents USB Drive from mounting on a PC with Floppy drive (wow, these things still exist?)

The solution is to remove the floppy drive module from linux kernel and you will be able to mount usb drive.
sudo modprobe -r floppy

Should you ever need the module again, you can issue
sudo modprobe floppy
to load the module back (alongside with the annoying bug).

Hope this will help!

p/s: To be fair, my office Dell Optiplex machine (with Pentium 4 HT 2.80GHz, 2005 issue) still has those floppy drives, although I haven’t use them ever since they assigned it to me (back in 2008).

Swee Meng: Doing ajax with django models serialization: jquery part

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:58:00 +0000

We have finished(somewhat) with our json source, now we can do ajax. With the help of jquery, we can use the data source to create something interactive. One of the key ingredient is the jquery ajax function, there is a few such as, $.post, $.get, $.getJSON etc. Here I use $.getJSON, because

Lets start with load data to a table from a json source last post.

Loading data into table alone is not that exciting, and you can do that using django templates, but this shows a example of loading data using json

You can get the example project here
http://github.com/sweemeng/Sweemeng-django-example/tree/master/djangoajax/

Aman Yus (codept): HPUX identify the 9th lun

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:27:13 +0000

N1# scsimgr lun_map -D /dev/rdisk/disk88 \
| tail | grep Instance
Instance = 83

N1# scsimgr get_attr -C lunpath -I 83 -a lunid \
| grep '#'
current =0x4009000000000000 (LUN # 9, Flat Space Addressing)

N1# ioscan -m dsf /dev/rdisk/disk88
Persistent DSF Legacy DSF(s)
========================================
/dev/rdisk/disk88 /dev/rdsk/c5t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c7t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c9t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c11t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c13t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c15t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c17t1d1
/dev/rdsk/c19t1d1

Nicholas A. Suppiah (tboxmy): Installing ubuntu 10.04 and KDE

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:52:00 +0000

KDE 4.4 looks good on the Ubuntu 10.04. Yup, finally have the time to upgrade but I only had the Ubuntu CDROM, so later after the install had to manually install KDE4.

Using reference from my previous blog on Installing Kubuntu 9.10. Launch from KMenu the Synaptics or Kpackagekit to install additional applications and libraries. Below is a checklist of items to install.

note: to install via the terminal (CLI), e.g.
sudo apt-get install wvdial

A. Adding KDE desktop manager to Ubuntu

kdebase-workspace
kde-window-manager

B. For the web experience to surf and email

openjdk-6-jre (using hotspot)
thunderbird & enigmail
icedtea6-plugin
adobe-flashplugin
See item D.

C. System tools

gdecrypt
password-gorilla
ssh sshfs ksshaskpass
khelpcenter4
wvdial
nmap
wireshark
ksnapshot

D. Multimedia, Fonts and codecs

ttf-mscorefonts-installer & cabextract
kubuntu-restricted-extras
vlc videolan-doc mozilla-plugin-vlc vlc-plugin-sdl (include libvcdinfo0)
k3b libk3b6-extracodecs
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
gimp-help-en & gimp-data-extras
kdenlive
recorditnow

E. IBM Thinkpad utils

tpb
tp-smapi-dkms

F. OpenOffice.org extra stuff

openoffice.org-ogltrans
openoffice.org-report-builder
openoffice.org-presentation-minimizer
mozilla-openoffice.org
openoffice.org-mysql-connector & mysql-server
myspell-en-gb
openoffice.org-kde
libmysql-java
mdbtools

G. Software development, Eclipse and Android (refer to previous post)

G.1. Apache, PHP & mysql (see previous post)

apache2 & php5 & php-pear (after done check that modules are enabled, run command a2enmod php5 )
mysql-server
php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 libapache2-mod-auth-mysql

Not everything can be done via the synaptics. Others that require downloading from the internet manually;

truecrypt-6.3a & libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb
Extract PCL_ZTEDCV.tar.gz and install (ZTE usb modem) & libqt3-mt_3.3.8-b-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
Download AdobeReader (to view PDF files) from http://get.adobe.com/reader

Nicholas A. Suppiah (tboxmy): Plasma widget error - "could not create a python scriptengine"

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:29:00 +0000

In Kubuntu 10.04, Adding widgets may give webkit and scriptengine errors. Here are some of the solutions.

"could not create a python scriptengine"
When installing Solar System widget to desktop, that error appears. Solution is to install plasma-scriptengine-python, e.g. at the terminal (CLI) type;

sudo apt-get install plasma-scriptengine-python

"could not create a webkit scriptengine for the scripted image widget"
When installing Scripted Image widget to desktop, above error appears. Solution, install plasma-scriptengine-webkit. E.g. at CLI type;

sudo apt-get install plasma-scriptengine-webkit

-the end-

Mohammad Hafiz bin Ismail: Test Password Strength at HowSecureIsMyPassword.net

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:42:02 +0000

So how secure is your password? You can test it from this website : http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Warning: Do not use your real password for testing on this website, it is not secured!

Low Kian Seong: Blogging awards

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:06:51 +0000

Geeta from packt informed me that Packt is having this contest for opensource blogs. To quote the site with the contest running on it's fifth installment:

"Now in its fifth year, the Award, formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award, is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward not only CMSes but a wider range of Open Source projects."

Nominations start on August 9 and ends on September 17, so get your nominations in! You can read the full announcement here.

Mohammad Hafiz bin Ismail: Debian Day 2010 aka Debian 17th Birthday!

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:41:50 +0000

Debian has already turns 17 ! For those who wants to celebrate it (especially LoCo), you can follow the methodology as outlined in the DebianDay2010 Wiki page.

I still didn’t see Malaysia among the LoCos that organized Debian Day 2010, perhaps we can hold a meeting on that?