Month: August 2005

Keranamu Malaysia

For this special entry of Malaysia’s 48th Independence Anniversary I will be writing in Malay.

malaysia_flag.gif 

Hari ini, tanggal 31 Ogos 2005 Malaysia meraikan ulangtahun kemerdekaan ke-48. Banyak yang telah berlaku sejak hari bersejarah 31 Ogos 1957. Malaysia kini lebih matang dan melangkah pantas ke arah kemajuan.

Sudah tentulah, apa sahaja yang ingin dicapai semestinya datang dengan harga yang tertentu. Malaysian semakin maju, taraf hidup rakyat semakin baik, namun agak sedih apabila mengenangkan semakin banyak keruntuhan akhlak dan moral yang berlaku di sini. Tidak kurang juga, Malaysia yang dahulunya aman damai semakin tercemar dengan kes-kes jenayah yang tidak berhenti-henti. Kes bunuh, ragut, rogol, rasuah, dan sebagainya bagaikan lumrah kehidupan saban hari. Menonton Buletin Utama di TV3 sudah cukup, tidak perlu lagi menonton filem-filem Hollywood.

Saya tidak akan menyentuh langsung perihal politik di sini. Politik adalah amat kompleks bagi saya dan ada di mana-mana sahaja di muka bumi. 

Saya bukanlah seorang tokoh masyarakat ataupun seorang ahli bijak pandai, oleh itu rasanya kurang layak bagi saya untuk memberikan pendapat yang lebih mengenai masalah-masalah negara. Tetapi apa yang nyata, kekal nyata. Hanya dengan menggunakan akal biasa saja kita fikirkan… Malaysia sudah merdeka sejak 48 tahun yang lalu, merdekakah budaya dan akal rakyat kita? 

Keranamu Malaysia… Selamat ulangtahun kemerdekaan ke 48! 

Services and Price List

Since I have received a lot of requests and people complaining about getting prices for specific services, I have created my own price estimation list for your convenience. For interested parties, please do not hesitate to contact me directly via email (ady at romantika dot name) or (ady dot romantika at gmail dot com).

I am ready to consider lowering the prices a little if you’re a home user or a student (or group of students). Just email me first with all the details. If you’re a company, try looking for other companies providing the same services and compare the prices with my services. You’ll see that my prices are much lower. If not, just show me the quotations and I shall see what I can do. Not exactly TESCO or Carrefour style. 🙂

FYI I am in the process of registering a company, so later we will have formal stationeries and documents for your convenience.

You can download the list here (in PDF format). 

By the way, if you have read my previous articles and have comments, do leave some for me to improve. If you have any questions regarding Linux or IT in general, send me a request and I shall try to write. Just note that I am a technical writer, so don’t expect too many political or review type articles here.

Afdlin Shauki Dah Hilang Akal

Did you guys ever heard of Afdlin’s new album (Fuyoo)? I did a while ago, but I don’t see it on the shelves of music stores. Anyway, Afdlin has initiated a project Afdlin Shauki Dah Hilang Akal where he’ll mail you the CD/cassette to your doorstep. Read about it at the official page made by Afdlin: http://hilangakal.blogspot.com/

I’m still waiting for mine, as I just emailed him asking for a copy. I just hope he hasn’t run out of it yet! 😉

I read about this in Pancaindera (Mingguan Malaysia) this morning at Sungai Petani. Read it online here.

Ooopsss… Google Dit It Again

gdesktop.pngGoogle has released its latest release of Google Desktop. Google Desktop 2, now includes a sidebar suitable for nerds like me.

Features of Google Desktop 2 includes: 

Email: This panel will display all of your latest emails in your gmail inbox. If you think nobody will look over your shoulder or you have nothing to hide, this will be great to display on your panel.

Google Talk: Google Talk is integrated directly inside the sidebar, so it won’t mess your desktop. Google Talk is one of the latest addition to the Google family. 

News: This panel collects and display feeds, most probably from Google News. Google News syndicates and retrieves news from all over the world.

Photos: I don’t know how this work, but the panel displays randomly photos that it can find from your hard drive. It displays the photos in slideshow style. Cool.

Quick View: This panel displays the latest (or most frequent) items you have opened. This is an easy tool for people withmemory loss problem. 😉

Scratch Pad: Another tool, which conveniently waits for you to scratch something on it. Think of it as a notepad, only that it sits on your screen. The contents then can be saved somewhere.

Stocks: This panel displays selected stock quotes and information of the symbols you select. Useful for investors. Not in realtime, though.

Weather: A very useful tool, especially for those in the USA. I’ll just keep it hidden until Google covers the area where I live.

Web Clips: RSS reader. My Thunderbird will thank Google for this. Now I have all my favorite feeds displayed on my desktop, waiting for me to click on them. There’s a nice feature where when you click on a title, it’ll display the summary first and it is up to you whether you want to see the full story.

What’s Hot: This panel displays Hot News from the Internet. So far I see a lot of entertainment news, and since I am not very interested in entertainment, I keep it hidden.

That’s it so far.

Google Desktop 2 also uses a new indexing method, but I can’t see much different in terms of disk usage. Overall, I think Google has improved the performance a little.

I think that’s enough for now. Have a try yourself, and let me know whether you like it.

🙂 

 

Jabberd2 initscript for Debian

I was compiling and installing jabberd2 on a server at office and everything went great except for one thing: no initscript provided. I was baffled to find out that the great software didn’t have any initscript. So I wrote one:

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#! /bin/sh
#
# Script to start/stop jabberd2 on a Debian
#
# by Ady Romantika, 23 August 2005
#
 
DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/jabberd
NAME=jabberd2
DESC=jabberd2
JABBERUSER=jabber
 
# Uncomment if needs debugging
DEBUG="-D"
 
# PID files base locations
PIDBASE=/usr/local/var/jabberd/pid
 
case "$1" in
   start)
   	echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
   	su $JABBERUSER -c "/usr/local/bin/jabberd $DEBUG &"
	echo "$NAME."
      ;;
   stop)
      echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
      if [ -e $PIDBASE/router.pid ];
      then
        su $JABBERUSER -c "kill -9 `cat $PIDBASE/sm.pid`"
	echo "$NAME."
      else
        echo "jabberd2 is not started."
      fi
      # Delete the PID files as jabberd does not do this automatically
      rm -rf $PIDBASE/router.pid \
               $PIDBASE/resolver.pid \
               $PIDBASE/sm.pid \
               $PIDBASE/s2s.pid \
               $PIDBASE/c2s.pid
      ;;
   restart)
      $0 stop
      sleep 3
      $0 start
      ;;
   *)
      N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
      echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload}" >&2
      exit 1
      ;;
esac
 
exit 0

The script might work with other distributions with minor modifications. 🙂 

jabberd is one of the many server softwares for the popular jabber open instant messaging protocol. If you need logging for your jabber server, you might be interested in Bandersnatch provided by Funky Penguin.

Update: 31 August 2005

There’s an rc script provided for jabberd2, but it is written with Fedora in mind. The script is more complicated, and probably is better. I didn’t have the time to check it out yet. You can download it at http://www.jabberstudio.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jabberd2/tools/ 

Haze Haze Go Away

At first, everyone has thought that this haze will end in a few days. No one ever expected that it could be the worst haze episode ever. With API reaching critical levels here and there, it’s a nightmare. Emergency state have also been declared in two areas; Port Klang and Kuala Selangor where the API levels have reached over 500.

API VALUE STATUS

  • 0 – 50 – Good
  • 51 – 100 – Moderate
  • 101 – 200 – Unhealthy
  • 201 – 300 – Very unhealthy
  • 301 – 500 – Dangerous

API readings for multiple locations in the country can be found at Jabatan Alam Sekitar: http://www.jas.sains.my/jas/default.html

NEW WEBSITES DEDICATED TO HAZE

MALAYSIAN COMPANY INVOLVEMENT?

I am currently following on Jeff Ooi’s website to get the latest news on haze. Since yesterday, there were also news that some Malaysian-owned companies are involved in the fire in Sumatera. Quote: "Yesterday, Jakarta Post reported that Malaysian companies own large tracts of oil-palm plantation in Sumatra, and that these Malaysian-owned operations are often said to be behind the burning or to be turning a blind eye to it."

To read more, check out Jeff Ooi’s site – Screenshots 

GOOGLE EARTH

The following image was saved from Google Earth: 

haze.jpg

Oh well… with all of the efforts being done this year, I hope it’ll not happen again NEXT year!