KageSenshi's Logs

MPPUTP posted a post at their news blog about the DirectConnect file transfer is the one that affecting the Internet connection of UTP. And they showed this diagram



Dear MPP, obviously you are taking this image blindly without checking at how the UTP network functions. Its either you are being tricked about the design, or the real UTP network design is really that severely flawed.

Here, let me show you the map of the UTP network, from the the IP number point of view. I draw this map based on my experience analyzing the network structure of UTP to get around certain things to link up the UTPchat servers. How villages are separated, how stuff are being laid out. However, note that this map is mainly based on IP data and base routing only. I couldn't map VLANs and others lower level networking architecture because of the limitation of the access I have.

Let begin with the overall layout, [Image 1]




Opps ... like a web? .. oh yes it is... however, weblike doesnt mean bad. More redundant l…

The news spreading around the net about Sufiah, a child prodigy 10 years ago who was accepted to Oxford at the age of 12, is now living in a pitiful life as a hooker.

This is not the first time cases like this happens to Malaysian-born genius, previously, (I forgot his name), the boy who managed to fluently read when was 3 years old, is now, a drug addict. There are also some other similar happenings to people around me which I happened to see throughout my school life transfering from state to state with my family.

What possibly have been the cause of this?. Why does these born-geniuses suddenly end up in a pathetic situation?. My opinion, its because of the people surrounding these geniuses and also the media.

These gifted childs, are often the pride of their family and the people around them. Some family, or people around, being very proud of these childs, wanted to show the world about the child. And there came the media, news, gossips, and in a short time, these childs became well…

I discovered PIDA while reading around Fedora mailing lists (forgot which thread), and decided to try it out. yum'ed it from the Fedora repository, and launched it.

My first impression - Coool!.. its gvim + version control + shell/terminal + customizable IDE, all in one!.

I usually do development with very basic tools - gvim and a bunch of shells/terminals. I don't like most IDE because of the over-complexity of them. I do use geany or gedit once in a while when I want to have a bit of non-vim'ish behaviour of text editor. But PIDA, its a whole different level. It looks very promising to be my next best-friend.

Not so long after, that I started using it for continuing my current project with Inigo, and quickly, it took over my daily use of gnome-terminal, and my frequent need to change directories and restart Zope. The basic version control feature it have is wonderful. Unlike Eclipse or other IDEs where it is quite hard to get flexibility on how the project is laid out beca…

Catching up on stuff that happened this week:

MAMPU Migrates Malaysian Government Agencies to OpenOffice/ODF

MAMPU Migrates to OpenOffice.org

Hooray to kaeru and OSCC!. This is a great success indeed.

UTP-OSS meetup March 2008

Our little special interest group in my University just held a meetup last friday. We haven't done any meetups for quite a while now and to my surprise, it looks like the number of really interested people have grown a lot. The turnout was approximately 20 people, and I can be sure at least 90% of them used linux in some point of their life and have some clue about OSS world. Compared to our previous big meetup which was mostly attended by uninformed people.

Yondie presented his presentation from the last Ubuntu meetup and I share my experience working with an Inigo and how OSS economics works.

IMO, this meetup was a great success and I hope those who are in UTP-OSS can continue this momentum and help building UTP-OSS reputation among UTP academician as a great kn…

It means the end of Windows is getting near

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/
http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/archives/2008/03/save_windows_xp.html

Vista is such a bad OS, to the point that even non-*Nix geeks also hate it.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3733286


In the same way, you only have to glance at the user forums of major distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu to see that more users are concerned with getting proprietary video drivers installed than with having control of their own computers. After all, the proprietary drivers are available at no cost, just like the ethically free ones, so why not use them, especially when they are technologically more advanced? I've even seen some users castigate Fedora for not providing the proprietary drivers in its repositories.

Never mind that to do so would be against Fedora's policy of including only free software -- with such users, the short term convenience of the technically superior proprietary drivers outweighs the ethos of freedom. Many of the complainers do not even appear to have heard of free software ideals. Nor do they bother listening when those ideals are raised.


Fedora is a strong supporter of software freedom, and it w…

Malaysian Election 2008 result is out.

Barisan National got their ass seriously kicked!!.

They won simple majority at Parliament, and loses a bunch of states. DAP leading bigtime with Penang and Selangor seats majorly won by them.

With this result, lets see in this coming years, will BN will start fixing themselves? Will the Oppositions start seeing the real economics condition of Malaysia from the eyes of Parliament? How this will affect the stability of Malaysia? Can BN be able to find what's wrong with their organization? Can the Oppositions deliver their promises? Will the hidden voice within BN will raise and start reforming the party?

Will Change happens? to the better? or to the worse?

Let the coming years be the benchmark.

Something I saw at Fedora Planet from Jeremy Katz's post Who says the mp3 patents aren't enforced?

CeBIT crackdown: 51 exhibitors busted for patent infringement


The word is that 51 different exhibitors got busted at the show for the patent infringement, with 180 law enforcement officers confiscating 68 moving boxes worth of gear. Primary offenses included Meizu-style MP3 / MP4 infringement, along with unregistered CD, DVD-R and DVD playback devices.

I am doing some development for a UN community site, using Zope/Plone. I uses Qemu for hosting the guest OS for my development environment.

For 2 days, I keep wondering why Zope/Plone loads damn slow on the qemu machine eventhough I have allocated both cores of the processor, and 512RAM for it. 15 minutes simply to start up is really not desirable. I kept on investigating and guess what:

[root@unapcict ~]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 18 MB in 3.03 seconds = 5.95 MB/sec

Just for a comparison, the host hdd's speed:

[root@Nobuyuki ~]# /sbin/hdparm -t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 174 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.71 MB/sec

Darn.. So, thats what the reason. Dear lazywebs, anybody know how to improve the speed??.

Seems like its getting near, and people from both Barisan National (BN) and Opposition parties started doing their usual crazy stuff. Both sides with their promises. Both sides with their accusations about their opponent. Which will win?. Lets wait and see. Which party I will vote?, Nobody (because I'm not yet legal to vote :P ). Furthermore, I prefer to be neutral. I value practicality more too.

I myself is not really excited with this event. Why?. Well, I just don't like the system of voting for a party and the party who decides who will become the leader. I see this method, is somewhat not really voting for a leader who will represent my voice and interest, but rather simply choosing what group of people will be the government. Voting for a group, IMHO, made me unable to choose one particular individual, who I feel, is suitable to lead Malaysia better.

In both BN and Opposition, there are good leaders, also in both of them a bunch of lamers (though I admit, IMO, theres one p…

Seems like theres one anonymous coward (or maybe the rector himself hide this student's identity), responding at rector's note at UTP ELearning.


Dear Datuk Dr. Zainal,

I would truly support UTP Management to close down IRC and DC++ regardless what reasons given by the students.

I agree that UTP facilities are meant for academic, not for entertainment.

As far i m concern, the request of not to ban IRC shall not be entertained at all. This kind of request carries no value at all as the matter of fact, majority of the students use IRC for non academic purpose, and i admit that i m part of the majority.

I dont understand the reason behind why these students still want to fight for it as if they are paying for the facilities for entertaiment? Why dont they spend their time to struggle and get 4.0 every semester?

So what if the students get the IRC? would they still perform well and obtain 4.0 every semester? Definitely NO because entertainment are more enjoyable than study.


Let'…

The long awaited reply from the rector have arrived!!. Its accessible from UTP ELearning Moodle Site.

=========================================

Thanks for the reply Rector,


--------
5th March 2008
UTP Chat - Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Dear Students ,
Further to some comments/complaints made by a couple of you on the above, please see the following explanation :

As you are aware, we faced serious network problems way back in 2005. Based on the network study conducted, it was found that the network congestions were caused by several factors including servers hosting Internet Relay Chat. After much deliberation, discussion, information exchange with other higher institutions, checking with experts as well as feedback from the students themselves, we found that the disadvantages for outweigh the advantages.


I am aware of that. However, note that I am not against the current network infrastructure which separates the 5 villages. Didn't I said in my original letter that I am a sysadmin too…

A comrade of mine, ShahrimanSamsudin (Yondie), just signed the Fedora CLA and registered himself as the 4th Malaysian Fedora Ambassador. A big welcome for him. I hope this will encourage him more into contributing more to FedoraProject and help spreading Fedora and FOSS in Malaysia. I know I can't do this myself, as I'm more of a technical guy than a people-person. Hanafiah frequently MIA, Sharuzzaman with his translation projects.

Look what he got for us, also posted at his blog here: http://rumble.yondie.org/2008/03/fedora-shirts-anyone.html













For Malaysian readers of my blog, he is taking orders for those shirts. However, we are not sure about what the price to put yet. You can contact him about the T-Shirt through his blog or get his contact details here.

Fedora-MY, slowly trying to gain momentum. Hanafiah, where are you?? Sharuzzaman, hey, be on IRC once a while will ya? :P.

I will keep on advocating for users and trying to recruit more contributors from Malaysia.

Fedora updates repository moves very fast. A few months after the release of F8, hundreds of MBs of packages have been updated. Some people, especially those who came from the less-moving world of Debian and Ubuntu, might found this ridiculous. They are used to receiving only important updates during the stable lifecycle of a release and are not used to Fedora ways of going-forward and adding new enhancement and features to the stable release.

Sometimes, from that many updates, regression problem happened, which is fun to some, but annoying to the others. (I know someone who kept complaining about that - /me glares at a certain person @ #myoss )

I personally does not keep my stable Fedora installations up-to-date to the latest updates, and I hand-pick those packages which I think might have fixed some bugs which I'm encountering. Yes, some people find that tedious :).

For those weak-hearted who are not used to Fedora update release speed, you can opt to only update for security fixe…