OpenDocument Templates by Lotus Symphony

I browsed through Lotus Symphony website just now, just to check out what new in Lotus Symphony as the first and the last time I used it was during its alpha stage.

One thing great that I noticed, a whole gallery of templates in ODF Template format!!! http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/gallery.jspa. Stuff ranging from document templates to presentation designs and cliparts. And due to it uses the ODF Template format, I can open them in no problem on OpenOffice. And I thought, "Great!, some free templates to use, but, what these are licensed on?".

Looking at the term of use:

Content from this Web site that is not provided under an agreement, such Content is not provided as "public domain"; you may use such Content for your personal, non-commercial use only and only in connection with your use of Lotus Symphony.

Erm, ain't that defeat the purpose of providing business document templates (invoice, meeting, project status, reports, sales plan, etc), but in the same time restrict the template to non-commercial?.

IANAL, but the phrase "only in connection with your use of Lotus Symphony" sounds like I'm also prohibited to use these on OpenOffice (or any other ODF editor) on stuff unrelated to Lotus Symphony.

Me! Me!!!

A Meme happening at Planet Fedora. I'm hopping in too~!.


[izhar@hikari ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
179 vi
112 python
96 cd
82 ls
37 rpmbuild
27 su
27 locate
23 ssh
23 rpmlint
22 diff


I use vim and python more than cd and ls ?? Thats unexpected.

When people petitioning to save WinXP

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.

Di Mana MyPapit?

MyPapit is MISSING!!!!!. He supposed to come for today's Ubuntu-My meetup at UITM Shah Alam. Somehow, we lost contact with him.



(Credits to yondie's post)

Happy Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year!. May this year be a prosperous year too.

Flood at Puchong Indah

Around 4:30pm this afternoon (Sat, Feb 02, GMT+8), my area got flooded. It was only a less than 2 hours rain and yet the water level raised up to knee level at the roadside of my side of the neighborhood. It might be caused by the monsoon drain was stuck due to irresponsible people thrown trashes into it. My family has been living here for more than 10 years and this is the 3rd time this place got flooded, and the first time it reaches to knee level at the road and barely entered my house. The rain stopped around 6pm and it took around 30 minutes before it complete drained.

Glad that it only barely reach the inside of my house. But my neighbors who are at a lower grounds , had quite a lot of belongings damaged/destroyed. My condolence to them.

Pics:










Considering Malaysian general election is coming near, guess its a good point to do some blackmailing to the local politician. Somebody need to clean up the monsoon drain or this will happen again, maybe worse than this.

Reducing Blogspot feed size

By default blogspot shows 20 posts for the blog feed, however, this might not be desirable to some people (eg: those who are aggregated on Planets and hated when a minor edit to an old post causes the post to be bumped to the top of the Planet). Gladly that Blogspot feed URL have an optional feature to reduce the returned post quantity on the feed, though its not displayed in the default blogger.com dashboard.

The trick is easy, just add ?max-results=<number> to the end of the blogspot feed URL. For example

http://blog.kagesenshi.org/feeds/posts/default?max-results=5

p/s: dont bother opening that url, as you'll be redirected to my feedburner feed, but hey, you got the idea right?

Ref: Feedburner Forums , Topic 18650

Made a Hackergotchi

I've made one hackergotchi for myself (^.^)




Thanks to Nicu's howto : http://howto.nicubunu.ro/gimp_hackergotchi/

MySpace?

Just got myself a MySpace account.

I'm not really a fond of Social Networking sites (except for LinkedIn and Mugshot) , but i'm curious bout the MySpace IM and what Mugshot offers for MySpace users. So, i simply created one account to play around with.

Profile Page: http://www.myspace.com/kagesenshi_87.

Add me if you wish. Just msg me @ MySpace telling me how u get the link to my profile so that i dont treat it as spam ..

Hunting for Internship

I'm currently looking for internship placements around for my next semester. In my university, Internship / Industrial Training is a compulsory 14 credit hours subject - which will last for 8 months. I havent get any offers yet from companies which i've applied and still actively looking for more choices.

Dear lazyweb, if you know any places which need LinuxAdministration/Python/Java/Fedora/Security/OpenSource guy like me, please tell me ^-^. A copy of my resume and cover letter (from my Uni) can be downloaded here -> Resume.pdf

Geek Stuff

In the meantime, at the other side of my life.



IBM just released BETA 1 of their new office suite, IBM Lotus Symphony. Lotus Symphony is a Eclipse based office suite available for free (as in free beer) to download and use. Its available for multiple platforms especially Linux and Windows and it supports ODF.

I have just played around with it, and what I liked most of it is its nice UI design. I like the tabbed concept and 1 window for all of the office component. The sidebar also makes it easier to distinguish and find buttons for setting the text formatting and other properties. Everything else are not much different than OpenOffice.

Get IBM Lotus Symphony now! -> Download here - You will need a IBM DeveloperWorks account to download (you can register for free anyway).

Links:
Open Malaysia Blog: Introducing IBM Lotus Symphony...
IBM Press Room: IBM Releases Office Desktop Software at No Charge to Foster Collaboration and Innovation
New York Times: I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line

Getting Compiz Fusion into Fedora | UiTM iHack 2007 Result

Getting Compiz Fusion into Fedora Progress

compiz-bcop ( #247405 ) package passed review a around 2 weeks ago .. but i just noticed today that i need a sponsor to get that package into fedora .... err .... some help ??? .. i'm not familiar with the process..

compiz-bcop, compiz-fusion-plugins-main, libcompizconfig final RPMS are available in my fedorapeople space .. those rpms built nicely on mock and rpmlint at the src rpm is silent ..

http://izhar.fedorapeople.org/



UiTM iHack 2007 Result

Yay~ ... my team won 1st place in Forensic Challenge and 2nd place in Capture the Flag.

My university sent out 2 teams :
Pr0j3ct T4ng0 - My team
Fnord - The other team

Plus, one of our alumni joined as a private team with his friends from other Universities. Team name - Tang0

The game was fun .. though the prizes are not as tempting as last year's iHack competition .. (higher money .. but no gadgets .. perhaps next year iHack committee should find more sponsors .. and btw ... Norton AV is practically useless to us :P )

Several pics from the competition

Heck .. i'm really NOT photogenic ... T_T

UTP Foreva! .. Pr0j3ct T4ng0, Fnord, and Tang0 .. /me 5th from left

Forensics First Place Winner!!!

I was explaining answer of Forensic Challenge flag 6 to Team "UMS Hackers" after the competition

UiTM iHack 2007 Competitors!!

What do we get? .. RM1500 (approx USD431) for winning 1st place in Forensic Challenge. RM 1000 (approx USD287) for winning 2nd place in CtF. Hampers for both. Norton utilities (eek! .. its win32 app, practically useless ). and participation in HiTB SecConf 2007 KL Conference for 3 - for winning 2nd place in CtF (but i'm a volunteer in HiTB, so .. i passed my place to my friend)

Looking forward for iHack 2008 ... ^-^

Good luck to iHack 1st place winners, 3boss.org / Bandar Baru Bangi Open Source Software Group in the HackInTheBox CtF competition .. :D

Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 packages | UiTM iHack 2007 | Hakaze 2ch-Type Forum/BBS Engine

Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 Packages

Its available in the main repo now .. both i386 and x86_64 packages ..

a little sidenote about the packages : 1 primary thing .. its not compatible with compiz 0.5.2 package from rawhide due to the one on rawhide is patched with a patch that forces indirect-rendering .. this, causes Nvidia cards to misbehave and also causes fusion-icon to need a patch to inverse its indirect-rendering option to direct-rendering ..


UiTM iHack Competition

I'm entering this competition tomorrow ... 2 days competition .. 1st day - computer forensic competition , 2nd day - ctf competition ... me and my friends entering both - 2 teams ... Hope we'll get 1st/2nd place with ctf like we did last year ..

http://www.tmsk.uitm.edu.my/~i-hack/ (They call it International Hacking Competition, but i have NO idea whats "international" with it .. perhaps its just yet another "Bolehland" attitude)

Hakaze 2ch-Type Forum/BBS Engine

For the past month i was playing with Django to build a forum engine .. I have released its 0.1.0rc1 release.. Its a 100% anonymous board based on a Japanese forum called 2channel..

GoogleCode page: http://code.google.com/p/kagesenshi-private/wiki/Hakaze
0.1.0rc1 package: http://kagesenshi-private.googlecode.com/files/hakaze-0.1.0rc1.tar.bz2
Demo page: http://devel.kagesenshi.org/hakaze/forums/

VMXGenerator.py : Python program to generate VMware configuration

Ok, I'm bored during this holidays ..

While surfing around and playing with Xen and VMWare, I stumbled upon this http://sanbarrow.com/vmxbuilder.html and saw a DOS Shell script to generate VMX. The crazy me took over, I started converting the script to Python~ :P. I have reimplemented most of the basic functionalities of the script in Python classes. Below is the script.

vmxgenerator.py

If youre interested to improve it, Sanbarrow.com provides lots of useful docs related to VMX parameters here - http://sanbarrow.com/vmx.html

SonyEricsson k320i

I just got myself a sony Ericsson k320i last sunday. My old phone was seriously out-of-shape and I think its time for me to change it.

With a price tag of RM438, heres what I got

- Bluetooth
- Java support
- IRda support
- 15MB storage
- USB connectivity
- GPRS/MMS support
- VGA camera
- MP3 player

More information about the phone here

I just succeeded syncing it with Evolution, I'll be posting a howto for it in my next post.

Mugshot : A Social Network For FOSS User

Fedora users might have heard about it, but not other FOSS users. I think I'm going to help them with some promotion :D

Heres the link to Mugshot Website.

Mugshot makes it easy to show off what you're doing online and keep track of what your friends are up to. Learn more about what you can do with Mugshot at the features page.

Mugshot is designed and developed in the context of an open source community project. For information on how you can contribute, visit our developer site and our blog.

So, what do it offers?

• A place where you can view Blog, Digg, YouTube, Myspace, (and much more) activities of your friends all in one page.


• Desktop integration with Mugshot's Desktop Stacker


• some more fancy stuff

For the list of features, go here -> http://mugshot.org/features

There are 2 things that I love in mugshot. One is the Desktop Stacker, and the other one, which I just discovered, a group chatroom!! Below are a screenshot for each

Mugshot Desktop Stacker


Mugshot Group ChatRoom


Musghot also provide a Flash widget for your blog or website. And here's mine (I couldnt get it to fit my blog navbars)

Visit my Mugshot page

So, feel interested?. Come and Sign Up NOW!

5 Marketer types in Open Source world

An interesting post I found @ Ubuntu Planet today,
http://www.understated.co.uk/blog/2007/be-a-marketer-not-a-town-crier/

There are five broad types of marketer in the open source world:

• Town criers: shout loudly but not always clearly, don’t listen, make a big noise but actually only reach a tiny number of people.


• Frustrated philosophers: so interested in the academic niceties of marketing that they mostly fail to communicate with anyone.


• Secondary practitioners: they fell into marketing-like practices by doing something else and probably wouldn’t think of what they do as marketing.


• Professional visitors: one of the small but growing group of professional marketers employed by open source software companies, for whom open source is just another job. Further divided into those that engage with the community and those that don’t.


• The people that get it: they know the difference between free software and open source, they’re a part of the community and they know marketing.

I think I'm in Secondary Practitioner class (maybe a little bit the professional marketer class). Most of my opensource contributions/promotion are voluntary, but I took it like something that I pay back to the community for the Freedom they granted me (somehow like an obligation/job) .. I don't believe on totally free... theres always a price for something , make it in term of monetary, efforts, obligation etc ..

Freedom has a very high price, that is responsibility
Anonymous@Internet

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

And that applies to all subjects in life, not only in opensource/softwares.

p/s: too many town criers around sometimes causes a great headache :P

Social network users have ruined their privacy, forever

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7499

Students at the University of Bristol have recently been warned of the dangers of posting to social networking websites. They aren't the first to hear these warnings, and they won't be the last.

Prof. Nigel Smart of the Computer Science Department at the University of Bristol has expressed his concern at the worrying trend of people giving up their privacy on the internet via social networking websites. He told HEXUS: "I am concerned that from some of the posts I have seen, by colleagues, students and others, that there is a deep societal problem emerging of people giving up their privacy without realising it".

There's little point in worrying about ID cards, RFID tags and spyware when more and more people are throwing away their privacy anyway. And the potential consequences are dire.

Just about anyone can read what's posted onto social networking websites like MySpace and FaceBook. 'Anyone' includes the intended audience of friends, but potentially relatives, teachers and employers too. And much of what is posted can never be deleted. I don't need to point out that Prof. Smart's fears are well-founded and that this is bad news, do I?
Anonymity down the drain

People have been posting stuff onto the web for years, though, so why is privacy suddenly a bigger problem for a larger number of people? Three or four years ago, it was all about chat rooms and forums. Both have a level of anonymity by default; you can choose your handle and only talk about what you want to, truth or lies... nobody will know.

Chat rooms are all but dead and buried now, amidst fear of sexual predators and other unsavoury types. However, forums continue, by virtue of their more topic-focused and moderated nature.

Then came what some people like to call 'Web 2.0'. On that wave of "let's pretend we've upgraded the Internet, LOL" came the social-networking websites... along with those terrible pages of drivel people like to call 'blogs'. It became cool to talk about mundane things and show other people what had been happening in your life. In essence, all the chat room goers had something to do once again.

So where's the problem in that? People treat users on their social-networking 'friends lists' just like their normal friends. They'll chat to them, share details from their lives, show them photos... do stuff friends do. People are comfortable with that. Problem is, they're too comfortable.

Bitching down the phone to someone about somebody else is a fairly common occurrence amongst friends, so socially, it's quite acceptable to do the very same with online friends, right? Yes, except unlike a phone call, it isn't private. Interestingly, you could probably get away with it in a chat room; they were essentially anonymous, but social networking is much more personal; the anonymity is all but gone. Fancy being sued for libel? How about initiating a police inquiry, or an investigation by the board of your educational establishment? It could happen, if you say or post the wrong things.
Irreversible damage

Once something appears on the Internet, it's almost impossible to remove. Within minutes, chances are a search engine will crawl it, then that search engine will cache it, so that even if the page changes, the original content will still be there, for a while, at least. Then there are archiving systems like the Way Back Machine. Once the page is on there, it doesn't matter what changes are made... it's archived. Of course, this assumes that pages are accessible by anyone, which isn't always the case, but that doesn't really matter.

It's easy to get an account with almost any social-networking site, and we've learned from chat rooms, it's easy to pose as somebody else. It's easy, then, to get added to a friend list (especially with the 'more friends the better' attitude of current social-networking sites). Suddenly, that 'friends only' stuff is pretty much public.

As these sites continue to grow in popularity, so too does the value of the information on them to parties other than those directly involved. Parents can see what their children really get up to at Uni'. Teachers can see what their pupils really think. Potential employers can profile applicants based on their online braggings and other shenanigans. While much of the content might be taken humorously amongst friends, other parties might not see it that way.

Profiling a person by their online activities need not be a long and arduous task entailing reading their boring blogs and examining all their FaceBook pictures, either. If somebody can write 1000 lines of code to scan MySpace for sexual predators, someone else can apply the same principals to profiling a single person.

Social networking users need to take a step back and think about just what they're posting onto the Internet. It'll probably be too late for a number of people, and it'll take a lot more 'victims' of the lack of privacy before most users actually start heeding these warnings. Just beware that anything posted online to your friends now, could very easily come back to haunt you in days, months, or even years to come.

My name is Steve Kerrison. I don't have a FaceBook account, or a MySpace login. I do have a blog, but it's work-related.

Relatively I feel the same too , especially applies Malaysians teenagers (even some adults). They simply don't care what they put on the internet. At some point, I really feel that the users are really stupid. They use the services in a way it was not designed for. (Eg. Private messages in testimonial section, useless chain mails in bulletins, adding pure strangers in friend list w/o ever knowing the person, a blog became a personal diary, etc ).

I admit I also use social networks, but I share only stuff that to me is okay to be published.

Anyway, it do have a good point - Thanks to their behavior, I can easily gather their personal informations for a "good" use.

::grin::

LinkedIn : A friend network for professionals

I stumbled upon a url to this site from an email in a mailing list. Being curious, I opened the site. At first glance, I thought it was yet-another-friend networking site like friendster and myspace, but I noticed theres something different with it. So, I click the site's about page and read it.

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Through your network you can:

* Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
* Be found for business opportunities
* Search for great jobs
* Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
* Post and distribute job listings
* Find high-quality passive candidates
* Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

Its kindof interesting to me, so I joined it. Feel free to invite me into you linkedIn connections.

GTalk Online Status Indicator

I beleive lots of us is familiar with Yahoo!'s I'm Online images on websites, blogs, myspace, friendster, etc. Some of us might not prefer the over-fancy Yahoo Messenger service (I know I am), prefer Gtalk, and wanted an online indicator for their sites. Jon Burrows have a solution for you. He hosted a Gtalk Online Status bot that will check your online status and provide an image of your status.

Using this service is easy. Just add gtalkonlinestatus@gmail.com into your buddy list then send ENCSTRING to the bot to get your encrypted string. The url or your status image will appear at http://jabsv5.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus/5/your-enc-string.jpg . For more options of changing images visit this page

HOWTO: Adding Non-Strict HTML into Blogger Widget Template XML

I have been trying to insert some javascript buttons into the Posts widget of the new Blogger engine. There are no predefined widgets provided by Blogger for this purpose, so, I opened the template's HTML to insert it. However, the task that I thought gonna be easy became a frustrating task because the engine requires strict XHTML coding in the template thus making everything a nightmare to pass the syntax checker.

Struggling to insert the code, I discovered that the engine will parse any &lt; and &gt; entries into < and > of the generated code. So , I fire up gedit, paste the code, and do a search and replace for & < and >, replacing them with &amp; &lt; &gt; and pasted the new code into the template. The result is -> Success!! -> look at the stumbleupon button below :)

Linux and BSD users can do this quickly on a text file by using sed.

cat file|sed s/'\&'/'\&amp;'/g|sed s/'<'/'\&lt;'/g|sed s/'>'/'\&gt;'/g