bloody boring

Good bye, Paderborn.

Kristiania, here I come!

Eh, ada bintang jatuh! Ah, harus cepet bikin wish nih (lantas bergumam sendiri)
Wah, mana sih bintangnya. Yah, telat deh.

Kamu mau? Kalau gitu jatah wish-nya aku hadiahin ke kamu deh.
Asyiiik! Aku pengen ..... (berandai-andai segalanya). Gimana, seru nggak tuh wish-nya aku?

Iya oke banget.
Terus kalo kamu wish apa dong?

Aku? Nggak ada, kan udah dikasih ke kamu.

Beberapa bulan yang lalu, iming-imingnya adalah seindah  "Santai aja, Norwegisch ist wie Deutsch ohne Grammatik" (Bahasa Norwegian mirip dengan bahasa Jerman tanpa tata bahasa). Memang janji yang menggiurkan bukan?

Tapi setelah beberapa hari ini membolak-balik buku Langenscheidt itu (yang belum apa-apa - tentu karena kurang populer - harganya jauh lebih melangit ketimbang pelajaran bahasa Perancis atau Spanyol), impian yang semanis madu itupun berpotensial berubah menjadi sedikit pahit. Memang betul bahwa dari kosa kata, cukup mudah melompat dari bahasa Jerman ke bahasa Norwegia ataupun bahasa Skandinavia lainnya. Tinggal berhati-hati saja terhadap false friends dan kasus sejenis lainnya (awas: sau ternyata artinya domba). Tapi, ohne Grammatik? Von wegen! Sepertinya malah tata bahasanya nggak dijamin lebih mudah dari bahasa Jerman.

Plus, masih ada persoalan lagi dengan pengucapan dan intonasinya. Banyak konsonan yang "mati" (tidak bunyi, seperti lazim di bahasa Perancis) yang gampang membuat kepusingan saat mencocokkan antara percakapan dan teksnya. Ini berarti ada tantangan besar untuk mudah memahami stand-up comedy (itupun kalau ada). Pola pengucapannya masih belum familiar. Cara mengetik tiga aksara baru æ, ø, dan å di keyboard layout DE juga belum ketemu. Terakhir, karena seringkali arti kata bisa berbeda (jauh) kalau intonasinya lain, ini berarti nggak lagi bisa sembarangan berucap tanpa irama.

Ya kita lihat saja nanti. Such a bloody challenge. Mudah-mudahan nggak lagi berakhir seperti hasil belajar bahasa Itali: hanya sampai mengerti urusan memesan makanan dan minuman

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.


    Sir Francis Bacon,  English philosopher

Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?

He was trying to get in touch with Private Data but if it involves a Major Disaster I understand that the fault lies with General Protection.

Furthermore, if you cannot reboot it may be because of a corrupt Colonel.

(diambil dari jokes4all.net)

Pernah punya dosen killer yang sering melontarkan soal yang sulitnya luar biasa? Pernah terjebak di ujian yang sebenarnya gampang tapi karena kurang persiapannya akhirnya jadi sukar? Pernah menikmati rasanya ujian lisan dengan tatapan mata si penanya yang membuat otak mendadak jadi blackout? Pernah membayangkan jadi superhero yang terlilit dilema antara menyelamatkan dunia tapi mengorbankan pasangannya atau sebaliknya? Selalu sulit menentukan keputusan?

Situasi klise di atas sialnya tidak seberbahaya menerima pertanyaan:

Gimana? Aku cocok nggak pakai baju ini?

Jagad raya seperti tak lagi berputar, taufan pun berhenti bergejolak, dan matahari hanya diam termenung di singgasananya.

Gunung akan kudaki, lautan akan kuseberangi.

Memang begitu cowok kalau mengumbar kemachoannya . Tapi tugas apakah yang paling menantang dan paling sukar untuk dikerjakan seorang cowok? Bukan trekking di Gunung Everest, mengarungi Lautan Atlantik, ataupun bahkan menaklukkan seekor naga segede Gaban, tetapi sesederhana seperti:

menemani shopping!

Sejak mulainya peradaban manusia, DNA cewek berevolusi sehingga menumbuhkan gen yang bernama shopping ini. Maka itulah, cowok tidak ditakdirkan untuk bisa menikmati rasanya shopping. Jangankan tatkala sudah sampai di supermarket atau factory outlet, baru berpikir akan diajak (baca: disuruh) ikut shopping pun, semangat yang berapi-api (seperti Beowulf akan pergi perang) jadi luntur tanpa bekas . Biseps dan triseps hasil berjam-jam fitness akhirnya hanya berakhir untuk tugas semulia menenteng tas-tas belanja.

Beberapa pusat perbelanjaan nampaknya sudah maklum dengan hal ini. Selain pajangan blus, rok, kaos, celana, dan segala macam produk tekstil tanpa akhir, terkadang di pojok-pojok telah tersedia bangku kecil. Kalau mata cewek sangat tajam mendeteksi tulisan "Sale" atau "Angebot" walaupun dari jarak yang tidak masuk akal, mata cowok sebaliknya hanya terlatih sensitif untuk menemukan tempat duduk semacam ini.

Konon kesialan harus ikut shopping ini menumbuhkan ikatan emosional yang kuat. Bukan antara cewek yang shopping dan cowok yang menemani , tetapi antara cowok-cowok yang sama-sama harus mengekor ke sana ke mari . Lagi asyik melamun sambil duduk menanti, cowok lain yang mau ikutan duduk pun menjadi sangat ramah, sering sembari menukas, "Das gleiche Schicksal" (nasib kita sama). Wah! Apalagi jawabannya yang lebih indah selain "Wilkommen im Club!"  Seringkali tentunya berlanjut sesama curhat (baca: komplain) seputar tema shopping. Ah, dasar calon-calon anggota ISTI*.

Lalu apa hubungannya kerjaan shopping ini dengan peluang bisnis? Mudah saja. Mestinya pengelola gerai mode jangan hanya sungkan menyediakan tempat duduk. Sekalian saja dengan pojok khusus untuk cowok. Hanya modal beberapa sofa yang empuk, TV plasma layar besar paling mutakhir, lengkap dengan kabel TV channel sport, tabloid dan koran serta majalah khusus laki-laki (ada yang pernah mengusulkan minimal Best Playmates), kicker alias table football, plus cocktail harga miring dan WLAN hotspot . Semua cewek diperbolehkan memarkir suami atau pasangannya di sana.

Ada yang mau memulai?


(*) Ikatan Suami Takut Istri.

This is so awesome!

Note: I wonder if it is legal to carry out that prank in EU.

Let's compare. Google Code Project Hosting (GCPJ) vs SourceForge.net (SF).

You can start using GCPJ in <1 minute. With SF, you have to provide all those tax-forms-like details and wait until your request for the project is approved.

The project front page in GCPJ is cleaner than that in SF. Don't even bother thinking about the old version of SF.

GCPJ's label-based issues tracker is much more usable than the complicated SF's one. Everyone hates a bug tracker anyway, somehow GCPJ is still humanly managaeble.

Often you want to put some information quickly and the GCPJ wiki is fantastic for that. No need to create some web pages, upload them, and so on. Yes there is also the wiki support for SF but how many of you use it or even are aware of it?

The download page in GCPJ is easier for eyes.

Optional goodies are not packed within GCPJ. If you want to display some screenshots, redirect to Picasa Web Album. Need some mailing-lists? Connect the project to Google Groups.

Tracking the statistics (visits, hits, referrers) is easy because it is integrated with Google Analytics, which btw provides more useful information compared to the limited SF's stat tool.

Administering your project in SF can make you scream (aloud!). It's however dead simple in GCPJ.

SF's subversion access is known to be flaky from time to time. GCPJ's might not be the fastest, but so far it works smoothly.

GCPJ's subversion viewer (the very latest feature of GCPJ) is a way way better than SF's traditional one. Try both and prove it yourself.

In short: GCPJ is designed with Pareto Principle in mind. Most of the core features which the open-source developers (who, BTW, do not have so much free time) really need are made very easy to handle. It's rather minimalist, it's not perfect, but it improves over the time. SF is so dull and not for mortals.

Blur is an interesting effect, mainly because it lets us enjoy the main object yet the out-of-focus parts add something to the realism. Like in the default KDE 4.0's splash screen:

For PictureFlow, I decided to add the support for optional blur effect for the reflection, as shown in the following comparison:

It is even more enjoyable when you run the demo program and see those book covers sliding, as if they are ice skating. Shader guru can quickly point out the fakeness of the blur. Rather than blurring the "floor" after the reflection is painted there, I choose to blur the reflection for each image beforehand. Fake but fast and fun enough. As for the algorithm, it is the famous blazing-fast exponential blur from Jani Huhtanen, used among others in KDE 4's Plasma.

Another improvement is that the background color can be customized, not limited to black. In fact, black is particularly suitable to do fast reflection illusion cause blending a specific color with black can be approximated by multiplying its RGB components with a decreasing factor. But since I saw that Cover Flow for iPod nano is with white background, I thought I just let you use your favorite color for PictureFlow.

In addition, I refactored the code so that it is more maintainable. For simplicity, the horribly long look-up sine/cosine table has been reduced with the help of simple interpolation.  Even better, PictureFlow now supports Qt 4 (Win32, Linux, Mac, Qtopia, Windows Mobile), Qt 3 (tested on Linux only), and Qt 2 (for Qt/Embedded platform) with a single code base. Maybe even Symbian in the future :-)

Get her/him a bouquet of beautiful roses. Throw away one of the rose, replace it with a fake plastic one. Attach a note "...till the last petal dies!".

For those who were waiting for this Canon EOS 450D, finally it's out! There is a nice overview in dpreview.com, comparing 450D and 400D. Basically, it sports a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor, a SecureDigital card slot (instead of CompactFlash), larger viewfinder, large (3") display, 14-bit ADC, personalized menu, and many other interesting goodies.

Time to start hunting for the best bargains. So far, the EOS 450D body is available starting at EUR 649 and with 18-55mm lens kit starting at EUR 829.

(the image is a slightly modified version of flomar's DSLR camera)

Lagu Dewa Roman Picisan dibuka dengan:

"Tatap matamu bagai busur panah
Yang kau lepaskan ke jantung hatiku"

Bagaimana ya rasanya kena busur panah? Kalau terkena anak panah sih masih bisa dibayangkan...

Just over these two weeks, over 5 thousands came to my humble blog from XDA-developer's forum. It turned out that Chad "thundershadow14", based on the HTC Touch port, set to create a PictureFlow-based image viewer and release it as Windows Mobile executables. And seems that people like it, there are already 290 posts in that thread as I write this. It was reported to work on a wide range of HTC smartphones, among others Touch, Trinity, Herald, Hermes, Kaiser, Atlas, Prophet, Himalaya, Wizard, as well as other Windows Mobile devices like Treo 750, LG KS20, Asus P535, Axim X51v, and a bunch others. So if you have an HTC gadget (preferably with WM6), give it a shot. Looks like it quickly becomes one of the first popular Qt/WinCE-based application, this is considering that (as of now) the final official Qt/WinCE is not even released yet!

On the other side of the world, my countryman Ketut "blackhawk" Kumajaya brought PictureFlow to Linux-based Motorola phones (BTW, he is also the one who ports Rockbox to EZX). It runs smoothly on some Motorola phones like A1200, A780, E680i, ROKR E2, and ROKR E6. He kindly sent me the following screenshot:

There is even a short clip showing it on A1200:

From these two exciting developments, and since the response is overwhelming (I can't still believe people *do* really bother to mess around with such a weekend project), I want to be a bit more serious and plan to create a specialized image viewer with that lovely CoverFlow effect, designed with mobile device in mind (and targeting Qt/WinCE and Qtopia). From what I read in the forum, people are not happy with the loading time and memory consumption. Of course, this is definitely the case since the example I include with PictureFlow source code is not optimized for speed or memory footprint. It is a typical example program, meant to show how to use PictureFlow only, not as a basis of a real-world application. Thus, a really usable viewer must be implemented differently.

So, folks, stay tuned. Of course you can send me a smartphone, something like HTC Kaiser, if you want. I'll be glad to take it :-)

Work is continuing to bring SpeedCrunch closer to become a real KDE 4 application. In the mean time, with the recent launch of KDE 4.0 that sports a new widget style, Oxygen, it's also worth to mention that SpeedCrunch already integrates nicely (with respect to appearance) and does not feel out of place, as evidenced from the following click-to-enlarge screenshot:

In the third generation of iPod nano, Apple has included the famous Cover Flow feature. But what if your iPod belongs to the generation before this? Well, AFAIK Cover Flow is not available. Either Apple would like the owners to upgrade or the hardware is simply not powerful enough. Pick your battle.

The solution: use Rockbox. It is a firmware replacement not only for Apple iPods but for a wide range of other popular music players. Since some time ago, it sports the PictureFlow plugin (still in continous development) which has the same idea as Cover Flow. This plugin is based on my PictureFlow Qt widget, something that I have mentioned before. The obligatory screenshot (courtesy of Jonas):

The good thing is, it is not limited to those iPods. At least, in the wiki page, it is reported that this PictureFlow plugin works for (among others) Sandisk Sansa e200/c200, Toshiba Gigabeat, Cowon iAudio X5, and iriver H300. For proofs, you can check some YouTube clips related to PictureFlow, for example:

KDE 4.0 is doubtlessly the most discussed KDE release at the moment. Some praise it, some don't really favor it. But whether you're going to like it or not, it's worth to, at least, give it a try.

If you use OpenSUSE 10.3, installing KDE 4.0 is very easy, it's just one-click away! Simply click on the following icon:

Wait few minutes (or hours), then you'll get the desktop:

Update: and add some plasmoids to get something like