Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

I wanted to write about the Yogyakarta Earthquake, but decided to wait. For some reasons, I felt that I am exploiting the victims by generating traffic to my blogs. I know that it is not the case, but that's how I felt. But, on the other hand, I wanted to say my condolence to all the victims and their families. So, this post. The heck with traffic. Our research center ( Microelectronic Center ) the university was shocked by a news that one of our researcher - Waris, who is doing his doctorate, passed away during the quake. He went to Bantul for a holiday with his family. Our deepest sympathy and condolence to his family. We will miss him. I was born in Yogyakarta. I even make jokes about Yogya, its people, and technology. It is a special city for me. I am sad to see what happened to Yogyakarta and its people. I hope they can get through this as soon as possible and as painless as possible. Hang on. May God be with you.

I've been searching for the meaning of " security architecture ." Various references point to different directions, depending on the source of the reference. For example, security architecture according to network companies is network security. Database people think that security architecture is access control, IT consultants think that security architecture is a working framework and activities, and so on. In anycase, I decided to define my own security architecture. A presentation material is available at my presentation's page . Unfortunately, it is in Bahasa Indonesia. Although, the terminologies are in English. Go there (to the presentation page) and read the "security architecture" presentation, which I presented a few days ago (24 May 2006) in Jakarta. Comments and feedback are needed.

The Rule of Four is a novel written by two authors; Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. The back cover has a comment from Nelson DeMille; " If Scott Fitzgerald, Umberto Eco, and Dan Brown teamed up to write a novel, the result would be The Rule of Four. " Having read Dan Brown's books, I was intrigue by the comment. Also, I saw this book was featured in a couple of bookstores. I decided to buy the book. It took me a while to read and finish it. The story in the book is about a mysterious Renaissance text called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili . This text has seduced many people. Marriage went cold. Friendship was broken. Even murder! Messages were coded in the text by using steganography and cryptography at the same time. To get the actual message(s) you have to solve some riddles. A student took this text as his thesis at Princeton. Needless to say, there were problems and fiasco. Can he finished his thesis and solve the mystery behind the text? I love reading books with code an...

I have just finished watching numb3rs at AXN. In it there was a talk mentioning about " quantum entanglement ." Whoa. It's not everyday you hear this in a conversation. I heard it long time ago, didn't understand then and still don't understand it now. Hah. The funny thing is ... I come in contact with the word "quantum" quite often lately. One in email from Singapore (which forced me to browse some websites). One in relation to 4G telecommunication security (don't ask - it's about the future of 3G). And, just a few minutes ago in a TV series. What's with this? Coincidence? I think not. Quantum entanglement?

My team was asked to do a source code review of a large application. This is actually the third (or probably mode) time we are doing a source code analysis. Our past experience was with smaller code. This time the code is around 2.5 million lines. Now, time for some questions. How many lines can a good programmer/source code reviewer read in a day? Is there a rule of thumb / best practice on this? What is usually the portion of actual code compared to comments (and other non-executing component)? We were joking predicted that the number of actual codes that we have to review is probably only 5oo thousands lines. The 2 million lines were mostly comments and documentation. :D That would be nice. To be frankly I don't like the LOC approach, but that's the only measure we can use. Is there other measurements? We had a discussion before and came up with some ideas, such as as the number of modules or functions. But they still depend on the size of the modules which could vary. Now l...

I am doing many things, just to avoid work (that is inevitable)! I am dancing around ... Next week I am going to do four (4) presentations in five days. There were 5, but one was cancelled yesterday. I have not done anything to prepare that presentation. Well, that is not true. I did some reading and collecting background materials. All I have to do "just" put them down (into a presentation material). Yeah, right. The " I just do it later " sounds familiar, right? The thing is, I am not in a mood. What's this? Yes, you heard me right. I could not make a presentation material until the day before presentation. I've done hundreds of presentations and they are almost the some, done in the last minute. I am not lazy, I am just not in a mood. (Tell that to your boss!) So, what I am doing right now is reading emails, blogs, and web sites. Dancing around. To tell you the truth, I am still thinking about those presentations (what to present, how to deliver them, pu...

I am writing a paper on various Siliconia (Silicon Valley wannabe) in Indonesia, such as the Bandung High Tech Valley ( BHTV ) initiative which I am part of. One of the thing that I am still missing is a reference on " cluster theory ." Could somebody suggest the definitive reference(s) or article(s) on this? My hypothesis is that technological (technology-based) companies have to cluster in a region to survive. While there is a believe (myth?) that computer nerds (IT people) like to work alone, tech companies cannot survive being alone. They have to be surrounded by "friends" (aka competitors). The second thing that I am interested in is references that argue why certain regions in the world are able to attract tech companies (and talented human resources). Why is it difficult to duplicate Silicon Valley, thus the many failed Siliconias ... ? I would like to argue that the city of Bandung has the "ingredients" similar to Silicon Valley, but it still is m...

Do you read a particular book more than once? If you do, what book? I read books just once because I am afraid that I am wasting my time (by re-reading it again) and that I could spend the time on reading other books. I am sure I am wrong on this, but I just could not do that. (I am sure that I have read book[s] more than once, but I just could not recall it at this moment.) Let me quote from Philip Gerard's " Writing a Book that makes a Difference ": One test of a book is whether it stands up to rereading. It's not that books that I have read are not worth re-reading. It's just that I don't want to waste time. I have a stack of books (that's an understatement) that is waiting for me. Read me, please , they plead. We can extend this to blog. Do you read a particular entry of a blog more than once? Which one? I keep a list of URL on del.icio.us , browsers bookmarks, and even I created a special tag on my email mailboxes (so that I could grep -it later on). ...