Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

I use seesmic web interface to access my twitter, but or the last couple of days I've been having problems with. I cannot login. What gives? I even tried to change my password. Mail confirmation was received and I changed the password according the instruction, but I still cannot login. Right now, I am using twitter web interface. If this problem persists, I may have to ditch seesmic. Oh well.

This morning I was asked to give a keynote speech ini a conference. The original keynote speaker was not able to make it and the conference was started this morning. I have spare time in this afternoon, so I said that I am able to do it in this afternoon. The main idea of my speech is to encourage everybody to do research in the future area. Computational intelligence methodologies and tools are needed to explore the future. One of the application is in the social network area. Many people - especially younger generation - live in two worlds; real world and cyber world. Just like in the real world, there are (social) problems in the cyber world. I gave an example of our twitter research, in which we are trying to understand the structure of Indonesian twitters. Before that, I told them how little we understood about such problems by showing Barricelli's universe. Barricelli did an experiment - simulation using the first computer, when von Neumann and his group were not using th...

On my gmail screen there is a note saying that I should look into Gmail's new look. Before switching to the new look, I looked into the features. For some reasons, there's no control of the fonts! I am always partial to fonts. I use userstyle (stylish) just to control Gmail's fonts. I hate to switch. I like to stay, but I may have to switch :(   Ouch

This is my breakfast this morning ... plus tea (and coffee afterwards). So, what's yours? Good morning ...

I was surprised to see Google Chrome advertisement in Indonesian TV channel(s). Some people already mentioned that awhile ago, but I didn't notice. And then I saw the ads. Good stuff.

I have just noticed that Blogspot (blogger) has a new interface. It is cleaner, nicer, and more "modern". So far, I am enjoying it. This post is just a test of this new interface. With new and clean interface, I might blog more often here ... :)  No promises though

Next week, I will be travelling to Singapore. One of the things I found out in my previous trips was difficulty in getting WiFi access. It is strage, since in Bandung or Jakarta I can find WiFi access easier. In Singapore, I usually try to use Wireless@SG first. It usually doesn't work. For example, in SimLim, there is a wireless@SG signal but once you're connected there's no route to anything else. As if it is on but nobody manages it. So, I usually switch to whatever wireless services available (which normally I have to pay). And, sometimes, it is so expensive (especially in hotels). Now, yesterday I got a "spam" in my mailbox (I think it's from iCell) telling me that Wireless@SG is being upgraded. Is it? Is it better? Or, even, is it working?

Here is a picture of my Introduction to IT class. Only 11 students in the class. Yay! It should be easier to teach? (Is it?) The size of class is dropping each year. Don't know why. Our "only" problem is the class is at noon. It's difficult to fight sleepyness :)

Somehow I have a strage feeling. A gulty feeling when I am reading. What gives? My funny reason is that when I am reading, I am not producing anything. I am not productive. I don't contribute to humanity. Thus, the guilty feeling. But, when I don't read, I don't gain knowledge. I am stuck. And I won't be able to produce anything good. So?

Next week, 17th August, we have our Indonesia independence day. This year is our (2011-1945) year of independence. Now, what does independence mean to me? It means a great deal. Although I was not born when Indonesia was colonialized, I now how it feels to live under oppression. These days we live under different kind of oppresions. Censorship is one of them.

New term has started. I am teaching "Introducti0n to Information Technology" for Pharmacy international class. This year, there are only 10 students in class. Yay! I just remembered. I should take a picture of the class. Oh well. Next class...

I am watching "maicih" twitter account. Interesting. Here's an example of an Indonesian entrepreneur, selling hot (potato?) chips, using twitter. The chips are popular and very hot. They scales to measure the hotness. They have moving vehicles (cars) and selling those hot popular chips in various streets in Bandung (and now other cities). If you want to buy their chips, all you have to do is look at (or follow) their twitter account. You'll know where they are. As for me, the chips are to hot for my stomach. I'll pass.

When somebody put you in a circle, in g+ of course, you are notified. That's fine. But, the problem is there is an urge to add the user in my circle. Well, I just add them in "Misc." circle :)

How many googe plus circles can one has? Can you automate the creation of google plus circles? (scripted)

I hate retweet (RT). There are occasions that retweet is okay, but most of the time they are not. Google plus makes it easier for people to re-share posting. This is re-tweet in a grander scale! So now, I have the same video clip posted 10 times (or more) in my stream. They take up a lot of screen space. Grrr ...

After using Google plus (g+) for a while, I think I am still going to tweet (or whatever g+ equivalent) more in twitter. My reason is very simple; I need statistics of my activities. In twitter, I know the number of tweets I have made and so on. I know if I talk too much (the ratio of #tweets/#follower is much higher - a metric I invented ha ha ha). There's no such feedback (karma of some sort) in google+. Even 4square has badges. I need that kind of feedback.

I just wrote two articles in my blog. Unfortunately they are in Bahasa Indonesia. How to upgrade Macbook (aluminum) disk Can Google Plus Beat Facebook? Enjoy ...

There has been a new development in tech start-up companies in Indonesia. Online media companies are taken by big companies. The recent take over is detik.com by Chairul Tanjung. Wow! (Some people think that this might be related to politics; as preparation of Indonesian election. Electronic media is important in Indonesia!) The investor scene is also buzzing. Here's an example of Indonesian tech investors . When I have more time, I'll write more on these. In the mean time, let's get the party going on. Woohoo ...

We are using Lyx to write our paper (using IEEEtrans class, which is a 2-column layout). In this paper we have a figure that is to big to fit into one column. Poking here and there, I could not find information on how to do it. Searching the internet found pointers to do it in LaTeX, but no information on how to do it in Lyx. Finally, I decided to read the .lyx source manually (with "vi", of course). I found this line: \begin_layout Standard \begin_inset Float figure placement htbp wide false sideways false status open So, I changed the "wide false" to "wide true". And now my figure spans into two columns. I am a happy camper now. I hope it helps.

James Durbin is out of American Idol. But, as far as I am concerned, he is the idol for this season (season 10). I think this is for the best. This reminds me of Daughtry, who is also great.

For the last few days, I've been getting "twitter over capacity error." Hmm... what's going on? I can't believe that they didn't do a capacity planning process. They must have done it, right? And because of it (twitter down), I posted this short twit-like posting.

When I go to "Preferences" and close the pop up window, it ends up creating a blank square on the top left corner of my screen. (See the screen shot.) Bug? Firefox 4.0.1 Mac OS X Leopard.

Last Wednesday I gave a talk on "Security Today 2011" as part of educating our clients (and future clients) about information security. In my talk, I talked about the trend of IT security in which application security is getting more attention. We have been investing our human resources to this relatively new field. We're going to give training(s) on this in June. We'll see you there.

I guess, you all have familiar with this case; somebody posted a video on YouTube and s/he became popular. Well, it happened (and is still happening) in Indonesia. This time, the star is Briptu Norman from Gorontalo. A video of Briptu Norman lipsyncing an Indian song was posted. (You can use your favorite search engine to find the video.) Apparently, people loved the way he "performed" in the video. Entertaining. And suddenly, all news and TV media wanted to show case him in their shows. He was brought to Jakarta and was asked to sing and dance just like in the video that was posted in YouTube. Norman is an officer in Brimob (Brigade Mobile, an Indonesian National Police special operations force units). His commanding officer(s) support him because this gives a good public relationship, showing the human side of Policeman. So there you go. Another case of a star was born because of YouTube.

Last night our band played in Beatles Night at Cafe Dacosta. We played nine songs only. I wish we could play more, but we didn't have time to practise. Oh well. Next time perhaps? In the mean time I am wondering if anybody took some pictures ...

Sunday, 27 March 2011, I gave a presentation at TEDx Bandung . If you don't know what TED is, check this out. My topic is " Digital Entertainment in Indonesia: the future of ". In essence, there are research and bussiness opportunities in Indonesia. Our culture is so much different, in that entertainment is our lives. It was a great event, with interesting speakers. I was told that the video will be available and uploaded. Will see... I am going to upload my presentation material this weekend.

I have close to 5000 friends in my facebook account. Facebook does not allow me to add more friends. I guess they have design issues related to this. Let me give you and example. If I want to do something (say tagging a photo) which requires a list of names, it is so slow. It tries to download the list of all friends that I have (including their icons / avatars). I could imagine what 5000 friends will do. This is even worse with slow internet connection like what I have (and perhaps what other people have in developing regions). Imagine if I have 10.000 friends :) and this is possible. I've been ignoring friend requests because I just couldn't add more friends. Currently there are more than 500 requests waiting. Almost all of them are legitimate requests. And why I get all these friend requests? Well, I hate to admit it but I do quite a bit of talk (to univesities' students, etc.) and in each talk there are more than 100 people. If 10% of them want to be friends with me, t...

[effects are in the bag] These were the gears Luqman dan I took to our gig yesterday.

I think Simon said it a while back, your show has to be memorable (hopefully because of good not bad). So, I am using that criteria to measure yesterday's performance. For me, the last two performances, James Durbin is the best. Maybe it's because I love rock music and get it? But, I think James has a great vocal. I thought he can only scream, but yesterday's performance - Maybe I am amazed - shows that he can control his voice. My vote for him ... My other fav contestant is Thia ... (but yesterday's performance was okay only).

CrackBerry visited Mangga Dua Mall in Indonesia and was surprised by the number of stores selling BlackBerry :) Check this video out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OB0lquizhE This is what I said in earlier post; you won't believe it until you are here and see it for yourselves. But, next time you'll come here, it would be Android all over ...

I know that all markets are different, but Indonesian cyber market is quite unique. People outside Indonesia don't know that Indonesia is the biggest market of BlackBerry products. Or that we rank #3 in the number Facebook users. The most important thing is why? I believe the answer to this question is related to our culture. For example, we tend to talk not to write. When people have minutes of meeting in writing, we don't have one :) [no, I am not joking.] Perhaps, we are more youtube than wikipedia. Our lives are mostly entertainment, not a learning one. If Westerners get a bigger bandwidth, they will think of distance learning. But for us it is time for karaoke online or online games or online chat :) Do you know the main driver of BlackBerry success in Indonesia? It's because of women and facebook. That was the main, original, driver. Many Indonesian women bought Blackberry to chat with their friends through Facebook. And when I say, chat, it is really really intense...

Last week I was asked to give a lecture at IT Telkom . The topic was " IT Audit ". I just had to squeeze this into my busy schedule (and I wasn't feeling well at that time). The class went okay. I am receiving emails from students asking guidance (what to do after they graduate). Well, this is actually another topic. On a side note, during the class there were only two questions from the students, but now I am receiving a few emails. I guess this is an-Indonesian culture thing :) [do not ask in class]. Oh, maybe this is an Asian thing. I took picture some of the students: here it is ... Outline of my presentation is here (at scribd and slideshare).

The meeting that I had yesterday (I can say yesterday because now it is 2 AM and technically it's already another day :) ) got me excited. It brings back the energy and spirit in me. It reminds me why I went back to Indonesia (instead of staying abroad). And when I got to this zone, I want to write. Thus, I blog. Even though I now I should be sleeping right now. There are many things that I want to write, but first I have to show to the world that I believe in our technical abilities. Do I really believe it? He**, yes! I met many tech savvy persons. Some of them were my students. My biggest problem is to keep them in Bandung. They go abroad and become the asset of those countries :( But what can I do? I don't have the money (and toys) to keep them in Bandung. I wish Google would open their research lab in Bandung. [Head spinning. Too many ideas and things to write ... and that's a good thing!]

I've just finished having an informal discussion with Steven Koltai, a Senior Advisor for the US State Department in charge of Global Entrepreneurship program. We talked about many things, but manily I talked about Bandung - or why Bandung is the tech center of Indonesia. There are so many things that I wanted to talk but could not because of time. He had to go back to Jakarta. Then it dawned on me that I should write things in smaller bits, so that they are more digestable. I could use this blog to do that. It would be useful not just for Steven, but for others who are interested in learning about tech-related situations in Indonesia. Wish me luck (so that I have time and energy to do it).

It looks like that I photo food a lot. The reason is very simple, there are always food around me :) So I just have to photograph them. (Some thing with flowers, actually.) Maybe I should learn (and focus) more on food photography?

I am typing this while serving as a jury on an e-government award. It is interesting to see how e-government is becoming better. (I wanted to say more mature, but it is still a long way to go.) Most e-government applications are related to citizen complaints or permits-related.

These are pictures of food that I have taken recently. Look at their colors ... wow!

There will be times when we have differences (in opinions, ways to do things, etc.). It is sad if those differences can break relationships and friendships. The most important thing is that we don't have bad or malicious intention toward each other or do things that make the other parties ill feel. Folks, I hope we can have long lasting relationship and friendship.