Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

Last night, I was part of a discussion on the new WhatsApp (WA)'s privacy policy. What is the impact to all of us. My points were actually the same as the one posted in my blog. ( Here . In Bahasa Indonesia.) It's just a different audience and different way of delivering the content.   Anyway, I hope the event is useful to the audience. On to next topics.

Finally, I decided to create a (YouTube) video. This time, it is about the Python programming language. In this video I talked about why Python is the language of today. (Not sure 5 years down the line.) Enjoy the video. Unfortunately the video is in Bahasa Indonesia. When I have the time, I'll make an English version of this. Come to think of it, there are already tons of videos on Python in English. I don't think you'll need another one. I guess, I'll make more videos in Bahasa Indonesia then.

Reading at several posts in various groups, I got a feeling that some coders think that they are holier than others. They think low of people who can code, especially in code-related projects such as open source projects. Granted that the main attraction of the open source project is the code itself, but don't we need testers, people who write documentations, trainers, public relations, and such? Don't they have important roles in the projects? I've been coding all my life. I love coding. I code for fun. In fact, I coded a few minutes ago before writing this post. (Tomorrow I am presenting my codes in a local CodeMeetUp().) My code is so-so. Being an old coder, I could not keep up with current programming methodologies. But code is code. The principle is still the same. Back to the topic, I don't look down on non-coders even in a code-related project. I know that writing documentation is a pain in the blip and appreciate people who would do it. But, that's just ...

Technology does help me to be more healthy. At least that's what I believe. For the last month, I've been wearing Mi (Fitness) Band. It's a bracelet that keeps track you movement. It records the number of steps you have done at a particular time of the day. It can also record the number of hours you are sleeping. But, I am mainly focus on the number of steps (and the associated kilo meters I have walked). I can synchronize the data with my iPhone. Here's an example of the result. I can set a goal in terms of the number of steps per day. I set it at 8000 steps. Usually, I couldn't make it. Ha ha ha. I usually go from my car to my office, which is probably only 500 meters from the parking spot. That's not enough to achieve 8000 steps. Sometimes, I purposely park my car further so I have to force myself to walk more. I also use Nike+ to track myself when I walk. But, Nike+ requires GPS and that sucks my battery really fast. So, I use Nike+ when I know t...

I guess nobody is listening at Google. Let me say it again. Gplus (g+) is not popular in Indonesia because it is VERY SLOW to open the page. That's the first problem. It takes me a while to open and interact with my gplus page. This is Indonesia. You have to come down here to understand it. (Google reps are in Singapore and only occasionally come to Indonesia. You wouldn't know the reality.) Second, it is difficult to interact in gplus. There is no notification and threads about the interaction. For example, if somebody comments in my post, I wouldn't know. I know there is a notification feature, but it is not as visible as Facebook, for example. I have more than 9000 followers in g+ and 5000 in Facebook, but there are MORE interactions in Facebook than in g+. In fact, there is close to zero interaction in my g+. Are you listening Google?

Want to know something hot in the Indonesia's start-up domain? It's Go-Jek . It's the Uber of Indonesia. What is Go-Jek ? It's an application to search for " ojek ". Ojek is a motorcycle transportation for public done by individuals. Or a motorcycle taxi. It's an Indonesian - or, I should say, Asian - thing. Many places in Indonesia are easier reached by motorcycle; streets are narrow. Motorcycles are much cheaper compared to cars. Everybody owns motorcycle here. And, if there are traffic jams, ojek is your best friend. It can get you there faster. Ojek is not regulated in Indonesia. Everybody can become an ojek operator (driver), while if you run a business using cars you have to get a license. It's a grey area. In any case, if think Uber can be illegal in Indonesia. Ojek is perfectly legal. You can also transport goods using ojek. It's a threat to courier business. By the way, this is yet another reason why you should be in Indonesia. T...

Just tested Photoscape 3.7 under Wine under Linuxmint 17. Looked okay, but then when I edited an image ... preview of all images became broken greyscale. It looked like this: Don't know where to report. Posted here for the benefit of others. Any fix(es) out there?

I've been using Google mail (gmail) for years. Obviously, I use picasa also to store my photos. Currently, I am having a problem with my (mostly email) accounts. It almost reaches the 15 GB limit. I use my gmail as my main communication media. Students sending assignments are kept in my mailboxes. Every semester I have betweet 30 to 100 students and I've been teaching more than 15 years. The storage is definitely becoming a problem. What bugs me is that I have only 8000 (or so) mails in my mailbox and that has reached the maximum free storage capacity. What to do? Delete emails? Or, should I upgrade the free account to the paid one?

I have too many emails. Hundreds of emails daily. That's not counting spam mails. It's not that I think I am important. It's just that I've been using emails for too long. Since late 1987 or 1988, I think. The problem is that most mail readers currently cannot handle this situation. I ended up with cases of lost emails. Somebody sent me an email and I did not reply right away because there was more pressing email(s) to reply. Then, I forgot to reply. Communication went dead. S/he thought that I did not want to respond, when the actual thing is that I could not find her/his email. I often ask people to send me email again if I do not respond to the email in a certain period of time, say in a week. Most people think that the request is strange. No. I don't mind people send me multiple emails. Just to remind me that I have not responded to the email. Send me again ...

Looking at various sites / blogs / forums, I read complaints that smartphones and all those tech gadgets are anti-social. Hmm ... This is ALL WRONG. If you look closely, at the other end - and also using smartphones - are people. Not wall or dead objects. Human. They are socializing through smartphones. It's just that most people see they are talking to the device. No! They are communicating with another person (or persons) on the other side. The device is just, well, a device. Now, have a look at those people who are travelling and reading books. Alone . By themselves. They are not talking to other people. So, who are the anti social?

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (as if you need this introduction - ha ha ha), is Indonesia. He met with our next president, Joko Widodo - famously called Jokowi, in Jakarta. Joko Widodo will be sworn as our president on Oct 20th. One of the photos that made me laugh (happy laugh) is this. In this picture, Jokowi showed Mark some kind of pants (I think it's a pair of jeans) from a small store in Tanah Abang. Jokowi was known for cleaning the mess in Tanah Abang. He loves to go to small places and meets with ordinary people. We call this "blusukan" (pronounce like: blue shoeq un - ha ha ha) in Javanese. Oh, btw, we make jeans in Indonesia. Those famous brands are made in Indonesia. Mark went to Yogyakarta before he went to Jakarta. Yogyakarta - or Jogja in short - is famous for Borobudur temple. Another photos that made me laugh is this. A group of tourists, not knowing who Mark Zuckerberg is, asked him to take a picture of them and he took the picture. Mark i...

One of the problems I have with Android phones is that by default (?) the configuration is trying to sync the phone with my Google account. For my case, it tries to download (sync) my emails (gmails) and photos I uploaded to picasa. This is a disaster since I have lots - say more than 10,000 emails - and Gigabytes of photos. I found out about this a while ago when I tried a new Android phone. I noticed that there were some networking activities. Apparently, it tried to sync my photos. I think it did that when I am connected to WiFi, but not when I am connected with 3G. Had it also done the same thing using my 3G connection, my quota would be long gone. (Long time ago, I had similar problems but could not recall what.) Some people love the idea of synchronizing contacts on the Android phone with their gmail accounts. I don't. If I do that, than thousands of my contacts would be on my phone. Searching for a contact in my phone would be a nightmare. Other than taking my networki...

This afternoon, I am going to give a talk on technopreneurship at Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). One of the points that I am going to address is when to start. Many people have plans and dreams of becoming an entrepreneur but never actually made it. They wait for the perfect moment to jump. Well, there's no perfect moment. You have to get out of your comfort zone. There's a saying, " Life Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone ." So jump in. A couple months ago I was a speaker at Innovfest Singapore. One of the speakers, Ike Lee, said that now it's the right time to start a business in Asia. Yes. Right here. Right now. Aren't we lucky? (Well, we means us here in Asia.) And so my soundtrack this morning is Van Halen's " Right Now ." See you in my talk.

For those who are not Indonesians or not in Indonesia may not know that presidential election is coming real soon. 9th of July 2014. And apparently there have been lots of negative and black campaign over the internet. Mostly on social media. Everyday, no correction ... every minute! there is a post on the candidates, followed by flurry of pro and contra messages. Then, the brawl began. Hate grew. Unfriend and blocking accounts took place. Many people wished that they could shut down their facebook account until election is over. It would be interesting if somebody from Facebook and Twitter could monitor the traffic and see the effect. This is a rare event. Anybody from facebook or twitter?

While the world is becoming faster, internet-wise, here in Indonesia things are still slow. I still cannot open Google+. Seriously. Nobody believed me. Now, I found the proof. Here's an infograph I found on the internet (need URL). As you can see, we are still a hippo(?). We are even slower than Vietnam. Ouch. With this condition, it is important to design applications. Your application should run on slow speed. That is if you want to grab Indonesia's market. Otherwise, ignore us with your need-for-speed-apps.

I just got back from  InnovFest 2014 reception (dinner). One of the frequently questions I got was if I were from a business incubator. I said I am not. I am just a technopreneur and a mentor for several startups. Then, I keep on thinking, do we really need a business incubator? Business incubators are similar to incubators used for premature babies. They are used to give those babies fighting chance against the world. The same thing for business incubators. They help startups. If you have a baby, would you dream to have your baby going through incubator? Probably not. You want your baby to be healthy and can face the world. But, I have a feeling that if somebody (you) starts a start-up, he (you) would like to get into an incubator. Strange. What do you think?

I have Linux (Mint) as my main desktop and Macbook (Mac OS X) as my mobile computer. To backup these machines, I have an external disk which I formatted using HFS+ format. Following instructions, I disabled journaling for this disk. This morning I tried to copy files from my Linux machine to the external disk. It won't allow me, saying that the disk is read-only. Hmmm... I checked and double checked that the format is correct and that journaling is tuned off. I tried to create a folder and it failed also. Obviously. Then, I decided to open a terminal session and create a simple file on the external disk; "touch junk". It worked! So, the disk is already mounted read and write. I tried to copy files again and it still didn't work. Puzzled. What if the problem is with my file manager? I am using Nemo. I installed Nautilus file manager just for the heck out of it. Copying files with Nautilus worked! Strange ... but at least I have a solution for my backup purposes. ...

The world fall in love with selfie. Even selfie has become a word in English dictionary recently. What you don't know is that we, Indonesians, "invented" selfie. For years young Indonesians - especially girls - take mug shot of themselves and post them in their facebook profiles. They even have certain style that I cannot explain. I just cannot describe it. (Later, when I know how I will update this.) But, trust me, we know our stuff. Selfie is our thing :) I saw an interesting article this morning, a comparison between selfie styles in different cities. Oddly, Jakarta or Bandung is not even in the list. They got it wrong!

Here's the deal, I have (too) many email accounts. Each mail for different purposes; teaching, business, (community) public services, personals, and testing. Aside from my gmail / yahoo accounts, these email accounts reside on many mail servers, some of which my own. On one machine I have multiple outgoing email addresses and one (or two) incoming emails. The different email addresses are mainly aliases. I use all kinds of email clients. Currently, I use mutt and Thunderbird. In the old days, I used elm, mutt, Pegasus, and Eudora. In the old email clients I can set the outgoing email address to whatever I want. Currently, this is not working with Thunderbird. It is limited to ONE username per server. (Maybe it is a way to protect users from creating fake email addresses?) How do I force it to use multiple user one one server? (Update: this is solved by "Manage Identities" configuration in the Account Settings.) Anyway, should I roll my own Mail User Agent (MUA)? or ...

I guess I congratulate WhatsApp too soon. Not long after WhatsApp is bought by Facebook, the system went down. (At least a couple times here in Indonesia.) As I mentioned in previous post, many Indonesians are using WhatsApp for many things (as a backup of SMS/text msg). When you depend on a system and the system is down, you're angry. And in this particular case, looking for another solution. Fortunately, there's Telegram . I am pretty sure that MANY Indonesians are installing Telegram right now. I do. This is the moment for Telegram to seize the day . I am pretty sure that their traffic will increase significantly. (And perhaps for Twitter or Google to buy Telegram!) One of the features Telegram puts forward is secret chat. With the new Snowden-era I am sure that many would like this feature. Although, Indonesians are not so into privacy. Cost - in this particular case, Free - is the main feature. Second is small footprint (so it can run on inexpensive devices). Way to g...