Read THIS and Weep

... Trust, my friend, is what we no longer have. We think people are out there to get us. They are after our property, our money, our jobs.

And if trust is earned, not given, we are certainly not trying to earn it. Look at some of our members of parliament. Is giving themselves expensive cars when people are suffering a way of gaining trust? Look at our government. Is it keeping its campaign promises to gain our trust?

For God sake, look at ourselves. We think stealing is normal...

... and let's think, really, really deep, about us. About how to change that.

ps: thanks for Boy for the url

The Rule of Four

The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
borrowed from Budi Rahardjo's personal collection

I love this book. It is about encryption, steganography, and friendship of four Princeton undergrad students. It is about process of solving a 500 years mistery. It is about how deep someone in history or language departement might have to learn about mathematics, anatomy, art, and above all: patience and persistence.

Interesting plots, interleaved tightly between current and past, which require non-stop reading if your memory is weak.

This book, like several others which talks about some -- vital -- historical backgrounds, left me "ngaplo kaya kethek ketulup" sometimes, because my lack of understanding of those events, places, terms, and names mentioned. Reinassance, Boticelli, Michaelangelo, Savonarola, Ibnu al-nafis, just to name a few.

It seems that the ending is somewhat dull, maybe because of its chronological style, but of course it still left a big surprise. Maybe the biggest surprise is that they need six years to
finish ...

But of course, this is very subjective. Readers' review on Amazon varied rather extremely, maybe because this book was hyped as something as good as or even better than Dan Brown's.

Firefox 1.5 RC1

Good: Tabs reorder, using drag and drop.
Bad: Some plugins (which works ok on 1.0.7) are disabled, API change?

Pengumuman Pemenang IOCCC ke-18

IOCCC adalah lomba untuk membuat aplikasi-yang-sangat-tidak-baik-untuk-ditiru, The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Coba saja lihat kode dari pemenang-pemenang terdahulu, dijamin anda mengerutkan kening dan mengurut dada ketika hanya sekedar melihat kesemrawutannya. Cobalah sedikit nekat berusaha memahami apa yang ditulis, dan proses macam apa yang dijalankan....

Tahun ini, ada beberapa katagori, yang dari nama-namanya saja sudah menjanjikan hal yang ajaib, absurd, menarik, dan menantang: Most superfluous output, Most circuitous walk, Most sonorous output, Most discourteous interpreter, Abuse of the rules, ..., dan yang membuat saya paling penasaran, Most ambiguous language. Sayang entri-entri pemenang masih belum dipublikasi, menunggu mereka menuliskan review. Mari kita nantikan!

New OS On The Block

Singularity, OS terbaru dari Microsoft yang bukan turunan DOS maupun Windows, cukup menarik perhatian. Yang paling menarik adalah quote baru:

Because when we blue screen, all of your data goes down into a black hole

Cryptic Error Message

I've been getting this cryptic error messages for several days on my Debian Sid:

warning: Non-ASCII character '\x8b' in file /usr/lib/python2.3/codecs.py on line 2, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 34, in ?
import DebianControlParser
ImportError: No module named DebianControlParser

It was started after I got a rather big disk f*ckup, which need standalone mode fsck. Many broken files (fortunately, only application ones, not my data), but I think all or most of them has been repaired. python and apt-listchanges has been reinstalled, nothing changed. Haven't had chance to do more debugging ...

Personal Security - Suatu Pengalaman

Berbagai acara televisi, dan mungkin juga radio (saya kurang yakin dengan radio, karena hampir tidak pernah mendengarkan radio lagi saat ini), menyelenggarakan berbagai acara interaktif, dimana peserta boleh mengikuti acara setelah melewati filter. Tahap filter ini sangat khas.

pembawa acara: halo, kuis xyz, dari siapa, dimana?
penelepon: halo, ini Budi di Bandung
pembawa acara: Budi dari Bandung, password-nya apa?
penelepon: password-nya blablablablabla

Kesalahkaprahan ini telah membudaya, dan biaya untuk memperbaiki kerusakan yang ditimbulkannya bisa sangat besar. Kerusakan apa? Kerusakan yang membiasakan orang untuk mengungkap password kepada pihak lain. Ini adalah kesalahan yang sangat fatal. Saya menghimbau kepada para pembawa acara untuk menempuh pendekatan lain. Paling tidak, mengganti kata password dengan istilah lain, karena password adalah rahasia yang tidak boleh diberitahukan kepada siapapun. Apakah anda mau memberitahu PIN ATM anda ke pembawa acara televisi? Apakah anda mau memberitahu PIN HP anda ke penyiar radio?

Di sisi lain, kedua anak saya mulai belajar memakai email dan instant messaging. Keduanya selalu protes apabila ada famili yang ikut melihat apa yang mereka ketikkan di komputer saat mereka mulai login. Barangkali karena ketrampilan "mengetik buta" mereka masih belum terlatih, sehingga mereka khawatir password mereka dapat terbaca dengan mudah. Kebiasaan yang bagus. Mereka berdua sudah sadar bahwa password mereka tidak boleh diberitahukan ke siapapun, bahkan ke orang tua mereka.

Saya masih khawatir tentang privacy awareness mereka berdua apabila mereka mulai ikut acara interaktif. Apakah mereka akan terganggu dengan pertanyaan "passwordnya apa"? Apakah anda merasa terganggu?