3xb055

Assalammualaikum and a very good day to everyone,

According to wikipedia, "DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems. It was released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in January 2005 and included in Sun’s Solaris 10 for troubleshooting system problems in real time"

From Wall Street Journal online Sept 11, 2006:

"The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal’s 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest, the second time in three years that a Sun entry has won the top award. The panel of judges, representing industry as well as research and academic institutions, selected Gold, Silver and Bronze award winners and cited one technology for an Honorable Mention". 

Click here for more info.

written by teleforce

Dell Latitude X1

I sold my Lenovo Thinkpad r50e to a 3b055 associate member a few days ago :-). Since roughly 3 weeks ago I was actually working on Dell Latitude X1. It is a lighther machine (good for my back) with slightly better spec than r50e. I’m using Debian and it seems that I manage to get everything (i need to use) working. In case you’re wondering, that includes - wifi with ipw2200, networking, hibernate, cd burning, DRI for opengl apps, usb support, Xorg, fluxbox, sound. So far so good. Check out this pic to see X1 in action (troubleshooting p0f) at the recent hackinthebox 2006 conference.

2.6.18
The latest stable kernel is 2.6.18 and decided to give that a shot. The latest suspend2 (2.2.8-for-2.6.18) works fine as well. Here’s the uname.

Linux an-nahl 2.6.18 #1 Sat Sep 23 13:08:34 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux

p.s r50e was an-naml = the ant , and now X1 an-nahl = the bee

written by adli

We’re back from HackInTheBox alright, and the more I think about it, the more it come to me that 3xb055 seems to be joining most of the OSS related events happening around here. Going back starting from HITB, in the recent days we were also at Niser’s Quarterly SIG meeting, emelaka’s Spoof, i-hack @ UiTM, and OSCC Implementation Guidlines Seminar. Seems like we have nothing better to do in life but just this

Anyway, please enjoy HITB 2006 photos in my photo gallery.

written by shakir

We’ll be right back

written by adli

Assalammualaikum,

I have a dream, where RM10 can sustain my mobile phone
for a month.

This is not a proposal but a hope to see one day we
can all talk with minimum ‘tax’.

RM10 five years from now can barely buy us a nice
lunch. Thus a payment for talking from anywhere in
Malaysia should cost just as much as this … RM10. Why
RM10, why not free since talk is free? My dear friend
it is an accepted mantra that there is ‘no free
lunch’, therefore, we have to accept this minimum RM10
tax for administration and to pay the engineers their
salary so that they can buy a Satria Neo. We cannot
expect an engineer to use the bus because our poor
public transport, can we? But we are not talking
about Mr. Samy for now, that will be a different story
altogether. For now please look into the feasibility
study that I’m thinking for years now. Please bear in
mind that this is not a scholarly study rather it is a
continuous thought to improve current situation. Let
the scope be Malaysia even though nothing is
preventing the principle to be applied somewhere else.
Remember charity begin at home!

I’m not sure where it all started but as far as I can
remember I’ve been involved in computer networking for
quite sometimes. This is where it’s all started.
Computer networking is NOT telephony since both use
different concept. For outside world they are the
same but for the engineers there are like apple and
orange. You can make fruit juice, pie, cake, etc.
using both but they are really two different fruits.
Telephony is meant only for voice but networking is for
data. This is the convention but there is always an
exception. For example you can have telephony sending
fax data and networking sending skype voice. Little
that people know that telephony has becomes so
obsolete that most of the telephony voice at the
transmitter is converted into data in the backbone
(read communication trunk) then converted back into
voice at the receiver. This is done to make more
efficient transmission or lower cost so that the
Telcos (telecommunication company) can have MORE
profits but charging us ever increasing charge. To
explain why computer networking is cheaper and
efficient than telephony will deserved its own
article. But suffice to say that computer networking
DOES NOT reserve a connection unlike telephony.
Connection reservation increase the maintenance cost
and limit the efficiency.

In this article we are focusing on wireless or mobile
telephone (voice) since for me home telephone is now
obsolete. I haven’t got telephone in my house when I
was in Malaysia and in the UK. A lot of my friends
are in the same situation. If you have telephone in
your house consider yourselves as belonging to species
waiting for extinction What people use now are
mobile phones and even 10 years old children has one of
these gadgets.

Now we have our objective plus the scope apparent from
the title and the last few paragraphs. Now I want to
introduce two computer networking technology (read
jargons) relevant for our discussions, namely VoIP and
WiMax. In short VoIP means Voice over Internet
Protocol and WiMax means Wireless Microwave Access.
Basically VoIP is sending voice using data. You can
imagine VoIP as direct competitor to telephony. WiMax
is a new standard (802.16d) for wireless networking
and its mobile version (802.16e) has been recently
standardised. You can think of WiMax as a big brother
to WiFi, wireless standard that we used in the airport
or at overpriced coffee shop Starbucks. WiMax is
direct competitor to cellular wireless telephony
infrastructure that we all have come to reply upon.
Think of VoIP as the bread being delivered by a WiMax
lorry and the Telco companies providing the service as
the corner shop that we buy the bread (service).

I think VoIP needs little introduction since I believe
most of the people have been using Skype or similar
service. But little that we know VoIP can provide us
better quality voice compared to telephony. How many
time we confused ‘s’ and ‘f’ in a telephony
conversation? This problem can be eliminated
altogether using VoIP due to the larger bandwidth
(transmission content). The only major drawback of
VoIP is that emergency called is not guaranteed since
computer networking does not reserve the line. A lot
of PhD students has been spending their precious
research time and have been awarded their PhD in order
to solve this particular problem but apparently is not
been solved until now. Apart from that VoIP is a
clear winner, it is the Roger Federer and the Tiger
Woods of the current communication world.

WiMax is a new kid on the block. It’s been introduced
due the popularity of WiFi wireless LAN (Local Area
Network). WiFi only covers few metres up to 100 metres
and the bandwidth is less than 10 Mbit/s. It is
intended to be used inside a building and its
surroundings. Think of WiFi as similar to bicycle.
Most people use it for travelling in urban setting but
some weird people has travel around the world with
bicycle. Similarly there are many claims that WiFi
can cover entire city but the bottom line it is not
meant for that purpose. As opposed to WiFi, WiMax is
meant to be used for connecting a whole city thus it
is called wireless MAN (Metropolitan Area Network).
Theoretically it can cover up to 50 km (point-to-point
backbone) and about 5 km (omnidirectional – normal
access). The bandwidth is about 70 MBit/s which is
about 70 times the bandwidth of 1Mbit/s
ADSL(Asynchronous Digital subscriber Line) or about
550 times the bandwidth of 128KBit/s 3G (third
generation network) bandwidth! Since this is wireless
connection we will be realistic to say that it can
handles up to 30 MBits/s, therefore, it is still more
than thirty times improvement over the conventional
wired and wireless technology.

Now I’m going to tell you a little secret. The
bandwidth required to transfer voice data for one conversation
is only about 16KBit/s. I won’t bother you with the
mathematical details but suffice to say this bandwidth
can give us better quality voice than the conventional
telephony. Better still you can do other fancy things
for free that telephony would normally cost extra for
the so called ‘premium’ services such as voice
recording, call forwarding, etc. You can also has
other services that are not possible for using
telephony such as presence notification, sending voice
as email attachment or convert voice to email using
voice recognition software for offline meassaging.
The list can goes on. Just think of the new solution as
Yahoo Messenger (with calling feature) on mobile phone.
Let say we have one WiMax tower that can handle 30
MBit/s. Divide 10 MBit/s with 16 KBit/s we can get more
than 1875 users talking at the same time! Hello Telekom
CEO, you will better sleep well at night The one million
dollar question is how many WiMax tower is needed to cover
the whole nation? If you have any knowledge on this
please tell me. Did I tell you that Intel will put
WiMax receiver chip in every Intel powered laptop by
2007 as it did forWiFi? Future is bright my friends.

The Telco will have us to believe we need more than
talking and the phone can be use for other purpose
like watching a football match. Please do not fall into
this trap. What we need is to talk and talk
should be cheap. If you want to watch football go
watch it with your friends at Mamak stall or go back
home. That’s your 30 inch flat screen with surround
sound system is made for. We just want to talk,
remember this fact. I’ll suggest any company that want to
venture into the market to using the trojan horse
strategy. Make small SD card that come free with the
RM10 subscription. This SD can be inserted inside a
normal mobile phone. When the WiMax signal is in
range use it, but when you are out of range switch
back to the overpriced mobile service. Then soon it
will be a time when we don’t need the mobile service
and the bloated phone. We just need to talk remember?
Imagine a mobile in wrist watch without all the PDA
bloat.

My friends, if we don’t champion this noble effort
others will. But when the others do it they most
probably not doing it for the people but for their outrages
profit desire. So let us act together and make sure
that the dream can comes true for the good of the
nation. Please lobby the government and keep talking
the idea to the people. Sooner or later the mobile
infrastructure is going to be just like our water and
electricity infrastructure that we heavily relying to
continue our daily lives which we can’t live without.

written by teleforce

Masalah: Saya diminta utk upgrade php dan mysql dalam Centos 4.1 dari versi 4.x ke 5.x. Terdapat beberapa aplikasi yg sedia ada pada persekitaran semasa dan ia perlu 0 downtime(hehe actually 2 jam pun ok lagi)

Penyelesaian: Oleh kerana saya tidak dapat mempastikan samada aplikasi semasa akan berjalan dgn lancar dlm php 5, saya bercadang utk melarikan 2 web server(2 enjin php) serentak(hanya sementara). Server sedia ada akan menggunakan enjin PHP4.x sementera server 2 akan menggunakan PHP 5.x.

Langkah 1 - download Xammp

Langkah 2-install xammp

hingga tahap ini xammp(php/webServer dan Mysql) telah berjaya diinstall. Tetapi ia bergaduh dgn webServer sedia ada(php4) kerana masing-masing suka makwe yg sama(port 80). Oleh kerana php4 hanya wujud sementara sehinggalah semua aplikasi berjaya dipindahkan pada php5, saya buat keputusan utk serahkan port 80 pada php5(webServer yg baru) dan php4 utk gunakan port 82.

Langkah 3-tukar port utk server lama

cari string Listen dan tukar supaya dengar port 82

save dan restart server

hal yg serupa berlaku pada mysql. Secara default, mysql akan menggunakan port 3306. Penyelesaian, Mysql 5.x akan gunakan default port 3306, sementara mysql 4 pula akan diubah utk dengar port 3308.

Langkah 4-tukar port utk Mysql 4.0

shell> vi /etc/my.cnf

 

dlm section [mysqld] tukar port kepada 3308

[mysqld] port = 3308

 

restart mysql

shell> /etc/init.d/httpd restart

 

utk start xamp

shell>/opt/lamp/lamp startapache shell>/opt/lamp/lamp startmysql

 

selesai. utk capai 2 laman di atas
php4- http://localhost:82
php5- http://localhost:80 or http://localhost (port 80 default, so tak taip pun tak pe)

namun ada satu perkara yg saya perlu ceritakan disini. utk hubungi mysql server, dlm php:

mysql_connect(’localhost’,$user, $passwd)

 

jika bukan pada default port, kita perlu terangkan port yg sepatutnya:

mysql_connect(’localhost:3308‘,$user, $passwd)

 

tapi malangnya kod di atas tak berjaya. saya menghabiskan masa hampir 2 hari sebelum menemui cara yg betul. Gantikan localhost dgn 127.0.0.1

mysql_connect(’127.0.0.1:3308′,$user, $passwd)

 

Ini disebabkan function mysql_connect akan gunakan socket jika mendapat string localhost, maka port 3308 tidak akan digunapakai oleh php, sebaliknya akan guna default port.

lepas 2 hari baru perasan benda ni. utk anda di luar sana, jgn ulangi kesilapan yg sama. Ok, selamat berjaya..

written by cperdana

Thinkpad R50e

Saya terpaksa berpisah dengan Thinkpad R50e yang dibeli pada tanggal 1 Ramadhan tahun lepas. Pada hari yang sama kasut saya telah hilang di Masjid KLCC dan kami anak beranak berbuka puasa buat kali pertamanya di Masjid yang sama.

Thinkpad R50e ini banyak jasanya, lihat sahaja galeri foto mohdshakir.net. Pelbagai acara telah disertainya, termasuk kursus keselamatan komputer, penyelengaraan rangkaian dan lain-lain lagi. Itu tak termasuk aktiviti ko-kurikulum di dalam kenderaan, di tempat awam atau di rumah.

Pengguna Linux seperti saya tidak perlu gusar kerana adanya laman web seperti Thinkwiki yang boleh membantu dari aspek penyesuaian kernel dengan perkakasan Thinkpad.

Selamat tinngal R50e !

written by adli

written by shakir