arifn

I’ll straight to the point.

Today I got an email from my thesis supervisor. Right now, he’s in Japan, chasing his Doctoral degree. In his email, he let me know that Monbusho scholarship is opened again. He also said that he’ll give me subject for the thesis research. He’ll talk with his supervisor there to give me chance. I know that I should be grateful about that. And I am, but somehow I feel anxious right now.

First, I’ve sent an application letter to UGM. My application letter will be selected on this May. And, if and only if, I make it, I’ll into the class in August. I’ve prepared my mind and determination for this.

Second, It has been six months since I got this hydropneumothorax. If I’ll go abroad, I think I should consults with the internist first. I dunno if my body can make it there. This is the biggest obstacle of all.

And the last things, I should prepare my documents and letters immediately. The deadline is on May 22nd. I should prepare my transcript and graduation letter (all in English), taking TOEFL (anybody know where I can take the test?), and studying new language.

So that’s my story for today. I wrote it down just to redeem my worries. I think I should pray more. Would you mind giving me your suggestions?

Weeks ago, I decided to track the visitor of this site using free services from StatCounter.com. The free services limited to 500 logs only, but it’s fine with me. So, Let’s play statistics this time!

Visitor's country

First things first, this is the image of the top ten country from where the visitors accessed this blog. The tracker caught more than 50 percent of the visitors came from Indonesia, my country. Maybe half among them were my friends (sometimes I forced them to take a peek at my blog, but it’s legal, right? ^^). Another reasons, I wrote some tutorials using Bahasa Indonesia, so they stumbled in this blog.

The second country goes to United States. That’s what I expected when I was thinking about writing in English. Another abroad country like Poland, Phillippines, Brazil, etc. were some side effects of this cause.

Popular Pages

Next, this picture showed this blog’s popular pages. I was curious, why the number one page didn’t show up. After I checked the details, the page was CodeIgniter: Removing index.php. In the second position, here it comes the homepage. I promoted my blog a lot at mailing lists, Facebook, and Twitter. I assumed that its visitors came from my never-lasting-promotion-efforts. Four pages (including the number one) among the top ten were a tutorial post. From this I concluded that tutorial posts will attract more visitors.

Entry from Search Engine

Last but not least, from which search engine my visitors came. From the statistics, most of the visitors used Google search engine, even from various countries. Just about nine percents of them used Yahoo! search to stumbled at this blog. So, I’ll optimized my upcoming post to be indexed by Google.

Well, playing with statistics was fun. But I couldn’t concluded more than that. I’m still learning at this. So, why wouldn’t you give me some words?

ChatZilla, an IRC client (Firefox addon)

Howdy,

A month ago, my friends and me started to hold a conference chat. In this chat, we’ll try to speak (or write) in English. The aim is to improve our English conversation skill. We’ve been using some chatting styles, and in this post I wanna share it to y’all.

Our first meeting, we were using conference chat provided by YM. Using this, we could invite any friends that we want to join. It has great features, like the normal YM chat, such as emoticons, voice chat, and so on. But the problem arise when one of the chatter has a bad connection. He/she got disconnected, but his/her name was still on the list. They couldn’t invited anymore. We’ve used this style for a week or two, then I was thinking about another style of chat. I was looking for an AJAX-based chat in a web page.

So, I googled and stumbled in Gabbly. I embedded it on my aggregator page. We tried it for one meeting. And we got a problem. Some of my friends couldn’t access the page at all. The page was too slow to load. So, there were not many people joined us that time. It made me think of another way. Something more stable and low bandwidth requirement.

Then I remembered IRC. Years ago, IRC was the main chatting style. And it still exists until now. So I found this server, TheOneServ. This server based in Indonesia, and I can register a channel for free. So I registered a channel for us. As for the client softwares, we can use ChatZilla (an add ons for Firefox). One of my friends asked me if she could use IRC client for mobile. I googled and found jmIrc. It’s Java mobile app. So then she finally can joined the meeting (and exercizing her thumbs too). Well,  think we’ll stick with this old-style chat things for now.

Or do you have another suggestions?

My short trip to Bogor this time sure brings back memories. It’s not less than 3 months since my last time here. Within this trip, I revisited my old a-place-i-called-almost-home. This place is Sengked Valley.

Sengked Valley?

For you who didn’t know, Sengked Valley is located in Darmaga, Bogor. The more exact location is near the male dorms of IPB. The name Sengked Valley has its own history too. The real name actually is Sengked. A year ago, they provided wireless internet access facility to their inhabitant. When I subscribed to their service, the SSID for the wireless network was Sengked Valley. So then we, all of the inhabitants, called our place Sengked Valley. So, actually it’s not even close to Silicon Valley.

The Inhabitants

There’re never many people live in Sengked Valley main dorms. From my major, there were only four long terms inhabitants and some short term inhabitants. And here they are:

adidm, a.k.a bang syadid. Born leader, hard worker type person. He entered Sengked Valley in mid 2005, one of the first long term inhabitant. At that time, he lived in Gerung building in the 1st floor. Among us, all of the inhabitants, he was the first who finished his thesis. That’s make us high-spirited to get our thesis finished asap. Now, he lives and works in Jakarta.

ndoet, a.k.a pandu. Very nice and friendly. Among all of us, maybe he’s the one who spent more time with his computer. If he’s doing his works in front of his computer, even dinner can’t distract him. He was the room mate of adidm. Now, he also lives and works at Jakarta.

fe, a.k.a ferdi. Smart and strong minded person. He’s the one and only, who had Cum Laude amongs us. He has the respect of the others. He’s my room mate at our first semester, but then I moved on my private room on the next semester. Like the two I mentioned before, he lives and works at Jakarta now.

denymaoeth, a.k.a deny. A man with strong principles. After he decided something, he will never back down. A man that you can relied on. Officially he’s not registered as inhabitants. But sometimes, usually when exam comes, he asked my permission to study at my room. So he became my temporary room mate. Thanks to him, I have study partner. Because his family live in Jakarta, he also works there now.

khadi-kun. You can mock him, but he’ll never angry. He’s a kind person. He has determination and never feel shame to learn. Up until I write this, he hasn’t graduated yet. But I hope he will soon. He only live in Sengked Valley for 3 or 4 semesters before he decided to come and back from Jakarta.

curisu, a.k.a kikis. He was my room mate from the last year before I graduated. He’s nice and caring person. He always give me some useful suggestions for me. Until I write this, he still live at Sengked Valley and hasn’t graduated yet. I hope he’ll soon. Good luck bro!

That’s just the inhabitants. Wanna know what we’re doing there ? Stay tuned..

In the mid 2005, me and some of my friends created accounts in one bank. I saved some money there and didn’t do any transactions anymore. So I have two accounts, one in my self-chose-bank and university-collaborated-bank. With the end of my graduate study, I closed and withdrew all of the money from university’s bank. So I only have the first account left.

Because I never do any transactions, I forget the PIN of my account. The bank has the facility to reset the PIN via phone call. Days ago, I tried it to reset my PIN. I called the call-center and they did some verification on my identity (wether I was a real client or just a fake). Then they connected me to the PIN-changer machine. I thought this was great, so the customer service knows nothing about my new PIN. So then I continued to listen into the machine.

“Please enter your account number”, I pushed my account number on the phone.
“Please enter your sequence number”, I pushed it on the phone.
“Please enter your secret code”, I pushed my secret code.
“Please enter your new SIX DIGITS PIN“, I waited. What? A six digits? I didn’t prepare for this. At first I thought that I’ll use my birthday numbers. But hold on, if you unprepared and asked about six digits number for your PIN, then you will likely to use your birthday numbers, right? Considering this, I used another sequence of numbers as my PIN.
“Please enter your PIN again”, I pushed it again.

…

Secret words or numbers are largely used as personal secret identity in the world. They usually used to verifiy wether you are real or a fake. This concepts widely used in the real world (like PIN or account numbers) and the clouds (passwords or captcha). Losing the secrecy of this words or numbers can lead to big problems. So I suggested you do at least one of these:

Don’t use commonly used passwords because there’re a lot of people would take a guess about it. According to Threadwatch, these are the 10 most commonly used passwords:

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. blink182
10. (your first name)

And yes, birthday were considered as commonly used passwords too. You could Googling for another passwords if you’re so curious. If you used one of these passwords, I recommended you to change it immediately.

Raise your password’s length and use some non-alphabetic character into it. Use a sentence as a password may be a great choice, as long as you remember it. Using non-alphabetic like @,^,*,$ can make your password harder to guess. As long as you remember it.

Don’t write down your PIN or passwords. In servers room, sometimes we can see the passwords for their routers, servers, or services. This could be really dangerous. As for PIN, don’t bring your passwords everywhere and don’t place the passwords paper at the same locations with your ATM / credit cards. Because if you lose your wallet, you will lose everything, your money, and maybe your life.

Change your passwords regularly. Maybe once in two months? Just a few minutes to secure yourself and for your own goods.

So don’t waste your time, go check your passwords now!

You have another suggestions? Go ahead and share it!