sidudun

About a year ago, I created a blog aggregator, or sometimes also called Planet. This planet display all the blog posts from my registered friends. At first, I did it alone. I maintained and designed it by myself. And then, my friend Andreas wanna help me maintaining the site. So I gave him a role as administrator. Some days ago, he sent me this email:

Rif,

Do you have opened the website in IE6? The layout and the design looks screwed :(

IE6 or Internet Explorer version 6 is a browser shipped with Windows XP. It was released in 2001. It has better CSS support than the previous version, at that time. The problem with the browser is it’s lacking support on the web standard. If you’re a web designer, you must know the designing problems in IE6 . This browser has bad reputation among web designers. Continue reading

Two months ago, I wrote a simple tutorial on how to create a Hadoop MapReduce program using Netbeans. Not a slightest clue in my head that this post will change my life. Okay, I’m exaggerating. I mean the post change the history of this blog.

The first day after I wrote the post, nothing special happened. But the day after, I was shocked when I checked this blog stats. This blog usually have about 15-25 visitors a day. So I was amazed when I saw 90 visitors that day. I started to investigate which post has the biggest contribution in delivering traffics. And I found out that it was the Hadoop in Netbeans post. I noticed that all of the traffic came from one site called DZone. DZone? I never heard that site before. When I was investigating the site, I found that it’s a cool bookmarking site for developer around the globe. And someone, later I known as mitchp, just share my post into this site.

The magic continued the next day. My traffic keep increasing. Then later in that day, I got an email from my hosting provider:

The domain arifn.web.id has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit (807.50/1000.00 Megs).

Well, my bandwidth limit was just 1 GB a month. So I double checked the hosting package and found that my bandwidth limit should be 2 GB. I contacted my hosting provider to make sure that they didn’t make any mistakes. They said that my bandwidth should be 2 GB and they will resolve it a.s.a.p. Okay, so I started installing WP Super Cache to prevent my site from being down because of the high traffic and low bandwidth limit.

The magic ended. The highest peak was on the third day, near 200 visitors. After that, the traffic declining and found its equilibrium state. But, this state is higher than my average traffic before. My average traffic now is about 20-35 visitors a day. Not bad, huh?

And now, I’m a fan of DZone. Some days ago, I found out that I’m not the only one who has this kind of experience. Yeah, of course. Jordi Cabot wrote in his blog about his DZone traffic experience:

Unfortunately, a completely different story is the mid and long-term impact. By this I mean the number of people that discovered my portal thanks to the link and that has become a frequent visitor of the site since then. This is very difficult to assess (there is no way to know if a new subscriber originally discover your site thanks to the DZone link or it is just a temporal coincidence that he/she joined the site around those dates) but if we look at the increase in the number of subscribers to the RSS portal feeds , my twitter account or the daily visits to the site, my estimation is that only a 2-3% of the original DZone visitors has converted into new portal followers.

I second that. Maybe it’s just a sweet temporal coincidence if my traffic growth above the average. But one thing that I can learn from this experience is that if you want to have a high amount of traffic, you should write a good post regularly. And I hope I can do that.

Do you have the same experience?

Howdy,

When I was in my college, I tried to implement Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) as a foundation for a distributed Geographical Information Systems (or better known as GIS). My academic advisor at that time told me that this idea is not entirely new, but there are still a lot of people didn’t know about it yet. So with this topic as my thesis, he wished that one day people will know about this technology.

The implementation that I made was quite simple actually. But let me tell you the complete story. At first, I was thinking about develop a geographical operation that can be operated via web service in the clouds. After some weeks of analyzing and gathering informations, I found out that this work could be really hard and time consuming. I didn’t have background in geography–I’m a computer science student–and I didn’t have much time before the next graduation. Finally, I just created a spatial data repository and make it accessible across the network using GeoServer,an Open Source implementation of WMS and WFS. I, then, created a simple web application to pull the spatial data and display it to the browser. I also provided a simple data update feature, utilizing one of the feature of WFS. I used OpenLayers to create the application. It’s really simple actually.

In my graduate study, right now, I want to try something entirely different. I want to explore MapReduce, a programming model for processing a large scale of data in a distributed environment. I heard about this model from some mailing lists and websites, surprised that the paper [pdf], the lecture notes and videos are easy to get. So, for the time being, I decided to do some experiments in order to learn something about it.

It’s still a plan in my head actually. I never talked about it to my thesis advisor (because I have none yet). But I can predict some problems that I will be dealing with if I do this research plan. They are:

• The case. I don’t have any idea about the case that I should solve with this research. My college’s advisor told me about doing something in bioinformatics like genome assembling. I think I will cosider it. But I’m open for an idea.
• The machine and its network. The lab are always busy with the other graduate student. Fortunately, one friend of mine told me that there is another place that I can use in the campus to do experiments. But I should create a permission letter first. Okay, I’ll do it.

In the mean time, I’ll focus myself to learn about MapReduce. Maybe I’ll post something about it in this blog. If you have a suggestion about what should I do with this programming model, let me know. I’d be really glad to hear it.

Credits:

EDSAC pictures, copyrighted Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Once in my peaceful days, a friend rang me up. She said that a friend of her got a problem with email. This friend got her email hi-jacked by her ex-boyfriend. So she couldn’t login to her email. That’s just for the start. The bigger problem is this ex also hi-jacked her Facebook account and start doing nasty things with her account. Pretty scary huh? Continue reading

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!