Here is the situation. You are going to do an important presentation in an international conference. You have made your presentation slides, it’s like the greatest presentation in the universe. You made the presentation using the latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org Impress. You double checked your presentation and laptop right before you’re doing your presentation. Suddenly, out of nowhere, your laptop crash, error, bsod, or anything. You have no choice, you transfered your slides file to another computer that can do presentation. Unfortunately, the computer didn’t have the program that can open your slides. The computer has the older version of PowerPoint that couldn’t open your slides. Or maybe the computer using another operating system that your presentation program didn’t support. You’re panic and can’t think clearly. Everything went dark and suddenly you passed out. Continue reading
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
Some days ago, there’s a vacancy offer in my undergraduate department mailing list. A company is looking for a programmer. I didn’t pay much attention to this email. Okay, here’s the email:
Mr. XXX, my office needs a programmer with this qualification:
- Have knowledge in VB, Java, and PHP
- Have any experiences as a programmer/developer for at least 1 year in IT division or in IT company or software house
- Have an ability to give product presentation to potential clients
- Have knowledge in CorelDRAW and Photoshop
- Have knowledge in Linux
- Have knowledge in building computer networks
- Have knowledge in hardware
About a year ago, I started an English conversation club with my friend in the college. Well, it’s not a real conversation club actually. Instead of doing direct conversation, we’re using instant messenger or irc. Later, I realized that I was doing it because of my own selfishness. I did it because I was lonely at my home, while my friends are on the other city. As expected, the club didn’t last in the long run. My friends became busier with their job and I couldn’t control them. Maybe they were eager to learn English, but they have their own business.
Now in my graduate college, I found that my classmates also trying to run an English conversation club. The great things about it, they are eager to learn how to speak and we can do it directly. We do it in Sunday morning under the tree in the campus’s park. I come twice and I started to love this club. And last day, we’re talking about my favorites: blog. Continue reading
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.