Free and Open Source Software Conference in Malaysia is happening soon. 8th and 9th November 2008 to be exact. They’ve got a pretty interesting line-up of talks. Yours truly will be attending.

  1. Fun Things to do with Asterisk, by Alwin Chan

  2. Git: The New Hotness, by Kamal Fariz

  3. Hacking on phpMyAdmin (A Google Summer of Code project), by Raj Kissu Rajandran

  4. Malaysian Challenges SAP!, by Redhuan Daniel Oon

  5. Open Source and the ORCA Screen Reader, by Silatul Rahim Dahman

  6. Anatomy of Fedora Kiosk Mode, by James Morris

  7. OSS at mixi.jp: Behind the Scenes, by Toru Maesaka

  8. memcached: Introduction to the Upcoming Goodness, by Toru Maesaka

  9. How Linux Gets My Dream Job at IBM, by Fajar Priyanto

 10. Linux High-Availability Cluster Presentation and Demo, by Fajar Priyanto

 11. How Open Source is accelerating innovation in the field of SaaS and PaaS, by Jerome Gotangco

 12. Navigating The Commons : How To Get Free Stuff And Get Creative (Legally!) by Nur Hussein

 13. Mac: A UNIX Programmer’s Paradise by Jinny Wong

 14. Introduction To MyMeeting by Abdullah Zainul Abidin

 15. FOSS and Access to Knowledge by Jeremy Malcolm

 16. Your Linux is MORE THAN ready by Ong Tee Kok

 17. Building a Business with Open Source by Daniel CerVentus

 18. OLPC - deployments and communities by Pia Waugh

 19. Building strong FOSS communities by Pia Waugh

 20. Open Source Security by Eugene Teo

 21. MySQL Cluster in High performance environment by Ruchith Gunaratne

 22. What’s great about Drupal Content Management System (CMS) by Najib Habeb

 23. Moving the Web Forward with Open Standards & Open Source by Pamela Fox

 24. Building Vibrant Open Source Communities by Gopi Ganapathy

Kudos to the team for getting hold of many speakers for the 2-day event.

Welcome to Free and Open Source Software Society Malaysia — FOSS-SM

Lowepro launched a new series of bags that are less like camera bags. Great for street shooting and other times when you wanna reduce the risk of getting mugged. A sad thought, yes, but it happens. I’ve heard of cases where snatch-thieves grabbed a camera bag in Jalan Bukit Bintang not too long ago. Now if only there’s another trip to Singapore…

Website: Lowepro | The Classified AW Series

Eye-candy galore! Running Ubuntu 8.10, with transparent panels, souped-up wallpaper and conky. Conky script from here.

Is still not possible, but it seems the team’s that is working hard on it is getting closer. They’ve successfully managed to run something on the baseband processor on the iPhone. Check out the video. Apparently the baseband processor is a hardware on the iPhone that communicates with carriers. Having ability to execute a custom program on the processor means the team is one step closer to faking carriers, unlocking the phone

See original post for more details (read the comments).

3G Baseband Tool from iphonedev on Vimeo.

I was bored last Friday so I did an Ubuntu upgrade. I’m now at v8.10 Release Candidate 1. Interprepid Abex is not a Long Term Support (LTS) which simply means this time around, you get only 18 months of support instead of 3 years. Of course, no one will stop you from upgrading to the next LTS version (9.04) in the near future. The official release of 8.10 should be around end of October, if no show stopper bugs surface. I’ve now got all the latest she-bangs, what-nots and the tingling feeling you get when running the latest and greatest version of your operating system

Ubuntu.com has the list of new features and new bugs.

Upgrade was performed by invoking the update manager, either through the UI (System -> Preference -> Update Manager) or invoking it via a terminal (sudo update-manager -d)

A couple of upgrading hiccups -

1. if you’ve got OOF3.0 installed, it’s gonna be wiped out and replaced with OOF2.4.1 when you upgrade via the update manager. You’ll need to uninstall OOF2.4.1 and reinstall v3 of the office suite.
2. lost AWN, but that was fixed rather quickly but issuing sudo apt-get install awn-manager.
3. lost most of my Compiz Fusion settings but not a big problem since you’d just need to reconfigure them. I also encountered terrible performance initially, but that’s fixed too.
4. had a weird problem where all my shortcuts and my home folder would by default be launched using file-roller (aka Archive Manager) instead of Nautilus. Fixed that by re-setting the default program to Nautilus for the folders and bookmarks.

Other than those few problems, upgrade went rather well. Do check out the ‘what’s new’ list, you’ll find that upgrading is very worth your time. Great work and congrats to the Ubuntu developers. Another great release.

The recent version of Compiz included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) resulted in pretty terrible performance. In short, it made me feel like not running the damn thing. Of course, I would never give up my eye-candy (one of the reasons for using Ubuntu hehe). Turns out that Intel’s 965 graphics adapter has issues rendering video with Compiz under certain conditions and was put under a hardware blacklist. The blacklist most probably made Compiz ran in software mode (CPU spikes all over), though I didn’t confirm this (I could not really be bothered). Compiz Fusion’s wiki states this reason for the blacklist - “XV does not play with XAA under compiz, only with EXA“.

If Compiz Fusion is running too slow and you suspect it’s a hardware support problem, check out Compiz-Check. Running it gives a simple diagnostic so that you can take it from there.