Hari ini gw baca artikel yang cukup menarik di koran Kompas hari ini, 7 April 2008, halaman 33, “Keseimbangan Baru Menghadapi Teknologi”: minggu lalu, Menkominfo kita mengeluarkan surat perintah kepada APJII (badan pengawas internet Indonesia) untuk “memblokir situs maupun blog yang melakukan posting film F*”, dan artikel tersebut berisi kritik terhadap kebijakan tersebut. Gw sebagai warga negara yang baik (wuidih…) mencoba untuk menekankan isi-isi yang penting dari artikel tersebut, tidak lupa ditambah dengan bumbu-bumbu pendapat pribadi :D.

Kesan pertama gw membaca artikel tersebut adalah: PENTING YA!? Bagaimana nggak, film hate speech seperti F* bisa mengundang reaksi yang begitu besar dari sebuah negara beradab seperti Indonesia. Apakah pemerintah saking gak punya kerjaan, sampai-sampai urusan-urusan kecil seperti ini diurus dengan sesigap mungkin (tertulis klasifikasi surat adalah “Sangat Segera”)? Apakah urusan seperti pembajakan yang marak terjadi di internet tidak segawat masalah F* ini? Gw rasa pemerintah perlu menunjukkan bahwa ia punya prioritas dalam menghadapi masalah-masalah yang terjadi di masyarakat. Read more »

Now that the blog becomes permanent, I would like to have a say about the purpose of this blog; or, rather, the motivation for me to blog. Perhaps my write-up here could motivate you to start blogging (for non-bloggers), or blog better and happier :)

Practice English and Writing

This is important for everybody, even for native speakers of English. By blogging in English, I am forced to write in English all the time. However, it doesn’t feel very dreadful because I am free to write about anything. Nobody collects and marks my work (except you blog readers!).

Contrastingly, being active in forums or social networking sites do not help much for your English. Either those sites permit you to communicate with your mother language, or they require very little typing. Replying a topic, writing on a person’s Wall or adding up a testimonial does very little impact to your English writing compared to writing a blog post this long, for example. Read more »

Yesterday I collected files from my classmates (by email) to aggregate it because a teacher had asked us to do it. Since most of us are pretty much non-techies, I would assume that everybody submit .doc files – that goes without saying. A headache came in, however, when one of my friends submitted a .docx file.

I am perfectly aware that this is a new file format used by Microsoft Office 2007 – but hey Microsoft, do you think that everybody in the world can suddenly open up a new file format just because you use it? A patch from Microsoft for opening up these files cost a dreading 28 MB download. Do you think everybody in the world has that much of time and bandwidth to download it? (No, Ritchie, I’m not blaming you for this fuss.) Read more »

I have an idea for a service to replace SMS (Short Messaging Service) with a "SMS over IP" structure. Basically a mobile Java / J2ME application connects to a central server with persistent socket. Using the established socket, the server can send data to the phone. Therefore, people can send "SMS" (actually only ordinary text data) to the server (using their own connections), and the server can route the message to another account which is already connected to the server.

This is very similar to existing IM concept, but with IM there are too many data to send - people logging in/out, etc., and data cannot be retained / saved if the current user is not connected to the server at the moment (hence "Instant" Messaging).

It has a great potential if SMSes are more expensive compared to GPRS connection (which is the case in Indonesia: Rp 350 per sms vs. Rp 3 per kb). I might want to develop this, but the server cost must be high, as there are very many persistent connections at one moment (which needs an MMORPG class server).

I put this in a forum, but I thought that I would like to share this to you all so…

Suppose that a species so much more intelligent than humans has an ability to create a universe and everything inside it, and s/he (our God) has the ability to view everything inside the universe. This makes sense because the universe can be only a computer simulation (like The Sims). God created our universe for a purpose, possibly for a research, for a student project, or just for fun. Read more »

Bangsa Eropa dan Amerika, karena kemajuannya dalam bidang ekonomi dan ilmu pengetahuan, adalah bangsa yang besar. Akibatnya budaya mereka merebak luas di seluruh dunia. Kita berjabat tangan (tidak membungkuk atau menyembah), makan dengan sendok dan garpu (tidak dengan sumpit atau tangan), memakai jas serta celana jeans (bukan pakaian tradisional). Kita menonton film Hollywood, mendengarkan musik mereka, mengikuti tren mode mereka, belajar di negeri mereka, menggunakan bahasa mereka. Semua itu menunjukkan bahwa budaya Eropa dan Amerika begitu besar.

Bangsa Jepang juga begitu. Anak muda jaman sekarang (saya juga lho) tidak ada yang tidak mengenal budaya Jepang. Ninja, samurai, sushi, musang berekor sembilan, Laruku, manga, anime, Final Fantasy… bahkan orang Eropa dan Amerika juga suka itu. Padahal Jepang pernah menjajah kita seumur jagung.

Bangsa Korea dan Cina sedang bergulat memperkuat budayanya. Korea punya senjata ampuh yaitu perfilman yang secara tidak langsung mengenalkan budaya Korea, setidaknya dalam pasar Asia. Cina sebentar lagi akan membangun apa yang dinamakan Pusat Confusius di berbagai negara di dunia sebagai pusat kebudayaan Cina. Read more »

Software source codes should be freely accessible because they are a formulation of science; it is like a scientific formula that anybody can use. Imagine if we are charged for every use of the Pythagorean theorem and that is what Microsoft is doing now for every use of Windows. Read more »