Greetings from Kota Kinabalu!

I am now in Kota Kinabalu. Last saturday I was in Johor Bahru, attended #barcampjb. And it was aaaawesome. These are some photos I took during the event.

More photos in myflickr. I also giving a session on facebook apps development. Thanks to Amran for his intro on facebook dev. We’re not prepared because we didn’t plan to present. This is one of the advantages of “unconference” concept. It is quite a much flexible and free structured where anybody can announce his session on the notice board. The speakers are free to choose the subject of their expertise to speak on. Thanks for those who attended our session.

ps: photo was taken by Ang Chin Han during my session.

Two thumbs up to the organizer. BarCampJB was great. See you guys @ the next barcamp, where ever it will be hosted.

Hey! Not that “tomboy”. Errrr… Tomboy is a famous desktop note-taking application for Linux. It’s very useful application on your desktop. Tomboy doesn’t support integration with Google Notebook yet. This is a how to install tomboy2googlenotebook addins in ubuntu/debian.

1. You’ll need subversion client and mono c# compiler. In terminal, type
sudo apt-get install subversion mono-gmcs

2. Addin’s folder & checkout tomboy2googlenotebook source code
cd ~/.tomboy/addins
svn checkout http://tomboy2googlenotebook.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ .

3. Go to your google notebook. Clicking on Sharing Options at the top right, and selecting “Yes” to “Publish this Notebook”. Look for a 20 digit number in your URL. That’s your user id. Memorize it or copy and paste it somewhere.

4. Create a gconf file
sudo touch /apps/tomboy/google_notebook_<your_user_id>

5. Run make
make

6. And you’re almost done.
sudo cp GoogleNoteBookSync.dll /usr/lib/tomboy/addins

7. Restart tomboy, activate Google Notebook addins. And yeah! You can now sync you google notebook with tomboy with “Tools > Sync With Google Notebook”.

Barcamp comes to the Johor Baru city 6th – 7th December 2008. BarcampJB is an ad-hoc unconference and it is part of the Barcamp Malaysia movement. It is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.

Where to signup?
First 150 to register for BarCampJB 2008 will get a T-Shirt! Register Now and it’s FREE.

Where is the event held?
Menara MSC Cyberport (formerly Menara Sarawak)
Level 29, No.5, Jalan Bukit Meldrum
80300 Johor Bahru, Johor
Location Map

* Interesting Sessions

See you at Barcamp JB!

The URL bar is super-slow in Firefox 3. This a quick solution to speed it up.

1. Type “about:config” in your url bar.

2. Filter for “browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped“.

3. Double click on the row to make it’s value change to TRUE.

That’s it. This should speed up the response time on the URL bar. Firefox rox!

I just bought Huawei E169 to replace my Huawei E220. It doesn’t work out of the box but I able to get it to work on ubuntu 8.10 with a little tweak. Photo above shows how it looks like with my Thinkpad X61.

1. Download usb_modeswitch.
wget http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb

2. Install it.
sudo dpkg -i usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb

3. Save this script in /usr/sbin/ as e169_switch
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch -v 12d1 -p 1001 -d 1
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch -v 12d1 -p 1001 -H 1

4. Make it run
sudo chmod u+x /usr/sbin/e169_switch

5. And make another file in /etc/udev/rules.d as 70-e169.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="usb" SYSFS{idProduct}=="1001", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", RUN+="/usr/sbin/e169_switch"

6. Reboot. And walla! It’s plug and play via Gnome NetworkManager 0.7.

Thanks to Liam Green-Hughes

I tried to boot ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) with USB Huawei E220 modem and it worked properly. But when I removed and plugged it again, it didn’t work as expected. The modem can’t detect properly. The dmesg says :

[ 918.669157] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for airprime
[ 918.669218] usbcore: registered new interface driver airprime
[ 951.283634] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 951.443512] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 951.449996] airprime 2-1:1.0: airprime converter detected
[ 951.450199] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 951.450309] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[ 951.451516] usb 2-1: airprime converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 951.680562] usbcore: registered new interface driver libusual

It sounds like the device is not being switched properly from CD storage mode to modem mode. In this case, ubuntu loaded usb device as airprime. So, blacklist airprime solved the issue. I put “blacklist airprime” in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist . And the result :

[ 350.552290] usb-storage: device scan complete
[ 350.558942] scsi 8:0:0:0: CD-ROM HUAWEI Mass Storage 2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[ 350.559604] scsi 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5
[ 350.677826] Driver ‘sr’ needs updating – please use bus_type methods
[ 350.710655] sr0: scsi-1 drive
[ 350.710666] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[ 350.710773] sr 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0

Yeah. It works.

• 1 November – Canon Photomarathon Malaysia
• 5 & 6 November – MyGOSSCON 2008, Malaysian goverment Open Source Software Conference.
• 8 & 9 November – FOSS.my, Malaysia’s premier Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) event.
• 22 & 23 November – Startup Camp, an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the various members of the startup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup

See you there!

I love Linux as my operating system.
I love Apache as my web server.
I love MySQL as my database management system.
I love PHP as my programming language.

I love LAMP. The world is just awesome. See you at #foss.my. !