Jabu ni Gandhi Manalu

Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Legend of Avatar Ang

Since lots of my favorite TV series (Supernatural, Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons) are still vacuum until March or April 2008, I tried to find another movie to entertain myself. And my choice fell to The Avatar movie. It seemed to be originated from Japan, but on the other hand the movie is originated from the US.

The movie is about the adventure of a 'young' (his age is more than 100 years actually) Avatar (named Ang) and his friends (Katara, Sokka, Toph, Appa - the flying bison, and Momo - the winged lemur) in a quest to save the world (used to be a peaceful four Nation: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air) from the ruthless Fire Nation.

There are four books that built the movie and it's named after each of the Nation. Each book consists of about 19 chapters (episodes). In every chapter, you will find their amazing, challenging, thrilling, and most of the time funny (thanks to Sokka) adventures.

I really recommended this movie because, besides it's entertaining (very funny indeed) it also teaches lots of lessons in life, friendship, and love.

Yahoo's CAPTCHA is Broken

Yahoo uses CAPTCHA to prevent bot (automated computer program) posing as human and signing up for a new account. CAPTCHA does the protection by presenting a text (in an image) that is easy to comprehend for human but difficult for the bots.

But recently, a group of Russian security researchers claimed that they've found a way to compromise the security system, and that means a high possibility of spam coming from Yahoo or other mail provider that uses CAPTCHA.

If you interested to test the program, you can download it here.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

PI Del Campus on YouTube

I just googled my campus with a keyword "PI Del" and surprisingly*, the first result is not my campus' homepage but a link to a YouTube video. After opening the page, I recognized that the video was taken by Alexander Schatten, a researcher at Vienna University of Technology who visited our campus around September 2007. Besides recorded our campus, he also recorded street market at Samosir, a beautiful Island on Danau Toba. You can see his video collection here.

*Of course you will have our website on the first rank if you search it by its name, Politeknik Informatika Del.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Indonesia is not only Java, dude!

It seems that the journalist in CNN who wrote this news didn't know much about Indonesia, because in one of his paragraph written:

"Suharto, who, like other Indonesians, only has one name, was president of Indonesia"

Well, in Batak people (which is definitely Indonesian as well) each person will have at least two names, his first name and family name. Not only in Batak, i believe lots of tribes in Indonesia also have family names such as Ambonese, etc. Maybe it's just a common tradition in Java, but it's not applied in all Indonesian.

So Long, General!

H. M. Suharto (former Indonesia President) has passed away on Sunday January 27, 2008 at 01:10 PM. Despite all the controversies he had, I just want to express my deep condolence to the members of his family and thank you for all the good things that he's given to Indonesia.

So long, General!