It’s been a long time since I visit my old website which still uses MySQL as its database. I’ve been moving to PostgreSQL since years ago and never look back. PostgreSQL is undoubtedly one of the best RDBMS out there when it comes to enterprise-level databases. MySQL is good but I found it hard to tweak and optimize it in a way that it becomes a robust database. So I choose the lazy part: switching to PostgreSQL totally and it goes well so far.

Back to the problem I had with my old website. It’s broken. I never touched it but it’s broken. I don’t have any idea what’s wrong but I’m willing to dig down deep to fix it. Here’s how.

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It was 4pm and I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. She was in a hospital getting an intensive medical care. I went to the office to get my jobs done and soon went back to the hospital. My mother was in a very weak condition. At 7pm, I was there, beside her, tried to talk to her about anything, while I prayed for the best. She didn’t reply or answer my questions but I knew she heard me. She was unconscious for the rest of the night. Finally, around 11.30pm, she left us, left the world, to meet her Creator. My sister, my father, and I gathered around her. That was a very sad day for all of us.

A few months later, one of my team told me that his mother was sick and need to be checked to the hospital, so he needs my permission to left the office early. I said, yes. A few days after that, he frequently asked my permission again to left the office early and I said, at that time,

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Many of us knew the concierge when visiting hotels. One of their primary tasks is to help us, hotel’s guests, to bring our suitcase into our room. You probably haven’t notice that they can do pretty much anything since we tend to see the concierge as what we know instead of their capabilities, but that’s probably a different story I can tell you later.

A few days ago, The Jakarta Post and The Concierge Society Indonesia held a casual yet formal meeting in a restaurant at Plaza Senayan. We’ve been in a very close relationship with The Concierge Society and support their activities with everything we have. It’s been a healthy relationship as I know it and we’re glad to have them supporting us also.

When we’ve talked about their day-to-day jobs, I was pretty amazed that they can pretty much do anything. I mean, literally everything. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned throughout the meeting.

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With the latest exploits found named Meltdown and Spectre, it’s more important than ever to protect your personal identity, including but not limited to address, password, phone number, credit cards, and even your account you use to access your online activities, including banking and e-commerce.

I’ve been carefully paying attention to the security and privacy since the early days of the Internet and always try to update to the newest method and ways to secure my privacy, e.g. updating my password every once in a while, activating 2FA, and so on.

For some people, 2FA is a magic thing and they’re afraid, if not lazy, to use it in their everyday lives. Even for people who understand about basic security don’t want to use 2FA.

Here’s the list of things you should know and do to secure your online activity.

Is your password ‘abcd1234’?

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Stay hungry, stay foolish

It’s been a year since the last time I posted my thought on this blog. Lots of things happened between that; ups and downs. Challenges and opportunities. New friends, colleagues and expanding networks. All happened without me recording in this blog.

Not that I didn’t want to share anything, but because I have things to share but didn’t really find a time to wrote them down.

To compensate my laziness during that time, I will write down things that I want to share in an unordered list (yes, I’m still lazy, but hey, at least I’m posting again).

• I joined the crowdresearch initiative from Stanford University under Michael S. Bernstein’s assistance about the crowdsourcing work. It’s been a one year full of weekly meeting, reading papers, writing our own and discussing with peers. You can find the first published version of the paper on the ACM Digital Library page here.

• I’m still doing my own research and work on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and spend hours reading subjects in Abstract Algebra such as Group, Ring, Fields (including Galois Field) and their applications to understand further about ECC.

• I also spend hours taking course about machine learning, understanding supervised (regression and classification) and unsupervised learning. I will write in details about this subject, hopefully.

• I, for the first time in my life, hosted an automotive review show and it’s such a great experience despite my nervousness during the show. Guess what car I’ve reviewed at that show? No, you couldn’t guess it. It’s the BMW i8. And here’s the review.

• One ambitious project I have in mind is doing a semi-autonomous self-driving car but not really sure on how I tackle this huge project alone. Still searching a partner who understand car mechanics so we can split tasks: hardware and software.

• Oh, I’m still working at The Jakarta Post Digital. We’re working on the new The Jakarta Post and custom CMS, also ________ to integrate with ________. We’re also in the middle of building _______ and ________. Classified items are classified until they’re launched to the public.

Well, that’s not quite a lot but for me, 2015 was the learning year and will still continues indefinitely. As Steve Jobs said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Yesterday, I’ve seen this post from one of our good friends who also a former Mozilla Representative in Indonesia, Benny Chandra. The talk between The Jakarta Post Digital CEO, Budi Putra, and him about making an app for Firefox OS started from a simple thing: discussion over a cup of coffee.

I haven’t get the full story yet on that but Budi Putra have told me to start including Firefox OS App in our timeline (and I’m still curious about the full story, ahem..)

And our warrior including infantry, cavalry, archer and… I mean, our software engineers bravely took that challenge.

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What

What do we know about rebooting?
It’s a mechanism we all–people who worked with computers everytime–familiar with.

According to to the Online Oxford Dictionaries, reboot means Line breaks.

The definition of reboot in English:
(With reference to a computer system) boot or be booted again.

Rebooting is also an act of booting a computer system again.

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It’s been two years since I blogged about the new challenges and first official day at U Connectivity Services as a CTO. Today, with a mix feeling between sadness and excitement, I must say that I have to move to the next thing.
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Last night, I couldn’t access Reddit site. The weird thing was that I could access the landing page, http://reddit.com but couldn’t access categories under it. I’m using Bolt and to those of you surfing through other ISPs, you might or might not get the same result as I am.

This reminds me of recent action from Kominfo ministry, Tifatul Sembiring who’s blocking Vimeo from the Indonesian users. So, let’s talk a bit about this blocking thingy.
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Usually, I never complained about Jakarta’s traffic jam. Not before I moved to a new office and new house. Right now, I have to travel around 30km to go to the office (so it doubled to 60km to go back and forth). It was fun driving that long before the traffic jam get worse and worse (and the worst yet to come). So, this is how I play “cat and mouse” with the traffic jam.

Jakarta’s traffic jam is probably one of the worst things happened to the people work and live in this city. No one could escape from it. While I realize that I couldn’t handle it, I try to handle myself to become better on how to avoid it. So here’s my personal analysis on the traffic jam that might occur throughout the day and how, later, I can avoid it and gain more productivity.

Please keep in mind that this is just for my own case and if you want to try it, make sure you’re OK with that. I’m not responsible for any effects that might occurs along with this ‘trick’ :)

Let’s start.

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