This is my gift. It is my curse.

This is my gift. It is my curse.

- Spider-Man (2002)

When everyone is against you

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong -- or absolutely right.

- Albert Guinon

GPRS mahal , sudah tahu masih nekat

Baru kena batunya, sudah tahu bahwa koneksi internet dengan GPRS (via Telkomsel) itu masih relatif mahal saya masih coba-coba juga. Anggapan awalnya adalah saya hanya mau coba-coba untuk meng-update koleksi RSS di Liferea. Ah cuma XML, bathin saya.

Pada saat dicoba, kepala saya berdenyut-denyut memperhatikan laporan iftop. Sebelum sempat selesai koneksi saya putuskan dengan Ctrl-C. Lagipula pikir saya masih banyak isi berita yang belum terbaca, kebesaran nafsu. Dan benar saja dengan mengakses *887# saya memperoleh informasi :

Biaya akses GPRS terakhir senilai 1113 kbyte adalah RP. 13356.

Sepertinya Telkomsel masih sibuk memasarkan Telkomsel FLASH, GPRS murah...very unlikely.
Jadi biar cuma RSS kalau yang di-download banyak ya sami mawon...jadi saya harus lebih hati-hati.

Screenshot Liferea, saksi nafsu besar:

Klik-kanan (Fifefox: Open Link in New Tab) atau klik-kiri untuk memperbesar gambar.

Koneksi internet dengan Telkomsel GPRS, W810i dan Bluetooth

Catatan setting GPRS Telkomsel dengan W810i dan Axioo Notebook Bluetooth:

Ini memang "jadul", ketinggalan kereta terlalu lama... . But then again, saya baru benar-benar perlu sekarang. Konenksi Speedy sih sudah baik dan tetap menjadi pilihan utama. Tetapi saya butuh koneksi internet untuk situasi darurat atau mobile. Mau pake Starone atau Telkomsel Flash gak punya uang untuk beli peralatan baru.

Pada dasarnya yang saya lakukan adalah mengikuti langkah-langkah yang sudah dipublish di halaman web (blog) lain. Hanya ada satu kata yang perlu diganti supaya koneksi internet saya bisa bekerja.

Untuk menghindari 'reinventing the wheel' maka inilah halaman acuan utama:
Karena saya tidak menggunakan tambahan alat berupa 'USB Dongle' maka saya menggunakan acuan dari tekkomerz.wordpress.com. Yang jelas berbeda adalah alamat MAC Address, kemudian kebetulan channel yang saya gunakan untuk DUN adalah 2 bukan 1 seperti yang ada pada contoh. Untuk seting pada /etc/wvdial.conf yang di sana tertulis:

#untuk kartu telkomsel
[Dialer telkomsel]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 460800
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = at+cgdcont=1,”ip”,”telkomsel”
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Username = “wap”
Password = “wap123″

perlu diubah (dalam kasus saya) agar dapat berfungsi. Yang saya ganti hanya kata "telkomsel" menjadi "internet" , lengkapnya sebagai berikut:

#untuk kartu telkomsel
[Dialer telkomsel]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 460800
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = at+cgdcont=1,"ip","internet"
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Username = “wap”
Password = “wap123″

Saya biasanya menggunakan Telkom Speedy (ADSL) dari notebook lewat switch ke modem. Untuk itu saya mematikan interface dari ethernet card internal notebook dengan cara mengetik $ sudo ifdown eth0 , kemudian jika telah selesai menggunakan GPRS (ppp0) saya mengetikkan $ sudo ifup eth0.

Untuk yang menggunakan Bluetooth melalui alat tambahan (USB dongle) misalnya keluaran BlueSoleil (Usb Bluetooth Dongle Billionton, itech atau lainnya) bisa mengikuti arahan pada masjito.web.id .
Untuk yang ingin mempergunakan /etc/chatscripts/gprs dapat melihat di Bluetooth Gprs Di Linux . Untuk setting penyedia jaringan lain lihat hadmokowibowo. Link acuan lain 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 .

Ini screenshot dari terminal pada saat saya menggunakan Telkomsel GPRS:

Klik-kanan (Fifefox: Open Link in New Tab) atau klik-kiri untuk memperbesar gambar.

Jadi setting koneksi internet dengan GPRS atau setting koneksi internet dengan W810i atau setting untuk koneksi internet lewat bluetooth memiliki beberapa persamaan antara variannya. Sekali satu pola ketemu biasanya mudah untuk mencari yang lain.
Yang perlu juga diingat adalah sampai pada saat ini biaya koneksi internet Telkomsel lewat GPRS adalah 12 rupiah per Kbyte. Sekali membaca satu halaman web yang memiliki banyak gambar bisa memakan biaya sebesar empat ribu rupiah.

Peta Kaltim

Klik-kanan (Fifefox: Open Link in New Tab) atau klik-kiri untuk memperbesar gambar.

Peta Kalimantan Timur


Samarinda dan delta Mahakam:



Posisi kota Samarinda dan tiga danau:

Fastest Hard Drive Ever

Posted by David Murphy at MaximumPC
...
Western Digital engineers must have been watching Honey I Shrunk The Kids when they were brainstorming for new storage ideas. The Velociraptor achieves its new footholds of speed and storage as a result of its reduced, 2.5-inch size. You're undoubtedly thinking about the ramifications of this, given that every modern desktop system under the sun fits 3.5-inch drives. Well, Western Digital's one step ahead of the form factor. It's strapped each Velociraptor drive to a mounting mechanism that conveniently doubles as a giant heatsink for the drive itself. Dubbed the "Icepak," the all-black base allows helps ensure that the drive run at temperature and noise levels comparable to the Raptor X. ...

Read on at maximumpc

Fyodor Dostoevsky : Reason in Notes from Underground

... You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing,there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. ...

-Fyodor Dostoevsky : "Notes from Underground"

• Study Guide for Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground

• fyodordostoevsky

Analytic and Synthetic process

Klik-kanan (Fifefox: Open Link in New Tab) atau klik-kiri untuk memperbesar gambar.


from:
CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW VOL. 50, NO. 1 FALL 2007
Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking
Sara L. Beckman & Michael Barry

Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

We’ve all heard the tales of the apple falling on Newton’s head and Archimedes leaping naked from his bath shrieking “Eureka!” Many of us have even heard that eBay was created by a guy who realized that he could help his fiancée sell Pez dispensers online.

The fact that all three of these epiphany stories are pure fiction stops us short. As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.

Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation.Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work
over time.

“The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems,” explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, “The Myths of Innovation.” “Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little
knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn’t the magic moment: it’s the end result of a useful innovation.”

Everything results from accretion, Mr. Berkun says: “I didn’t invent the English language.
I have to use a language that someone else created in order to talk to you. So the process by which something is created is always incremental. It always involves using stuff that other people have made.” ...

more on nytimes.com

The Serenity Prayer

"God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,

courage to change the things we can,

and wisdom to know the difference."

My comment: For those who are openminded, this is a very inspirational prayer.

Doa seperti ini gampang untuk diucapkan tapi perlu perjuangan keras untuk juga dapat selalu diamalkan dalam pikiran dan perbuatan sehari-hari.Doa ini (The Serenity Prayer) adalah doa yang umum digunakan pada acara Alcoholic Anonymous. Yang saya post adalah versi pendeknya, ada pula doa yang versi panjang. Bagi yang penasaran tentang asal muasal doa ini, dapat melihat dari halaman Wikipedia, Aahistory, dan About.com.

A Father Prayer by General Douglas MacArthur

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak,
and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid;
one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat,
and humble and gentle in victory.

Build me a son whose wishbone will not be where his backbone should be;
a son who will know Thee and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

Lead him I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort,
but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge.

Here let him learn to stand up in the storm;
here let him learn compassion for those who fail.

Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high;
a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men;

one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep;

one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor,
so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously.

Give him humility, so that
he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness,
the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

Then, I, his father, will dare to whisper, have not lived in vain.

-A Father Prayer by General Douglas MacArthur (May 1952)

Doa yang sangat indah, saya pertama kali menemukannya dari blog Enda. Ada beberapa sumber lain serupa yang bisa dilihat (link1, link2, link3).

Men and Women

Seorang pemberi komentar, berbaik hati memberikan tambahan seperti berikut...


Computers are Like Women...

No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.

The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

You do the same thing for years, and suddenly it's wrong.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Computers are Like Men...

In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.

They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.

They have a lot of data but are still clueless.

As soon as you commit to one, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer you could have had a better model.

They hear what you say, but not what you mean.

link

The mind by Milton

The mind is its own place and in itself can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell.
-John Milton, Paradise Lost

Think hard

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
—Bertrand Russell (quoted in Macmillan, 1989)

Masih, speedy putus kadang-kadang

Yup, kecurigaan saya terbukti bahwa splitter bukan penyebab utama seringnya koneksi speedy saya reset. Kalaupun ikut menjadi penyebab maka kemungkinan bukan sebagai penyebab utama. Alasanya karena setelah splitter saya lepas masih juga terjadi reset pada modem ADSL speedy saya. Di lain waktu saya coba memasang kembali splitter dan kebetulan koneksinya tidak reset. Selang hari dengan splitter terpasang ya juga reset lagi. Jadi kesimpulan sementaranya adalah ada tidak ada splitter koneksi tetap reset.
Kadang dengan splitter terpasang saya beberapa kali dapat mendownload dari Rapidshare atau Depositfiles file sebesar 99 MB tanpa putus. Kadang baru mulai beberapa Kb sudah putus. Gejala ini berlaku untuk semua server, none particular.
Yang saya khawatirkan andalah Modem Linksys AM-300 AnnexA, sedang yang lain ; notebook, PC, switch, kabel UTP sepertinya gak ada masalah. Saya gak punya modem cadangan untuk membuktikannya, yang bisa saya lakukan adalah mencoba mendownload selama mungkin. Dan saya bisa melakukakannya beberapa kali tanpa reset. Jika modemnya memang rusak agak aneh juga.
Pola yang saya dapat beberapa hari ini adalah pada pagi hari dan dari sore sampai sekitar jam delapan malam koneksi memang jauh lebih sering reset daripada saat lainnya. Apa ada masalah di jalur telpon ?

Semua gambar screenshots dapat diperbesar dengan klik-kiri atau klik-kanan (Open Link In New Tab, Firefox)

Ini screenshot pas lagi baik , dapat sampai 1,7 GB:


Koneksi lagi bagus, ada peak-nya > 50 KByte/second


Lagi stabil

Intermittent, part 2

Tadi malam saya ditelpon pihak speedy dari Jakarta. Setelah itu sekitar 4 jam saya melakukan download tanpa hambatan, gak pake acara reset mendadak. Padahal gak ada yang diubah-ubah. Pagi ini penyakitnya kumat lagi sekitar 6 kali saya berulang-ulang download, gagal lagi. Jengkel juga rasanya padahal yang saya download itu bahan buat saya belajar. Maklum tugas utama saya kan belajar, bukan sampai ke negeri Cina tapi sampai SpaNyol.
Saya kebetulan lalu ditelpon lagi dari layanan Speedy Jkt, diminta melepas splitter. Masih reset satu kali, kemudian lancar sampai saya menulis post ini. Jika memang masalahnya di splitter berarti selama 4 jam tadi malam kotak splitter yang berisi kapasitor dan resistor itu tidak sedang ngambek.
Pola yang lebih jelas adalah setiap selesai (dua kali) ditelpon pihak speedy, koneksi saya jadi lancar. Apa kebetulan ya ? Semoga tetap lancar lah...

Not identical

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.
Their tastes may not be the same.

George Bernard Shaw

My Speedy, intermittent

Entahlah apa ini normal atau tidak ?



Ada komentar ?

Koneksi Speedy error, putus, reset terus

Di Samarinda sepertinya telkom menaikkan kecepatan akses speedy. Setelah pada hari minggu (13-April-2008) seharian dongkol karena hampir semua situs blogspot gak bisa diakses seharusnya ini menjadi kabar gembira. Sebagai pengguna telkom speedy "rumahan" saya tentu sangat senang dengan kenaikan kapasitas bandwidth ini. Sayangnya kenaikan ini diikuti dengan gejala koneksi yang sering putus (reset). Menjengkelkan karena proses download saya ke Rapidshare gagal terus, maklum hanya pake yang gratisan.

Setelah beberapa hari yang lalu saya agak trauma dengan kalangan men in the uniform (ceritanya nanti menyusul), saya memilih untuk sementara tidak menghubungi 147. Sambil melihat perkembangan dan pengalaman para pengguna lainnya.
Ini data-data yang berupa screenshots yang saya ambil:

Blogger (*.blogspot.com) di-blok ?

Entahlah apa memang di blok , yang jelas sampai saat saya nulis ini, akses ke blog saya ini macet alias gak bisa dibuka. Saya pake speedy.telkom.net.id, jadi gak tau kalau dari ISP yang lain bagaimana kondisinya. Saya coba ping www.0penmind3d.blogspot.com, hasilnya dapat 72.14.207.191. Saya coba login ke www.blogger.com, bisa masuk. Bahkan saya coba ngutak-ngutik setting dalamnya pun bisa. Klo tulisan ini masuk, maka berarti dari Swiftfox: ScribeFire bisa kirim draft juga.

Untuk bisa membaca semua situs blogspot saya dapat caranya dari sini (sumber aslinya).
Intinya adalah kita menggunakan jasa http://www.google.com/translate_t untuk mengakses blog yang dituju.
Caranya dengan memasukkan alamat blog yang hendak di lihat pada textbox, kemudian pada pilihan bahasa silahkan pilih bahasa apa saja asal menterjemahkan ke bahasa Inggris. Misalnya biarkan saja pada defaultnya (Spanish to English).

Ahhh sampai kapan kita begini ?

Not the biggest but the fastest

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow."

Rupert Murdoch

Microsoft makes C++ move, discontinues Visual Basic 6.0 support

In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

The feature pack had been available in a beta release since January, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft's developer division, in his blog this week.

"The Feature Pack provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) and an implementation of TR1 (Technical Report 1). Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the 'look & feel' of Microsoft's most popular products — Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer," Somasegar said.

Technical Report 1 is a document that featured a Visual C++ implementation with extensions to the C++ ISO standard. Microsoft's implementation of TR1 contains such features as regular expression parsing and sophisticated random number generators.

...

By Paul Krill

Komputasi bentuk lain

Jika kita hanya mengenal penggunaan pulsa listrik untuk mengoperasikan komputer maka ada cara-cara lain (untuk melakukan kerja komputasi) yang mungkin masih asing buat kita.

1. Optical computing
2. Quantum computing
3. DNA computing
4. Reversible computing
5. Billiard Ball computing
6. Neuronal computing
7. Magnetic (NMR) computing
8. Glooper computer
9. Mouldy computers
10. Water wave computing

Silahkan membaca artikel lengkapnya dalam bahasa Inggris.

Situs NASA science

Beredar kabar bahwa NASA punya situs baru tentang ilmu pengetahuan. Setelah saya lihat ternyata isinya tidak cuma tentang hal ihwal luar angkasa. Ada pembahasan lain seperti tentang cuaca dan ekosistem.
Silahkan melihat-lihat di: nasascience.nasa.gov

World's First Gasoline Powered PC ?

English Russia managed to uncover this gasoline-powered PC, which is "connected directly to the car's gas tank -- analyzes the state of the fuel and diagnoses the overall condition of the car, while consuming some gas fluid." Click here for first picture in gallery.

link1, link2

Learning to think big from Mr.Spencer

Quentin Hardy report :

Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ), Nortel or Avaya (nyse: AV - news - people ).
"We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies," says Spencer. "For better or worse, I don't tend to think small." [catatan: Beginilah pola pikir rata-rata "orang besar", percaya atau tidak]

Spencer, who is all of 29 years old, is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market for office telecom switches (often called PBXs) much the way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) and Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ).

Please continue read on.

It is good to be a thinker!

Ini tentang manusia dan "kemanusiaan", memanusiakan manusia...

Google has been known for a long time as the best place in the world to work. They offer free massages, gourmet meals, and professional haircuts at their beautiful campus in California. That right there puts them above 99.99% of the other companies in the world. At any rate, you already knew all that so lets move on.

Have you ever wondered how much a Google employee makes? Well this data isn't extremely easy to find, if you don't believe me just search Google. However, here is some interesting statistics.
Google Programmer in Phoenix - $174,000/year
Google Programmer in California - $197,000/year
Google Programmer in Chicago - $222,000/year
Google Programmer in New York - $242,000/year
(according to Indeed.com)

...and thats just in salary. What other financial benefits does Google offer it's employees?

Dan saya berani bertaruh sebagian besar waktu kerja mereka "cuma" dihabiskan untuk berpikir.
Berita lengkapnya di sini.

Number of computer viruses tops one million

The number of computer viruses in circulation has reached one million for the first time, according to a report by a leading security firm. Symantec said that just over 711,000 new viruses were identified in the past year - an increase of 468 per cent on the number identified in the previous year.

The US was still by far the greatest contributor to the pool of malicious software infecting the world's computers, accounting for 24 per cent of such activity. Madrid, meanwhile, was the city with the highest number of so-called 'zombie' computers - machines that have been co-opted into performing particular tasks by criminals based elsewhere.

by Jonathan Richards

Bicara jujur malah diancam, "sami mawon"

Di mana-mana sama saja. jadi orang jujur apalagi jadi orang yang relatif benar itu susah.

Bobby Boutris, a whistleblower from the Federal Aviation Administration, testified to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee today that he received a death threat after airing his concerns to supervisors about safety lapses at Southwest and a too cozy relationship between an FAA supervisor and the airline that allowed Southwest to fly damaged planes.

A second whistleblower, Douglas Peters, choked up and had to compose himself while describing how he also received a veiled threat from an FAA superior when he raised concerns about unethical actions between an FAA investigator and Southwest.

Lengkapnya: FAA Investigator Received Death Threat for Blowing Whistle on FAA and Southwest's Safety Failures

Ah jadi ingat "Inu Kencana".

Robot Jerman gantikan pramusaji

Berita ini sekaligus dapat dijadikan peringatan bagi negara-negara yang semata-mata mengandalkan tenaga kerja yang murah dan jumlah penduduk (baca:konsumen) yang besar. Cepat atau lambat manusia akan ditempatkan pada posisi terbaiknya, posisi yang belum dapat digantikan oleh mesin ciptaannya sendiri.
Pengalaman mengajarkan bahwa manusia itu kompleks, tidak cukup hanya dipenuhi makan dan minumnya. Tidak demikian dengan mesin ciptaan kita. Pembangunan SDM sudah tidak bisa ditawar lagi bagi setiap diri kita masing-masing. It is just a matter of time.

Jika anda kerap selera setelah berhadapan dengan pelayan yang memasang wajah masam, ini mungkin bisa mengatasi masalah semacam itu. Sebuah restoran di kota Nuremberg, Jerman, mendapat gagasan untuk memanfaatkan teknologi tinggi untuk menggantikan pelayan dengan mesin otomatis. Wartawan BBC Steve Rosenberg telah mencobanya dan berikut laporannya:

Selengkapnya dalam bahasa Inggris.

Pria dan Wanita

"Pria memang lebih tertarik pada wanita yang cantik dan menarik, sedangkan wanita biasanya memilih pria yang tubuhnya lebih tinggi atau bergaji besar," kata Dan Ariely, ahli manajemen dari Media Arts and Sciences and Sloan School of Management (MIT).


Lebih lengkap di sini

8 Sebab Pria "Sensi"

Secara singkat:

1. Jatuh miskin
2. Sedang lapar
3. Janji yang dibatalkan pihak lain
4. Banyak kerjaan
5. Kegiatan sexual tidak memuaskan
6. Jalanan macet
7. Kalah bersaing
8. Lama menjomblo

Untuk lebih lengkapnya ada di sini

When need drives

No man will change for the better until he sees the need for it
– Socrates

Teknologi turbin, dari gelombang menjadi tenaga listrk

Turbine technology is turning the tides into power of the future.

The world’s first deep-water device to generate electricity from the tides on a commercial scale is due to start operating within weeks.

A seagoing crane barge has lowered the 1,000-tonne double turbine into place and an operation to fix it to the seabed with 12 metre (40 ft) pins begins today.

The SeaGen Tidal System at Strangford Lough in Co Down, Northern Ireland, is designed to produce enough electricity to supply 1,000 homes.

The system, made by Marine Current Turbines (MCT) and assembled at the Harland and Wolff dockyard in Belfast, boasts two 16m blades which will be turned by the water streaming in and out of Strangford Lough at up to 8 knots.

Read on.

Medicine Mix-Ups Harm Kids - TIME

(CHICAGO) — Medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses and bad drug reactions harm roughly one out of 15 hospitalized children, according to the first scientific test of a new detection method.

Researchers found a rate of 11 drug-related harmful events for every 100 hospitalized children. That compares with an earlier estimate of two per 100 hospitalized children, based on traditional detection methods. The rate reflects the fact that some children experienced more than one drug treatment mistake.

The new estimate translates to 7.3 percent of hospitalized children, or about 540,000 kids each year, a calculation based on government data.

Medicine Mix-Ups Harm Kids - TIME

Balance by Ken Hussar

"A balanced meal is not, a Big Mac in both hands."
-- Ken Hussar

Full-throttle Productivity and Web-Work With Ubuntu

If blogs are to be believed, it would seem that every aspect of the web worker’s life revolves around one Apple product or another. The image of the hip MacBook Pro-clad designer has become a meme to the point of becoming clichė. As a web worker, it seems like I should be subscribing to digg’s Apple feed, drinking copious amount of tea, and listening to bands that no one has heard of.The last two are fine, but why not break the mold and use an operating system that no one’s heard of too?Sure, Apple’s built its reputation on being the hipster brand of choice, but one of the nice things about Linux is the ability to customize virtually any aspect of the operating system to cater to your workflow and computing habits.For the purpose of structure I’ll break the article into two parts. The first will discuss how Linux can be just as application-rich, in terms of usefulness, as OS X or Windows. In the second half, I’ll cover various productivity-boosting apps and features that allow you do accomplish virtually any task with a few simple keystrokes.

read more

Ditemukan gen 'kebengisan'

'Ruthlessness gene' discovered

Dictatorial behaviour may be partly genetic, study suggests.

Apakah seseorang yang bengis dan kejam merupakan pengaruh genetik ?

Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian streak — from national dictators down to 'little Hitlers' found in workplaces the world over.

Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise called the 'Dictator Game'. The exercise allows players to behave selflessly, or like money-grabbing dictators such as former Zaire President Mobutu, who plundered the mineral wealth of his country to become one of the world's richest men while its citizens suffered in poverty.

Please read on

AVR Butterfly

AVR Butterfly
Originally uploaded by BenSinclair
This photo was taken from:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bensinc/

Cheap broadband over powerline planned in Indonesia

This news is cited and mentioned in several places such as slashdot.org.It is good when they can get it done soon.

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Stress akibat ngeblog

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home. “I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen."

Kebutuhan atau kecanduan ?

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Belajar menjadi lebih baik

Yang ini saya setuju, kapan bangsa kita bisa mulai belajar untuk menjadi bangsa yang lebih beradab. Semakin hari kita bukannya belajar dan diajari makin reasonable tapi malah diajari jadi preman. Cuma tinju, tendangan dan bakar-bakar ban yang semarak tersiar di media tv kita. Arghhh

Seorang dosen dari universitas ternama mengatakan, “Kita tidak menanggapi sebuah karya ilmiah yang tidak kita setujui dengan menampar penulisnya, melainkan kita buat karya ilmiah tandingan yang lebih baik. Kita balas [Diet Express] dengan cara intelektual, bukan dengan cara yang tidak berbudaya”.

Lebih lanjut silahkan lihat lengkapnya di sini

9000 PCs in Swiss schools will switch to Ubuntu only

From next term, all computers at schools in the Swiss canton of Geneva will have MS Windows removed and will only run Ubuntu Linux and FOSS.Director for the schools IT services sees this move also to "encourages participation and the democratization of knowledge " and provide equal opportunities.

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Coming soon: superfast internet 10,000 times faster

Akan segera tersedia [bukan di Indonesia!], jalur koneksi internet cepat...THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid”

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Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released

Dari tech.slashdot.org:

bunratty writes "Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released today. This last beta release sports performance-boosting improved connection parallelism. Not only has 'the memory leak' been fixed: Firefox now uses less memory than other browsers. This is not only according to Mozilla developers, but CyberNet and The Browser World as well. As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1 and 79/100 for the latest Opera 9.5 snapshot. The final release of Firefox 3 is expected in June."

Slashdot | Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released

Begini kalau sudah terobsesi

Dari Wired.com:

Kids don't care about robotics anymore. At least, that's what Takayuki Furuta fears. So, to boost his field's appeal, the director of the Future Robotics Technology Center in Chiba, Japan, figured out how to make a real-life, six-story-tall Gundam, the classic battle robot from Japanese anime. He ran computer models on every aspect of the bot to determine what parts he would need to power and control the beast. Then he surfed electronics and industry-equipment catalogs to find the components. The result: a complete blueprint for a $742 million bot. By showing how the anime fixture can actually be built, he hopes to get schoolkids fired up about robotics. Well, that and he actually intends to build one. A 60-foot-tall robot may not be financially feasible, Furuta says, but he's going to try making a version that could be as tall as 13 feet. He aims to have it working by 2011, when, ideally, someone will have created something for it to fight.

Untuk gambar dan info detail:
DIY Battle Bot? All You Need Is $742 Million and No Sense of Reality!

Linux desktop market share is up as much as 61 percent

It's possible that the Linux desktop will never be anything more than a fad among geeky enthusiasts. If so, a growing swell of people appear to be much more faddish of late, as numbers from W3Counter.com appear to indicate.

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Beautiful [ IOW : "not so creepy" ]

Beautiful (Christina Aguilera)

Every day is so wonderful
And suddenly, it's hard to breathe
Now and then, I get insecure
From all the fame, I'm so ashamed

I am beautiful no matter what they say
Words can't bring me down
I am beautiful in every single way
Yes, words can't bring me down
So don't you bring me down today
...

Ekonomi Menuju Titik Nadir

Menurut Kompas mengutip Soros, Amerika Serikat sudah mulai "batuk-batuk", siap-siaplah kita.
Di suatu tempat saya pernah membaca/mendengar jika Amerika Serikat bersin maka dunia akan terkena Flu berat.

Jumat, 4 April 2008 | 01:37 WIB

New York, Kamis - Miliuner George Soros mengatakan, krisis keuangan saat ini adalah yang terburuk sejak Depresi Besar tahun 1929. Krisis ini sedang menuju titik nadir (paling dasar), dan paling cepat pemulihan baru terjadi tiga bulan dari sekarang.

...

Kelesuan itu tidak saja menekan ekspor ke negara maju, tetapi juga munculnya kenaikan harga-harga pangan. Harga-harga pangan yang naik terjadi karena investor dunia, yang biasa aktif di bursa valuta asing dan saham, kini sudah memasuki bursa komoditas, yang dianggap sebagai lahan baru investasi untuk meningkatkan laba. Akibatnya, adalah peningkatan harga-harga pangan yang kini mendera semua warga dunia.

Karena itu, Presiden Bank Dunia Robert Zoellick, di Washington, meminta negara maju bahu-membahu mengatasi kesulitan warga negara berkembang. Zoellick meminta dunia untuk memprioritaskan bantuan pangan untuk negara yang terancam malnutrisi.

...

Jika berminat membaca lebih lanjut silahkan lihat di sini.

What is worth

Tiga selesai

Hari ini tiga ebook selesai dibaca, plus mencoba mengaplikasikannya. Sisa ebook masih banyak. Arghhh.
Kesunyian sering kali memang benar-benar berharga. Jika dikombinasikan dengan faktor-faktor penunjang lainnya maka banyak pekerjaan yang bisa diselesaikan. Atau setidaknya dapat menyelesaikan satu pekerjaan dengan sangat baik.

Yes, sometimes silence is gold.