satukubik.net

For several weeks I have been using Ubuntu distribution and so far love the experience. Some complains are on some packages which don’t provide what are needed.

Those three are:

• ntfs-3g, yeah I need full access to my NTFS partition for smoothly coverting to Linux. I’m Windows-er for a quite long time, so lack of NTFS support always give me reason to boot in Windows.
• XGL + Compiz…. It’s cool, I’ve try it and it eventually better than OS/X, but unfortunately still buggy and my graphics card seems to have unsolvable bug. Aaaaargh… (Want to see some video? find them on Google Video, keyword: XGL Compiz)
• InitNG… Faster is always good.

And there are several projects which is not available yet

• better messenger… please GAIM doesn’t support voice or video chat. And the interface is so ugly compared to Yahoo Messenger
• fineprint like application, to control my printer. Print 2-4-8-16 pages in one page. I know Linux has some console command for this. But I’m Windows converter. I deserve better interface for this!

And my complains:

• Totem… OMG.. why you always crash if I’m playing movie in until end in Full Screen mode??? Until I found Ctrl+Alt+D to get out from the black screen I’ve to restart my Ubuntu everytime I watch movie!

Anything to add?

Have you installed FoxLingo as one of your Firefox extensions? Well, I just install it before.

What interesting is, FoxLingo uses many translation engine for translating a page. The next big question is of course, which one is the best?

So I open a German page and try all of the translation engine and try to use FoxLingo to translate it for me. I thought Google translate is the best, but I guess I’m wrong.

Bestiland, ImTranslator, Alphaworks, Comprendium, Intertrans is such a trash… Just leave them. FreeTranslation is the worst among the last four, sometimes it shows a character error, and in other case the result is not really satisfying.

Google and BabelFish come after. Both of them fail to translate some pages in the internet. Google is slightly better because it can guess an acronym into its full text and return the translation. Google is also the fastest of all with BabelFish following in the second place. Google and BabelFish result brokes some layout but BabelFish is slightly better.

The best translator engine for me is WorldLingo, no wonder FoxLingo creator places it at the top of the list. WorldLingo has everything that Google has plus a better grammar. I think it maybe using Google Translate to do preliminary work and then fix some grammar errors. Anyway, WorldLingo is also the only translator engine that translate every pages that I tested. The layout and everything is almost perfectly preserved.

The only problem of WorldLingo is it comparably slower than Google or BabelFish. I don’t know the reason, but maybe my guess is right, that it is using Google Translate. If so, the slowness can be understood.

Moreover, FoxLingo also provide a Indonesian->English. The translation is very good (when it works). Sadly, only some pages that I tested working correctly.

Anybody interested to see what kind of service provided by Google Checkout? See this video…

In my opinion… one BIG thing missing is the ability to use money from bank account, and not just from Credit Card. This is very useful if you live in Germany, where transaction with bank transfer is more often than with credit card. But oh.. I forget.. this Google Checkout seems to be only valid for U.S. in the near future :(.

*UPDATE!!!! It’s online now… check it out on http://checkout.google.com

It’s valid only in U.S. (read the Terms of Use), and still, only credit card :(

As we already know, Windows XP SP2 limits its network onnections to have only 10 connections a time. The reason behind this is to avoid fast spread of worms. This is a problem for me that always using may applications simultaneously. You can confirm this problem if you get some event 4226 in the event viewer.

To avoid this problem, you can install patch to TCPIP.SYS by using lvllord. The problem with this patch is you have to re-apply the patch if you update TCPIP.SYS which is very often (almost every months). Sometimes I got the event 4226 again because I forgot to re-apply the patch after Microsoft Patch Day.

Several days ago, I got the same problem… then I apply the patch again, but the same problem re-occur. I still can browse through Firefox, but my other connections are dead. I can’t even ping google.com even if I still can browse the site. What’s up?

Obviously… I checked everything that use internet.. I check my firewall, but the problem still occur after I disable the firewall. I disable cfosspeed, but the same problem re-occur. I use netstat, but the number of connections is far below my setting with lvllord patch. I restart my computer several times to check everything.

In the end I realize that the problem only occur after I open Firefox. Why my netstat don’t show anything about it? I open a tools in cfosspeed and I realized that I forget to show UDP connections with my previous try. The tool shows that there are many UDP connections to the DNS which is not disconnected.

I open the configuration in my Firefox “about:config” page, and try to find anything about dns but still no hit. Then, I searched for everything that related to network and found one properties “network.http.keep-alive” which was set as true as default. I try to change it to false and voila.. the problem is disappear.

I know that my solution probably somehow wrong… I guess that the cause of the UDP connections that is not disconnected is because my firewall configuration which is not allowed any UDP connection from outside. But since my network running well currently, I just leave the best solution out and wait for future problem (if any…). This blog entry will be my reminder if something happen.

Are you satisfied with current computer desktop? Commonly, current computer desktop is filled with icons representing files and tasks. These icons are flat, 2D objects.

Some guys from Toronto, Canada are not satisfied with this desktop. They want to have a more realistic desktop which represent the actual desktop. By actual desktop, they means they have:

• 3D icons
• a possibility to pile icons
• a possibility to make icons tidier/messier
• a possibility to fold icons
• a possibility to rotate icons to every direction
• a possibility to resize icons

Several screenshots:

Check out:
project page
video