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Today is Software Freedom Day 2007. Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Their goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high-quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!

It was a bit late when I got the news, and I have not be able to organize such an event here in Kota Kinabalu. When I checked on Software Freedom Day official website, there are only 2 places that held this event in Malaysia - Kuala Lumpur and Kuching.

I was wondering on how I can contribute to the community, although I am doing this alone. It is almost impossible to contact local university (University Malaysia Sabah) in this short period of time. I also do not have any contact with Malaysia Open Source Training Center to get some feedback on the above matter.

At last, I decided to give away my Ubuntu Linux cds which I got from Canonical few months back. 1 Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn 64-bit and 2 Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn 32-bit, which is in excellent condition. I also have their Kubuntu cds, but after trying, it seems that the cds are faulty. I won’t give the Kubuntu cds out.

For your information, Ubuntu Linux is one of the friendliest Linux operating system nowadays. It is really suitable for normal computer users, either notebook or desktop. It is a Live CDs, means that you don’t have to change any configuration to your existing computer to get it running. Just pop it in and run.

So, if you want to experience the feeling of having an option to your Window$, just drop an email to drizad(at)gmail.com with your address (Malaysia only please). I will personally snail mail/parcel it to you. If you don’t mind waiting, you can also ask your copy from ShipIt.

Talking about Ubuntu, I think you want to see this. Oh, put it in a better words - YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS -up till the end of the video.

That is the least I could do. Happy Software Freedom Day!

*First come, first serve basis, and yes, I am doing this free for Ubuntu.

If you have been using Adobe Acrobat to create your PDF files, you should check this post out. It is even more important if you are still using pirated copy of Adobe Acrobat, as what am I going to share with you now will not cost you anything - except your precious time.

We know that an original copy of Adobe Acrobat can burn a hole in your pocket, but these 3 simple software can do just what Acrobat can do.

Open Office.org

The so called MS Office replacement. OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite that contains word processor, spreadsheet, multimedia presentation tool, drawer, database manager and mathematical processor.

It can do almost all the things that MS Office can do, but the only thing that makes it more user friendly is its ability to export any files created by Open Office to PDF in just one click. That is the feature that made me stick to Open Office from its version 1.x.

Similar looks with MS Office Words, but with an extra menu button in the menubar. When you hover on the button, “Export Directly as PDF” will pop up. Make sure you save your files first before you export the file to PDF.

Similar looks as MS Office Excel, OpenOffice Calc also have an extra button to export your file to PDF.

qvPDF

An open source software specifically for Window$ users. It is an application that will function as a printer for your computer. It will install a printer driver, and it will print your documents out as a PDF. So, you can generate any documents that can be print out as PDF files, without the need of any other software.

You just have to download the installer file from Sourceforge.net, and run the installation process. During the installation, Window$ may warn you that the printer driver that will be installed by qvPDF is not recognized, and may tell you that it could harm your computer. Just ignore the warning and continue the installation.

Upon successful installation, check whether your new printer is available. Click “Start”>”Control Panel”>”Printers and Faxes”. You should be able to see your printer listed in the directory.

I have just installed and use qvPDF for a couple of days, and still learning on how to maximize the software usage.

PrimoPDF

PrimoPDF is not an open source software, but I would like to highlight it as it has served me long enough before I jump into open source software bandwagon. It is one of the most convenient software to have, and it function similarly like qvPDF. It will install a printer driver and it prints out anything that you want to PDF.

You can just download the installation file and run the executable file to install the software. You can see a new printer in your “Printers and faxes” directory, labeled PrimoPDF (like the one you see above).

I must tell you that PrimoPDF does a very good job at producing PDF files. Some of the features that I like about PrimoPDF are the ability to secure your PDF file by setting a password to open the file and it could also encrypt your PDF files.

Any other free PDF generator that you know?

I bet you must have seen the blue screen of death if you have use Windows long enough. It is what happened to your PC or notebook when you don’t know what to do next. Should you call the technical team from the shop you bought your PC? Or call anybody who know how to get rid of the problem? Or maybe contact Uncle Gates from Micro$oft support?

When I encountered the problem while I was really naive few years back, the best bet would be to restart my notebook. If it does not changed anything, I will call my friend who “seems” to know what to do (unfortunatley he does not). At last, I have to reinstall my Window$ with the recovery cd that comes with my notebook.

The not-so-good about reinstalling Window$ was that I lost almost all my data on the hard disk. When reinstalling, Window$ installer will wipe your hard disk clean before it installed the “new” copy of Window$. It bugged me very much, until I found a temporary solution to save my data from the “crashed” hard disk - accessing the hard disk WITHOUT WINDOW$.

Linux Live CD

The extraordinary features about Linux Live CD are:

1. It can access your hard disk when your Window$ commit suicide. It does not matter if you have FAT32 or NTFS file systems in your hard disk.
2. It is free.
3. You can use it as your own recovery cd. Choose the smallest, easiest and user friendly Linux distro and burn it on a cd. In this review, I prefer to use SLAX Linux.

SLAX Linux

SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. It means that using SLAX, you can do your work in your PC or notebook without the need of a hard disk.

Howto:

1. Download your copy of SLAX Linux from SLAX homepage. It is available as an ISO image of the cd. It fits on small 8cm CD-R(W). Burn it with your favorite cd-writing software.
2. As you downloaded ISO image is quite big (around 200MB), I would suggest that you check for the integrity of your ISO image. Each file for download has it’s own md5sum. This checksum is used for several purposes, the most common is to assure your download wasn’t corrupted. When md5sum of your downloaded file is different than the one published at these pages, then you can be 100% sure your file is wrong. So, every time you download a file which is big, use md5sum software to create (generate) the checksum of your file and compare it with the one published at the download page.
3. If you have successfully downloaded and burn a copy of SLAX Linux in a cd, you need to tweak your PC or notebook so that it can boot from a cd. When you restart your PC or notebook, press whichever key you are told is needed to enter setup of BIOS (mine is F2).
4. You’ll need to change your system’s boot order in the BIOS. In the Boot section you should then be able to adjust the settings labeled Boot Order, Boot Device Priority or possibly some other variation on this wording. Make sure that your CD/DVD drive is set to be your first boot device and you should be able to boot from a CD.
5. Put in your newly burned SALX Linux cd, and restart your PC. Your PC should be able to detect the cd and boot from it. Successful booting will end you up on this page:
6. To access your files in your hard disk, just click “System” > “Storage Media”. You should be able to see and access your drive C: from here.
7. If not, you may need to “mount” the drive by right clicking on your drive C:, and then select “mount the drive”. But most probably, you won’t have to do this.
   
8. You should be able to see your hard drive content from here. If you decided to do a backup for your precious data, get a portable pen drive and copy your data inside it.

For advance user, SLAX Linux may not be able to give more, apart from recovering files from the hard disk. They may want a boot cd that could do more than just accessing their machine, like for example diagnostic tools and antiviruses. Ultimate Boot CD may suits the need of an advance computer user.

I used Adobe Photoshop - couple of years back when I was still using pirated software for my notebook. As we all know, Adobe Photoshop is the best and most expensive photo editor around. However, after using it for quite sometime, I don’t feel right with the pirated copy. In addition, the installer cdrom that I bought did not function properly. My Photoshop editing session sometimes behave “strangely” and it sometimes “hanged” my notebook.

I found GIMP as the replacement when I decided to jump into Open Source bandwagon, and never looked back since then. GIMP can do almost all the things that Adobe Photoshop can do, and it cost you almost nothing. I have experienced with the earlier version of GIMP (which was really buggy), but the latest version on GIMP is almost flawless. It can even use third party plugin for Adobe Photoshop.

pspi.exe

Tor Lillqvist wrote an executable file, pspi.exe, for Adobe Photoshop third party plugin lover in 2001. Pspi.exe is a GIMP plugin that runs 3rd party Photoshop plug-in filters. It can run Adobe Photoshop plugins with .8bf files.

How to install pspi.exe?

You need to have your own GIMP program yourself. Uninstall your pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop CS (if any), and get the GIMP installer package for Windows from GIMP.org.

Head to Tor Lillqvist’s page of pspi.exe plugin here. Download the Windows executable GIMP-pspi plugin.

Unzip it and put the file (pspi.exe) in your GIMP plugins folder. It is usually here: C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins.

Restart your GIMP. You should see “Photoshop Plug-ins Settings…” from Xtns menubar. Locate the folder where you put your Adobe Photoshop third party plugins, and put the link there.

For example, you can head to Flaming Pear Software for hot plugins for your GIMP. Bare in mind that a lot of third party plugins for Adobe Photoshop, especially which is free or “freeware” are mostly useless, as GIMP have their own plugins that can do better job then they are. You can test it before you have it as your favorite plugins.

*Attention for Linux users: You can also use Adobe Photoshop plugins in Linux!

I have been using a Salaat Time for quite some time now. I am very satisfied with its performance as it never misses to inform me the prayer time. Salaat Time is an application that calculates the prescribed five daily Muslim prayer times as well as Qiblah direction for anywhere in the world. It rests in the system tray and at the prescribed times the Athan sounds and/or displays visual alerts.

I decided to look for other Open Source alternative for similar software which I can use as an option for Salaat Time and maybe a plugin or widget for Wordpress. Unfortunately, I could not find any…

Islamic Prayer Times for Joomla

Instead, I found an Islamic Joomla extension. It is a module for Joomla portals that displays Islamic prayer times. Written by Omar Alrawi, a student from Purdue University, the prayer software can also:

• display prayer times right off islamicfinder.org
• display your own custom defined times just fill the text box
• display sunrise time
• add leading or trailing text to module before or after the times
• user defined Iqama times

I have email Omar and asked whether he could modify the script to become a Wordpress plugin or widget, because I wanted to put it inside my alumni community portal which runs Wordpress as the backend.

Prayer Times code

At the moment, I am using a PHP script from islamicfinder.org which is able to show daily prayer times of Kuala Lumpur, our Malaysian capital city.

You can get your own script from islamicfinder.org for your portal. You need select a country and a city where you live in. They will generate a script that you can cut and paste into your web page. And you can choose from either vertical or horizontal table presentation.

Side note: There are differences on calculating the prayer times for Fajr (Subuh) and Isya’, according to different methodology. If you don’t have the knowledge on which methodology to use, just choose the default value, and they will generate the script for you.

Prayer Software

I am slightly disappointed in this area when I found NONE of the open source prayer softwares that is listed in Sourceforge.net is working. I found 2 - Adhan Alarm and TrayAdhan - which both have bugs. After installation, I could not get the software working as expected.

It gives me no choice but to look for other software from other places. I found Mawaqit from Hotscripts.com. Mawaqit has a similar functionality with Salaat Time, but the presentation of the software is much more interesting. Basically, both of the softwares have these key features:

• Set different athans at different prayer times or use the random feature.
• Selection of different discreet visual alerts including balloon tips and tray flash.
• Qiblah direction in graphical compass-like format.
• Time until next prayer with a dynamic graphical interface for time-remaining.
• Daily, monthly and yearly prayer time views.
• Moon phases in Hijri and Gregorian calendars.
• Transform Hijri dates to Gregorian and vice-versa.

I fell in love the first time I saw Mawaqit. It has a very beautiful GUI compared to Salaat Time.

Mawaqit GUI

Salaat Time GUI

Salaat Time will have a notification balloon during prayer time and Mawaqit will have a pop-ups from the system tray, showing Muazzin reciting Azan.

So, which one is better?

Personally, I like Mawaqit’s GUI and presentation very much. But in terms of extra features like exporting and printing monthly prayer time calendars in both Hijri and/or Gregorian formats and listen to the Quran from a selection of Suras and Ayaats, only Salaat Time have those features.

Salaat Time website also have a lot more to offer to Muslim computer users, with audio lectures and custom folder of audio and image files which you can add-on to your Salaat Time software for enhancement.

p/s: Hoping for Adhan Alarm and Tray Alarm to be updated…

Before I continue to answer the above title, I just would like to share with you WHY should we install Wordpress blog in our own computer:

1. You can make it as a test blog. You can test your new theme and new plugin, without worrying on breaking your official blog in the webhosting server. I like to keep my hands dirty by playing with the theme editor. By having a locally hosted Wordpress blog, I can do almost anything with the theme.
2. When you have your own Wordpress blog in your computer, you don’t have to be connected to the internet all the time to upload your blog in your browser from your webhosting server.
3. You can make it as a back up blog. Make the locally hosted blog as a “mirror blog” which have all the plugins and themes of your official blog. If anything happens to your blog online, you have almost the same blog locally to count on.
4. You can also make it as a personal diary, where none of the post that you wrote can be access by internet user.
5. A good learning process on how servers are operated, and maybe you could also install other blogging platform and compare it with Wordpress.
6. You don’t need to use FTP to transfer your files to the server.
7. None of the software that you need to have Wordpress installed in your computer cost you anything. You just need some passion and a little bit of elbow grease to get the things going. So why not?

What do you need?

Basically you will need to transform your notebook/PC computer to be a server, and to be exact, an Apache server. You will need XAMPP to do the job.

XAMPP is an Apache distribution which contains MySQL, PHP and Perl. It is the best package that you could use to run Wordpress blog in your computer. You don’t have to be a geek to install XAMPP though, as it comes with a one-click Windows installer for you.

Don’t forget your Wordpress installer package.

Installation

XAMPP

Choose the latest stable distribution “XAMPP Windows Installer Version” from Apache Friends. Choosing other than the installer version will give you headache. Run the installer in your computer after successful download. Apache Friends have all the information on how to install XAMPP in your computer.

To make sure that you install XAMPP properly, open ‘CONTROL XAMPP SERVER PANEL’ from Start Menu > All Programs > apachefriends > xampp. Click ‘Admin…’ from the Apache service modules. It should open your browser and show this:

The URL address should be http://localhost/xampp/

Wordpress

Now we go into Wordpress installation. Installing Wordpress in our local server is a bit tricky. You won’t find public_html (which you usually have in remote servers) subdirectory in XAMPP server, as XAMPP use htdocs as their public_html subdirectory.

Follow the steps below:

1. You need to first create a database for Wordpress by using phpMyAdmin as the manager. While you are on http://localhost/xampp/, choose “phpMyAdmin” in the left sidebar. Create a new database for your Wordpress, for example ‘wordpress’.



By that, XAMPP is sorted out by now.

2. Download and unzip your Wordpress folder and locate wp-config-sample.php. These are the exact details you need for XAMPP to work because the default user in phpmyadmin is called ‘root’ and there is no password.

   *****

   define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
   define(’DB_USER’, ‘root’); // Your MySQL username
   define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ”); // …and password
   define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

   *****

   Copy those details into your wp-config file, and save it as wp-config.php

3. Now you need to copy the files to the right place. Locate htdocs folder in XAMPP. For example, I installed XAMPP inside my Program files folder. So, my htdocs folder would be in the C:/Program files/xampp/htdocs. Copy the whole WordPress folder into this directory.
4. In your browser, go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and everything from there should run smoothly !

I have been using Wordpress with XAMPP for the past few months, and found out that it is a good way to feel like a “webmaster” rather than just a “blogger”. XAMPP has become my server playground to test various types of PHP scripts for my websites and blogs, and getting my hands dirty with other blogging platforms.

By the way… Do you know that Wordpress is an Open Source project?

Happy webmastering!

As a Blog Mastermind student, Yaro have mentioned to me regarding the use of podcast to produce an audio file in the blog post in one of his weekly e-lessons. He did mentioned about an open source application, Audacity, an award winning software that may be used to edit audio files during the production process.

I did not take what Yaro said seriously, until Steven Wong from Interneton9.com contacted me for a podcast interview. By the time I received the confirmation on the appointment for the interview, I have only 3 days to figure out how to produce a podcast.

I am going to share with you on how you can produce a podcast easily.

1. Get a headset. I bought a new headset, as my old one was really uncomfortable. It hurts my ears because of the design, although it has enough foam padding.
2. If you still do not have a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) software, you should get one. The most famous is Skype, but Gizmo can also do the job.
3. The problem with Skype: by default, it does not come with a conversation recording plugin or software. You have to download a separate plugin or software to do the job. I found out that PowerGramo does a very good job, and Freecorder toolbar for Firefox is a good option.
4. Get Audacity. Audacity won the SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2007 — Multimedia Category in July 2007. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Some people advise me to download iTunes for editing purposes, but I will tell you later why I don’t like iTunes.

The preparations

1. Make sure your soundcard is working well. I have problems with my soundcard when I opened Audacity and Skype at the same time. It seems that when they both access my soundcard at the same time, Audacity turns my microphone to “mute”, and during recording, I can only listen the other person’s voices and not mine. So, what I did was NOT running both applications at the same time.
2. Use your Skype with PowerGramo plugin and try to record a conversation of you with somebody else. I only test my recordings with the “Skype Test Call” girl…



(By the way, PowerGramo is a small “plugin” to Skype, which can record all kinds of calls and SkypeCasts. I like it very much because it is really easy to use, and the free version can even record unlimited time of conversation for FREE!). And don’t forget to adjust the microphone volume for your Skype higher, as you may record a lower volume of your voice recording.

3. Make sure you have Skype installed first before you install PowerGramo. Installing PowerGramo will add one menu in the Skype menubar and an additional button for easy access to PowerGramo. After successful installation, every call and conversation that you have will be recorded automatically.



4. Audacity and PowerGrammo does not come with MP3 encoder by default. It means that both of the software does not export MP3 files directly, but instead uses the freely available LAME library to handle MP3 file encoding. You must obtain lame_enc.dll separately by downloading the LAME MP3 encoder, and then locate this file for both of the software. You only need to do this once. (I got my lame_enc.dll by just Googling for it). Here is the dll file.

If everything is working well, you should be able to record your conversation easily with Skype and PowerGramo.

File Conversion

After any conversation recording finishes, PowerGramo will automatically produces an audio file with a .Pga extension file that can only be played back with PowerGramo. The file can be really big, and you need to convert it to either MP3, Ogg Vorbis or WAV format, so that it can be played with almost all audio player.

Just click File > and select “Export Record as” either MP3, Ogg Vorbis or WAV format. If you have installed your MP3 encoder properly (the same LAME MP3 encoder with Audacity), you can choose your file exporting records, i.e. the sample rate, the channels and the MP3 bitrate for your produced files.

For example, a simple audio interview podcast can be exported with 44100Hz sample rate, (1) mono channel and 64 kbps of MP3 bitrate, while still preserving the quality of the audio produced. My native PowerGramo file which was around 200MB was compressed to around 35MB of MP3 file for around 70 minutes of recording. Some podcaster choose 32 kbps of MP3 bitrate to make the file smaller.

Editing

Audacity is the best audio editor around. It does the job perfectly. If you ONLY want an audio editor, (without the complication like what iTunes has), nothing come close to Audacity. For example, I use Audacity to amplify my voices, but not Steven’s as some of the listener complained that my voices were softer.

What about iTunes?

I downloaded and installed iTunes (as suggested by some of my friends). Even before the download started, I have encounter some challanges:

1. The installation file was too big, to just do some audio editing. (I don’t know about you, but 48MB is really huge, compared to Audacity, 2.12MB).
2. I don’t use most of iTunes features - like the playlist, the store, etc…
3. It eats up my memory. All of a sudden, my other applications runs really slow.
4. I don’t have / use iPod.

How to upload your MP3 file into your Wordpress blog

You need to have Audio Player Wordpress Plugin by 1 Pixel Out. Follow the installation steps carefully. You should be able to get your MP3 file running in your blog in no time.

The product? Check out my first podcast interview here.

Happy podcasting!

I have used few antivirus before. My first antivirus was Norton, which comes pre-installed with my Acer notebook 3 years ago. When the registration for Norton expires 3 months after that, I looked for an alternative - cracked version of Norton which eventually gone corrupt (as they detect that my antivirus was an illegal one), and I have to re-install my Windows.

I started looking for other antivirus, and proprietary antivirus was not an options, as I don’t like paying for a software. I used free version of AVG for a couple of years, until I found out that it has some limitation on removing one particular virus at that time (Brontok C, if you have heard of it…).

I then tried ClamAV, an open source antivirus, which did a very good job at removing viruses, but the lack of its ability to do some of the features that I wanted, has made me change to avast.

Until few days back, when I decided to blog about the best free alternative for proprietary software around the internet, I found out that Moon Secure Antivirus one of the option for you to use for your computer security.

The Software:

Developed by 3 developer, Moon Secure Antivirus is written for Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP). It aims to be the best Free Antivirus for Windows under GPL license. It offers multiple scan engines, Net shield, Firewall, On access, on Exec scanner and rootkits preventions plus features from Commercial Antivirus applications.

The size of the installation package is 10.3MB, and after installation, the application occupies 18.22MB of your hard disk space. Installation process was flawless, although with another antivirus is running in the background (I forgot to disable my avast). After the installation, your computer will be automatically secured by the antivirus.

Problems arise when I get to know Moon Secure Antivirus more. Clicking Moon Antivirus folder from my All Programs button will only show “Uninstall Moon Secure Antivirus”, and you can only execute the application for a scan from the running process of your applications on the taskbar. Right clicking the Moon Secure Antivirus button will show this:

You have to update your virus definition database first, before you can start scanning for virus. Oh, don’t forget to disable any other antivirus that you have before scanning with Moon Secure Antivirus, as the process will be terminated prematurely, as it can conflict with other antivirus program. My avast stopped Moon Secure Antivirus scanning process while the latter do the scanning.

After the virus database has been updated, this screen will show:

After that, I did a scan on my hard disk. The graphical user interface (GUI) was very minimal, with only 3 menus in the menubar; Options, Logs, and Infected Files. I notice that you need to run the update before you do the scan. Otherwise, you may get an error message.

How good?

I can’t really tell how good the antivirus is, as after scanning all my hard disk, it does not find any virus. It passes the test with a test virus from eicar.org. It managed to disinfect the test virus, but not delete it.

One more thing. Using Moon Secure Antivirus as your computer antivirus will trigger off your Windows Security Center. It does not recognize Moon Secure Antivirus as a “valid” antivirus to be used for your system. Just declare to your security center that you are using your own antivirus and will be monitoring your computer yourself.

So, if you are looking for a free and simple antivirus solution, Moon Secure Antivirus can do the job well.