APRICOT 2007 Officially Opened Yesterday

Even though the workshop and tutorial of APRICOT 2007 in Bali has been starting since mid of last week, the conference was only officially opened yesterday (Tuesday, 27 February 2007). The conference was officially opened by Mr. Sofyan Djalil, the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia, after the opening speeches given by Ms. Sylvia Sumarlin, the chairman of APJII, the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association, and Mr. Gaurab Uphadaya, the chairman of APIA. APJII and APIA are two out of several organisations which support the APRICOT 2007 event.

Yesterday morning, I attended the BGP Deployment and Best Practices tutorial, conducted by Philip Smith. During lunch time yesterday, I had the chance to meet Mr. Sanjaya, one of APJII's activists who is now working for APNIC, and Mr. Roy Rahajasa Yamin, my ex-boss in RADNET. During the plenary session, I also met Mr. Yulianus, the network administrator of Indosat, one of the leading ISPs in Indonesia.

Yesterday night, I attended the APRICOT Opening Social Event, which is held at the Westin Poolside. I met some friends from Starhub and Equinix, Singapore. I also met Mr. Toto Santoso, the administrator of Ipteknet/BPPT and also previously the administrator for the go.id second level domain. We discussed almost anything reminiscing and Bill Fridini also joined the discussion. It was fun.

Today (Wednesday, 28 February 2007) morning, I attended the second phase of the APRICOT plenary sessions at the auditorium, with some interesting presentations, such as the new 4-byte (32-bit) AS number testing by Geoff Huston, and bogon filters discussion by Randy Bush. During lunch time, I met Judhi Prasetyo, one of my friends in Singapore. His company, FortiNet, is having a booth here in APRICOT 2007 and is one of the sponsors for the event. He also introduced me to Valens Riyadi, one of APRICOT's organising committee members.

I'm now writing this article from the Nusantara 2 Room, attending the IX SIG, chaired by Philip Smith. There are some interesting presentations, one of them is regarding the new 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, by Greg Hankins from IEEE. Currently, there's also a presentation regarding Euro-IX, which is actually a European IXP association, and *not* a European IX point by itself. Very interesting. This might be due to the fact that there are many (and not only one) IX points in Europe.

I won't post any more pictures here, you can go to my Flickr site if you want to see photos during the event. Specifically, these are the locations of the photos during my first day in APRICOT 2007 (26 February 2007) and during my second day (27 February 2007) here. I haven't uploaded any photos from today's events, will do soon, please watch out for them here.

First day at APRICOT 2007

Although today (Monday, 26 February 2007) is my first day at this APRICOT 2007 conference, it's actually already the sixth day of the conference, since I skipped the workshop and some of the meetings which are not related to my organisation. This conference is being held at the Bali International Convention Centre, which is quite a good, world class convention centre, similar to the Suntec City Convention Centre in Singapore. It's located within the complex of Westin Resort hotel, about 5-10 minutes from Melia Bali Hotel where I'm staying. There's a shuttle bus ferrying all the delegates from hotel to the conference venue.

Earlier, during lunch session, I met Mauldi Wirastomo and Bill Fridini, both are my old friends from APJII. They are now very busy since they are in-charge of the network providing Internet access to all the delegates. I also had the chance to meet Ahmad Alkazimy, one of APJII's key technical staff whom I previously only knew from his e-mails in some mailing lists. I also met Deny Kurniawan and I Nyoman Tusta, two of my old friends from RADNET Surabaya.

There are some tutorials which we can choose to attend, based on their streams. For today, I attended the Introduction to IPv6 tutorial by Jordi Palet Martinez, and IPv6 Deployment tutorial by Salaman Asadullah. There's free Internet access provided through wi-fi (wireless) networks, and power plugs are also available in the tables, so we can use our laptop and access the Internet while attending the tutorials. Unfortunately, the Internet access is a bit slow, although, according to Mauldi, there's more than 28 Mbps of bandwidth available. I guess it might be due to more people are using the network this week compared to last week.

More pictures during the event can be found here.

[Indonesian version]

Happy Lunar New Year

For those of you who celebrate Lunar New Year, I wish everyone of you a very happy and prosperous new year ahead. Xīnnián kuàilè, Gōngxǐ fācái. And, don't forget the red packets... :)

APRICOT 2007 in Bali

The APRICOT conference, which stands for "Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies", is the place where all network geeks from Asia Pacific, if not the whole world, gather to discuss about new technology in the Internet and IT fields, especially on the network area. The event consists of workshops, tutorials, conference sessions and some other forums as well. We can say that APRICOT is the Asia Pacific version of North America's NANOG. For this year, the APRICOT 2007 will be held at Bali International Convention Centre, Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. It will be hosted by APJII, the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association.

The last time I attended APRICOT was six years ago, during the APRICOT 2001 event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Since then, I never attended the next APRICOT events, until this year, my company has agreed to send me to attend the APRICOT 2007 in Bali, thank God. I will be going to Bali on Saturday, 24th of February 2007, and will be back to Singapore on 3rd of March 2007. I will attend the tutorial, conference sessions and the APNIC member meeting.

I'm glad that I'll be meeting quite a lot of friends there, including some of my friends from APJII and my ex-colleagues in RADNET. I took a glance at the event's organizing committee here and saw some familiar names, including Mauldi Wirastomo and Hammam Riza, two of my ex-bosses while I was in RADNET last time. :) For those of you who will be going to attend APRICOT 2007 as well, just drop me a note, in case we can meet up there and have a chat. Looking forward to see you guys in Bali! :) :)

Inka and Irza's New Look

My blogger friend Tata, who is currently in Switzerland but is having a plan to migrate to Singapore soon with his family, informed me that his computer always hung after viewing the main page of The Journey of Inka and Irza. I tried to replicate the problem, and yes, I also encountered the same problem. My Mozilla Firefox hung after trying to load the page for some time, not too sure why. Many thanks Tata for the feedback. :)

To be frank, firstly I didn't really much bother since the blog itself is already in hiatus mode for quite some time. In the past couple of months, I prefer to write stories about Inka and Irza in the photo section of my Multiply site, together with all the photos, while the Indonesian versions of the stories are usually posted in Rumah Indra. So, I didn't update that blog too often. However, writing articles (with all the hyperlinks etc) on a photo blog is quite inconvenient, especially since you would need to add the hyperlink tags manually. So, I've decided that I would want to use back The Journey of Inka and Irza for me to write stories about my kids and family, in English. Furthermore, I have configured my Multiply site to import all my articles from all my blogs under my Blogger account, including The Journey of Inka and Irza and Rumah Indra.

Before I start using it, I need to fix the problem first. Since I suspect that the problem might be due to the template, a quick and clean way to resolve the problem might be using a new template altogether. So, I backed up my previous template, and then I picked up a new template and at the same time, upgraded the template so I can use Blogger's new template layout tools, since I've already upgraded the blog to the new Blogger.

So, the problem is now fixed. You should not have any issues accessing The Journey of Inka and Irza blog site again, and I'm ready to post future articles about stories of Inka and Irza there again. Stay tuned! :)

Zabrina and Joe Jer Win the Amazing Race Asia

Amazing! As I have predicted earlier, my favourite team, the Malaysians Zabrina and Joe Jer, have won the first session of the Amazing Race Asia, with a narrow lead from the second team to arrive at the pit stop, Sandy and Fransesca. The race ended at Bako National Park (misspelled as "Baku National Park" by the show's producer), which is about 37 km north of the city of Kuching, in Sarawak, Malaysia.

The other Malaysian team, Andrew and Syeon, was actually the first who finished the "building the bench" detour at Kuching's Old Courthouse, but got lost when finding their way to the Sarawak Cultural Village, making them the third team to arrive at the finish line. One member of the teams had to take up treetop challenge in Permai Rainforest Resort, before setting off to the beach and took the speedboat to Bako National Park. Zabrina finished this treetop challenge very well, making her team to be the first to arrive at the finish line. Congratulations!

How about the Indonesian team, Marsio and Mardy? Well, contrary to my prediction earlier, they were actually on the fourth place, after becoming the last team to be eliminated from the race, during the leg in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Not bad at all, actually, and the fact that they can achieve the fourth place is simply amazing and beyond almost everyone's expectations. My sincere congratulations to them as well. :)

Overall, I really enjoyed watching the show, and I am really looking forward for the second season of the Amazing Race Asia. Good work, AXN Asia!