APRICOT 2013 and Traceroute Party

Last month, I attended APRICOT 2013 in Singapore. It has been a long time since I attended APRICOT or any other APNIC events. The last time I attended APRICOT was in 2010 when it was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Therefore, it was nice to meet some old and new friends during the event.

As usual, I attended only the conference and not the workshop. Some of the interesting topics discussed during the conference were:

1. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), which is designed for Internet routing security to prevent route hijacking or blackholing;
2. Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which is an approach to provision network connections on-the-fly, normally within cloud computing and virtualisation environment;
3. DNSSEC, in a bid to secure the DNS (Domain Name System); and
4. Last but not least, IPv4 exhaustion and the (very slow) deployment of IPv6.

This weekend, I will be going to Jakarta, Indonesia to attend Traceroute Party. This is one of the biggest gathering events related to the (very big) Indonesian Internet community, with telcos, NAPs, ISPs, content providers, game providers, Internet communities, bloggers and the Internet users in general, are expected to attend. There will be 300 exhibitors, talk-shows, workshops and last but not least, many indie bands performing live. This even is hosted by IDC Indonesia.

I will make use of the opportunity to hang around and get together with some old friends, and make some new friends as well. Some of my friends from the Indonesian ISP and Internet industry are expected to be there. I hope to meet some of my old friends during the RADNET era. Most of my friends in BemoNet community will also be there, since BemoNet has 3 booths at the event, and we don’t have any idea on how to make use of the booths. ;P  I will also make the opportunity to meet some friends from the RKTI and BlogFam communities as well.

See you in JCC this weekend. :)

Can’t Get WordPress for Android to Work on My Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

I installed WordPress for Android on my Samsung Galaxy S III phone, however I am not able to get the application to work with my self-hosted WordPress blog, Minda Indra. I got this error message when I put http://ip.sg.or.id/ as the Blog URL:

Sorry, no WordPress site was found at the URL provided.

And this is the error message when I put http://ip.sg.or.id/xmlrpc.php as the Blog URL:

XMLRPC Fault: server error. requested method wp.getUsersBlogs does not exist. [code –32601]

I have tried to search the Internet for more information, without any luck. Anyone knows what could be the problem?

Freedom of Speech in Indonesia

Treespotter wrote:

Indonesia has one of the most liberal press law in the world (which not without problems in itself, but we’ll get there later). We’re no longer live in opaque Soehartoesque police state and people are free to write whatever they want. For any of you with any experience whatsoever of the press life 20 years ago, then you’d know that life is a whole world of difference these days where freedom of opinion is concerned.

Agree with him. Compared to Malaysia and Singapore, the Indonesian government is more relaxed in giving its press, be it mainstream press of citizenship journalism (e.g. bloggers), more freedom to express their views and opinions. The Pesta Blogger 2007 event, which is supported by the Indonesian government with its declaration of Indonesia's National Blogger Day, is a great example.

The onus is now with us to ensure that we make use of this "freedom" responsibly.

Asia Blogging Network

I'm back to Singapore after a very short (less than 2 weeks) holiday with my family in Jakarta. My Internet connection was very limited while I'm in Jakarta, since my family's house there does not have a dedicated Internet connection. I can use a dial-up connection to some Indonesian ISPs using my company's iPass Global Roaming account, however the network connectivity was terrible. Downloading e-mails from my server in Singapore can take forever.

The only thing I did quite regularly while I was in Indonesia is to blog at Kronologis, using my Dopod 818 Pro with a GPRS connection provided by XL, which has GRPS roaming agreement with my Singapore mobile provider, M1, at quite competitive prices. Therefore, I seldom update my blogs or check my e-mails during my trip to Jakarta. The only post I wrote while I was in Jakarta is a post on Rumah Indra to congratulate Kukuh for his wedding, and to congratulate Tyty and eRBe for the birth of their first daughter, Auriel.

I also would like to congratulate Budi Putra for the launch of Asia Blogging Network (ABN), the first Asian blogging network founded by Budi together with some of his fellow bloggers: Kuncoro Wastuwibowo, Harry Sufehmi, Ikhlasul Amal, Firman Firdaus, Rendy Maulana and Thomas Arie Setiawan. Some of big names in Indonesian blogosphere has also joined the network, such as Jennie S. Bev and Budi Rahardjo. They have many blogs, some use different domains, to cater for different specific topics, under the same one ABN umbrella.



Although the blog network is founded in Indonesia, it's quite obvious that ABN wants to reach out to bloggers in Asia, and based on its press release, Budi describes ABN as a "blog network from Indonesia for Asia". At the moment, they are currently inviting Indonesian bloggers to become their permanent writers, however, in the near future, it might be open for other Asian (non-Indonesian) writers as well.

I, myself, am actually interested in writing on and for ABN, however it seems that I'm not (yet?) really that passionate enough to write there. One of the requirements to become a permanent writer for ABN is to write regularly, minimum (typically) three times a week, a requirement which I think is quite difficult for me to fulfill. Well, consider this, I'm already feeling lucky enough if I can post on my blogs at least once a week. :)

Nevertheless, I really think the Asia Blogging Network is a great initiative from our fellow Indonesian bloggers, and I am looking forward to see the network to grow and reach out to not only Indonesian bloggers, but also to our fellow bloggers from other countries in Asia. Again, congratulations to Budi and friends for the launch of Asia Blogging Network. Keep up the good work.

Bemonet Alumni and First Indonesian Bloggers

My friend Budi Putra, reputedly the first full-time Indonesian blogger, is currently doing a research on the history of first Indonesian bloggers. I agree with him that articles with regard to this matter are rarely found on the Internet, and I fully support his initiative and efforts in doing the research. I foresee that this will be quite a difficult task for him, but once the task is done, I believe the research results will be very much rewarding, not only for him, but also for us and the Indonesian blogosphere in general.

Currently, he's in the early stage of gathering all the necessary information. Some fruitful inputs and feedbacks have been received as comments on the article. Based on the inputs and feedbacks, it seems that the year 2000 is the start of the blogging era for Indonesia.

It was noted that some of the first Indonesian bloggers, such as Harry Sufehmi, Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo, T.A. Coen, Kukuh T. Wicaksono and Kuncoro Wastuwibowo are coming from the BemoNet community, a BBS community which I joined during the Indonesian BBS era in the 90's. The start of the Internet era marked the end of the BBS era in Indonesia, and the members of the community had to move on to use Internet as their communication media. Some of them used the mailing list, and some other used blogs.

T.A. Coen, the Bemonet coordinator, started a poliblog called Bemo Live, which I was one of the contributors. The first post of BemoLive was dated 7 April 2000. At that time, I already had a Blogger account even though I haven't started to blog, as yet. On the same year, Idban Secandri also started another poliblog called Blog Suka-Suka, and he was also very kind to add me as one of the contributors. The first post of Blog Suka-Suka was dated 23 August 2000.

At that time, Coen and Idban should have started their own blogs as well, so I believe we can safely say that they were some of the first Indonesian bloggers who has started blogging since early 2000. On top of that, some of the active contributors of the two poliblog sites, such as Kukuh and Kuncoro, can be considered as first Indonesian bloggers as well.

Again, I would like to emphasize that I have not started to actively blog at that time. At that time, I chose to use the bemo-batavia mailing list, setup by Heryudi Ganesha, to get in touch with other Bemonetters. I only started to blog on year 2004 (based on my first post on this blog), and only started to actively blog on year 2005, when I launched Rumah Indra and The Journey of Inka and Irza. Therefore, of course, I am NOT one of the first Indonesian bloggers I have mentioned above. :)

On a side note, the official domain of the Bemonet community, bemo.or.id, is currently down at the moment. Couple of months back, I had a chat with Coen about the possibility of reactivating this domain and host the site in my facility, however so far there's no further updates on when can the domain be reactivated. Perhaps Coen or Priyadi can shed some light on the status of the domain? :)

Last but not least, I hope the above short article can help Budi in doing his research. Again, I fully support his efforts in doing this research and I am looking forward to see the results of the research. Good luck. :)

Upgraded to New Blogger

At last, I finally saw the long awaited option on my Blogger dashboard for me to switch to the new Blogger, which is already out of Beta (see left picture). The option appears on top of my usual Blogger dashboard when I logged in to the dashboard today. This is a great surprise to me, since I have actually tried to switch just several days ago, and it was not successful. I believe this was because my Blogger account is also a contributor of the Bemo Live and Suka Suka Gue blogs, preventing me from switching to the new Blogger account. It seems that now, Blogger has managed to give me the option to upgrade all my blogs separately from the two blogs which are still on the old version of Blogger.

Having said that, I immediately chose to switch to the new Blogger. First, I needed to confirm my sign-in by signing in using my old Blogger account (see right picture). After signing in, I am given the list of all my blogs, which are going to be upgraded (see below picture). It was mentioned that the two blogs I have mentioned above are owned by someone else, and although I will still be able to post to those blogs after upgrade, but the blogs won't have the new feature until the owners upgrade them.



After pressing "Continue", the screen would prompt me to choose a Google account (see right picture). I could either use my own Google account if I have one, or create a new one. Since I already had a Google account, I just needed to key in my Google account and password. After signing in, the upgrade process will start, and depends on the number of blogs and how big they are, it may take several minutes. Once done, an email will be sent to our Gmail e-mail account.

So, here this is, my first post on the new Blogger version. Haven't really explore the new features yet, though. One of the obvious features I can see, which I think would be very useful, is the labels tagging, which can be used for me to categorise all my next articles. Well, let's see how it goes after I post this article. :)