GII Christmas 2007 - Breakthrough

Another Christmas celebration just passed. I am experimenting with new field of ministry again this time :) I am responsible for handling multimedia related to task during the show, not making the slideshow or taking photos like I normally did before.

What I meant by multimedia related is task like playing music/sound effect as well as changing projector background and subtitle for Indonesian to English translation. The task itself is pretty straight forward, however, I took another step forward by developing my own application for helping me to execute this task. I have a team that supported me: Ko Handjar and Daniel helped me in controlling the volume and gain of the audio, Lukas is helping to operate the subtitle.

The interesting part of this task is that it is my first experiment working with AIR using AS 3.0. It is very cool, it's a lot of changes from AS 2.0, but it surely worth to learn. I created a client server multimedia presenter.

Following are some reasons why I initiate this project:

1. We are running two projectors, one for Subtitle and one for showing background. We then will have two computer sitting at the front for handling this task. Instead of having two persons sitting at the front and running two different PowerPoint Slides, I thought why didn't we create a presenter that will allow its user to control it remotely, xml-driven, and without need of running PowerPoint.
2. I am planning to replace the use of PowerPoint at Church with something that is more easy to obtain and free (not literally free because one needs to buy the software for development). I choose Flash on AIR, because of its built-in multimedia capability, displaying video background is just so easy and you can do it on the fly :) Moreover, it is easier to integrate it with our "Warta Generator" system, because they speak the same languange: XML
3. I guess the other reason is because I am a geek.

Ok, here is how it works:

• Presenter Client, it's the application that run on computer that is connected directly to LCD projector. It has 3 features: displaying background (both video and image) and subtitle as well as playing music/sound effect. In current case, we have two Presenter Client running: one with subtitle and sound option turned off and another one with only sound option turned off.
  
• Presenter Manager, it's application running on operator's computer. It gave operator option to control background, audio, and subtitle shown/played in Presenter Client. I am running Manager to control both audio and background, while Lukas is running Manager to control the subtitle.
  
• On start, Client and Manager will establish connection to server I called Mediator. As it name implies, it just passing data received from Manager to all connected Client.

One main obstacle we encountered during the event is that something wrong with our WAMP server: some image/audio files were not streamed properly. Initially, it seems that the files are corrupted; however, they are fine when run locally, not through HTTP.

Several possible features that I will consider adding:

1. Manager can communicate with the other Manager to tell about its current task
   
2. Manager can choose Client that it want to broadcast to, instead of broadcasting to all Client.

Anyway, I have been talking too much on the technical side of my task. The event went pretty good except where I lost the cue from Irwan to play some sound effect because I tried to find out why the audio streaming suddenly failed in the middle of the event. It's totally my mistakes :(. All in all, the choir was good and the drama was good.

Celebrate Medley, last song by Senior, Adult and Youth Groups

The Christmas 2007 Team

Merry Christmas all! Thanks for the good work!

Featured in News

Just got a call from my coworker and he said that our company product is featured on the business section of Vancouver Sun news paper. I am pretty proud about it, because I have been working single handedly on the software of this product for a while now.

Vancouver Sun cover page, business section

I did encounter tons of problem during development time, but I also gained a lot of experience when trying to solve those problems. We are still developing and improving the system as time goes. We'll see where it leads to.

Software and Software

In the last two months, I have been speding a long of time performing my personal research in remote control area. I managed to develop several Java MIDLET application during the research. They are mostly application that allow me to interface my phone with PC as well as to control appliances at home.

The next step is to add some intelligence to the system. My house is gonna be an experiment subject for my project :) With this limited amount of knowledge, I need to start reading some book in AI area, such as machine vision and machine learning. Hopefully, I can understand what the books are talking about.

I also should start revision control software to manage all my application. Number of personal software that I developed in the last two year has greatly increased. I am currently looking at Subversion, which is also the one used at my work place. It's easy to use and free :)

Back to Work

I have been away most of the time during month of August, just went back to my country for my engagement ceremony. Now, I am back at work.

Recently, I am really into things related to "Remote Control". I have been searching Win32 Library in order to find code that can help me to control other Windows Application. I finally found two function that will help me fore sure: FindWindows and SendMessage. Later on, I am gonna integrate it with my phone Bluetooth for controlling my custom made Home Entertainment System. I know I can just use my phone's HID service for remote control purpose or I can just buy Apple TV or similar devices; however, I am the kind of person who will learn by doing it. So, this is one thing I'll do in my "spare time" to enhance my skills.

Spring Fellowship 2007

It's that time of year again. Spring Fellowship is a special event held by GII Youth Fellowship every year at the end of April/early May. The purpose of this event is to strengthen friendship between each of us as well as with newcomer. This year, it was held at Harrison Hot Spring, ~1 and 1/2 hour drive from Vancouver.

Harrison Lake at Sunset

Following are some photos I took:

This year theme song

Last group leaving Vancouver (Cik Sophie dan Audrey ikutan foto)

Our hotel

Group Photo 1

Group Photo 2

Group Photo 3

More photos can be found at my pbase site

The Missing Iron Ring

Last week, accidentally, I looked at space underneath my car's windshield. And ..., I found my engineering iron ring. Waow ... I thought I already lost it somewhere 8 months ago; in fact, it's always with me whenever I drive.

The Iron Ring

Canada is the only country that offers iron ring to engineers who graduate from accredited university. We, engineers, are all bind to oath we declared during the iron ring ceremony, pretty cool he ... :) The ceremony itself is private and not opened to public. Wanna know more about the ritual of iron ring? Just visit http://www.ironring.ca/.

Easter 2007

We just finished our celebration last week. Easter and Christmas are always interesting for me. It's the celebration of birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How he was born, killed, and alive. At church, we usually work hard preparing for these two celebration.

For easter this year, we are presenting a drama titled "3 Wise Man (The Continuation ...). I am not directly involved this time, because I handled the documentation area; taking photos and videos.

Easter 2007 IEC Team. Thank you guys for the hard work.
(click to see larger size)

More photos at http://www.pbase.com/closari/easter2007.

Pak Berlianto Farewell

Pak Berlianto adalah seorang staff di Konsulat Jenderal (Konjen) Indonesia di Vancouver. Orangnya baik dan ramah, dan juga tertarik dengan kamera. Hal inilah yang sering kita bicarakan pada saat kita ketemu. Sayangnya, dia menggunakan Canon, dan saya Nikon :)

Masa kerja beliau di Vancouver udah berakhir dan kemarin, Senin dinihari, beliau meninggalkan kota Vancouver. Berikut ini adalah beberapa foto pada saat pesta perpisahan.

Pak Berlianto

Ibu Dian, Gaby, Pak Berlianto

Kenang - Kenangan dari GII

Ibu Dian dan Gaby

Mendengarkan Kesan dan Pesan


Mendengarkan Pesan dan Kesan

Pak Berlianto dan Gaby

Gaby

Semoga sukses di Indonesia dan sampai ketemu lagi.

Switching

I finally had a chance to install Linux on my laptop. Now, my laptop is fully running on Linux; distribution I used is Ubuntu. The installation wizard has improved a lot since 5-6 years ago. Amazingly, it also recognized all hardware in my system. In the past, I remembered trying to go through x86 config file to setup my vga card, installing sound card driver manually, etc.


So far, my experience is pretty good. I have setup all developments tools that I normally used: Java and Netbeans, PHP, Apache, MySQL, GCC. Other than development tools, I do install mplayer to watch movies before sleeping :)

However, I still need Windows to run some tasks. For example, Matlab ( I am still using it eventhough Linux has octave), Adobe Suites ( I am not used to GIMP), and .Net Development Tools (Visual Studio is the IDE that I like the most).

The last one month has been a blast for me. Some cool projects are coming; it's challenging but I do gained a lot of new skills.

File Sync'd App

Akhirnya selesai juga satu project saya, membuat file sinkronisasi applikasi buat kantor saya. Applikasi ini saya kira lumayan sederhana untuk dibuat, tetapi saya ternyata menemukan beberapa hambatan selama proses pembuatan.

Applikasi ini akan mengambil data tentang semua client dari database, terus melakukan sinkronisasi antara server dengan semua client yang ada. Terus saya juga membuat simple scheduler untuk mengatur banyaknya proses sinkronisasi yang bisa berjalan pada saat bersamaan. Jadi, semua client harus memalui queue list (antrian) sebelum memulai proses sinkronisasi dengan server.

Dari pengalaman ini, saya belajar menggunakan thread untuk menampikan sinkronisasi status di Windows Form TextBox. Pada awalnya, saya tidak menggunakan thread, dan alhasil, tidak ada text yg muncul di TextBox selama proses sinkronisasi berjalan. Textnya baru muncul setelah proses sinkronisasi selesai. Threads arefun if we can manage them :)

Project selanjutnya akan melibat penggunaan teknology nirkabel Bluetooth untuk file transfer. Yuhu :)

Automating Powerpoint

In July 2006, I started a small project for writing a software to generate a PowerPoint file for our church 'Responsive Reading.' It's painful to see someone actually has to copy and paste bible verses to PowerPoint for generating the Responsive Reading' every week. The software has been developed and used for a while now.

I grabbed all bible verses from http://sabdaweb.sabda.org/bible/ by writing a Perl script. Initially, I saved each verse in a file, and use combination of Perl and C# for generating the PowerPoint file; Perl for finding verses from files and C# for generating the PowerPoint. However, I found out that Windows are extremely slow at processing folders that contains thousand of files. Hence, I moved all those verses' files to SQL Express database, and also eliminate the use of Perl. Now, the application is basically C# app that utilized COM object for PowerPoint.

This project is half a year ago, why am I writing it now? I am going to start a new project that will manage church's song databases. Since most of the songs are currently saved in Powerpoint, I need to write a C# app that will go through all the files and convert it to plain text format.

The problem is when I tried to reuse my previous code, I got the following error:

The type 'Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoTriState' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'office, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'

Then, I went back to my reference site, and I followed all the instruction there step by step, but still got the same error. After googling around, I finally managed to solve the problem by re-installing the Microsoft Office XP primary interop assemblies (PIAs). Here is the link to download it. Hope this will help someone who encounters similar problem.

Richard's Birthday

Vina's brother, Richard, was having his birthday two weeks ago, and we went to Sun Sui Wah Richmond for the party :) Waow, the food is just amazing, I couldn't stop eating. Anyway, here are some of the photos from the event.

Liong, Hosea, Sundoro

Richard and Lovely Sister

Appetizer, cause hand is dirty and busy eating, no more pictures after this food :)

Main Dishes, taken before appetizer came :)

My Church

Last Saturday, while waiting for my girlfriend to finish worship team practice, I went out and took some pictures around the church. My church name is Indonesian Evangelical Church, in Indonesian, it is called GII (Gereja Injili Indonesia). Our service is on Sunday at 10.30 am, and our current pastor is Rev. Stefanus Theophilus. The church is located at:

IEC/GII Location

And here are some pictures around the church:

PHP in Nutshell

What a week ... I just finished coding my brother's company website. The site is developed using PHP which is totally new for me. I could just use some free e-commerce software, however, I want to get some experiences with PHP, as well as adding another ability to my programming skills.

I have experienced with ASP before, so it's actually not that bad to learn PHP. Previously, I learned ASP and finish my company content management system project in a week. This time, I also learned PHP and finish the website in a week.

Based on a week of experience :), I will say that I felt like I have more control with PHP compare to ASP. PHP is more tedious in some ways, because programming ASP in Visual Studio is really easy with all built-in controls. While for PHP, you need to understand more in order to start the programming. Anyway, I might be wrong since this is based on a week of experience.

One bad thing about PHP is that I still could not find an IDE that is as powerful and easy to use as Visual Studio. Following is the screen shot of the website. It's still simple, but it's very dynamic and easy to update. More features will be added in the next release, not sure when :)

Xtremespot Website

Fondue Party

Last Saturday, I am having fondue party with my friends at Pak Stef's house. It's interesting since this is my first time trying fondue chocolate. For those who don't know what it is, here is how it looks like:

Fondue Chocolate

It tastes pretty good even though I am not a big fans of chocolate. Following are some of the photos from the event:

The Fondue Machine

Honeydew and Cantaloupe

Orange, Banana, and Marshmallow

Strawberry and Grape

Complete Set

My gf: mmmm...chocolate

The Party Began

The Chef: Liong, Jessica, Jimmy

Catur Pak Stef: Roman vs. Egypt

For more photos, just go to: http://www.pbase.com/closari/fondue_party

History Week

Minggu ini, waktu break di kerjaan, saya menghabiskan lumayan banyak waktu untuk baca-baca sejarah/autobiography dari beberapa tokoh dunia yang lumayan kontroversi, seperti Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Adolf Hitler, dan beberapa lagi.

Saya memang tertarik untuk mempelajari sejarah-sejarang orang yang berpengaruh, mengamati bagaimana mereka berusaha untuk menaiki tangga politik. Memang banyak juga yang membuat kesalahan setelah mereka berada di atas, tetapi yang saya kagumi, adalah keuletan mereka. Mereka kerja keras dan coba mengambil semua kesempatan yang ada.

Hal yang sudah lama saya gumuli, kesuksesan tidaklah luput dari kerja keras, tetapi kerja keras bukanlah the only requirement. As for me, I also need God and friends and family besides me in order to move forward and to be successful.

Freezing Weather in Vancouver

In the last three days, the temperature here has reached below zero state. It's not normal for Vancouver to have this kind of weather. Road is very slippery due to black ice and snow. However, there the view of snowy land is gorgeous, I wish I bring my camera with me all the time. I will try my best to get some photos before it starts to melt and become mud.

Sekarang, lagi di tempat kerja, kerja sambil melamun, melamunin kesusahan yang bakalan saya dapat jika ingin membuka usaha sendiri. Saya sudah sangat pingin sih untuk buka usaha sendiri ketimbang kerja sama orang lain. Walau saya tahu tidak akan gampang, tapi it's worth a try and for sure it will give plenty of experiences. Ini perusahaan yang sekarang kita lagi bangun: www.coniques.com. We provide services for creating a custom multimedia presentation. Inilah bagian art dari saya, walau beberapa technical skills are surely useful dalam mempercepat proses kerja sebuah project.

Coniques Logo

Balik kerja, c ya.

New Year's Eve in GII

I just finished editing and cropping photos from our New Year's eve event at GII. It was a fun night, and the food is just awesome.

Awesome Food

Bubur saya untuk ronde 1

We also have games: tebak lagu, tebak wajah, dan tebak gerak. Pemenangnya ada kelompok 2 yang diwakili oleh Pak Stef.

Sang Pemenang

Berikut ini adalah beberapa foto dari acara ini, selengkapnya dapat di liat di: http://www.pbase.com/closari/new_year_eve_2006

New Year Toast

Acara ditutup dengan tukar kado

Good luck all in year 2007!!!

Tambahan Kerjaan

Kerjaan di kantor bertambah lagi. Saya harus design dan implement custom software buat file sinkronisasi dan security software buat prevent orang untuk mencuri software kita, something similar to MS Windows or Adobe software activation tools. Semuanya saya targetkan untuk selesai dalam waktu satu bulan. Semoga bisa terpenuhi :)

First Post

Ini adalah blog pertama saya, yang dibuat pas waktu saya masih dikantor, menunggu datangnya bus untuk pulang ke rumah. I am looking forward to put more stuffs here as my life goes by. C ya.

Vancouver from Lonsdale Quay