Places to Visit in South Korea

안녕하세요! Hello there.. Thank God, I had few occasions to do business trip in South Korea. My first business trip was in autumn 2010. I enjoyed three months there in a chilly weather. Then, my second one was a short biztrip in February 2011. It was only 10 days because the schedule was so tight.

Lucky me, in the midst of busy work there (in my company, working until midnight or working in weekend is an ordinary thing), I had several times taken time to travel around Korea, especially around Gyeonggi-do province. So in this blog post, I want to share places I have visited during my time in Korea, and I think those are recommended places to visit if someday you visit this country. I will share my short story in every place I ever visited in Korea. Here we go... *warning: this will be a long long blog post ^^*

AMUSEMENT PARK

1. Everland
Everland Resort (에버랜드 리조트) is the largest theme park in South Korea. It is located in Yongin city, about 40km from Suwon. I visited this amusement park at Chuseok (추석) holiday this year. FYI, Chuseok is a three-days holiday for Korean; actually it is a harvest festival. I went there on September with my college friends who are doing post grad study in Korea. Although it was flooded due to the heavy rain that day, surely it was an amazing experience. And who knows you will be trapped in flood in the developed country such as South Korea, haha :)).

At Everland (Halloween season) with KAIST-ers

For you, roller coaster lovers, there are some roller coasters there, including the T Express. One of the most must-do in Korea is riding T-Express, which is the steepest wooden roller coaster in the world!! 77 degrees, w00t!! :) Click here for Youtube video made by American tourist about T-Express.

Background: T-Express wooden roller coaster, Everland

Biztrip to South Korea

안녕하세요 ^_^

Thank God, currently here I am in Suwon, South Korea :). I've been here since Sep 2010, and will stay here until the end of Oct 2010 November 2010 due to a business trip. It feels so amazing here since it is my first time to be in Korea.

A short flashback, in 3rd week of Aug 2010 my supervisors moved me to another team, then informed me that my new team would did some projects in the Headquarter. I was a little bit surprised at that time because they told me so suddenly, while I was in preparation phase of DVD-P 2011 development with my previous coworkers. After considering a few things, I took that opportunity and now joined the BD-P software developer team.

About the new project, I feel so enthusiastic to get more knowledge and experiences. Currently I work with different product and different chipset compared with my previous projects. In embedded software development, different chipset means different source code, also which means it needs hard work to learn the new code architecture as quick as possible. And it is very nice for me to move from C to C++ programming, from Windows to Linux development environment. Yeah, so far so good :)

About life in South Korea, hm.. it is great! Korean people are so kind and hardworking, and many Korean girls are cute *haha.. I guess I must be watching SNSD and Wonder Girls' video clips too much XD*. The transportation in South Korea is absolutely better than in Indonesia, and so is the Internet connection. Food? Well, I think I need longer adaptation time here before I can say kimchi is so yummy :p hehe. In weekend, I usually take a trip around Gyeonggi-do. Perhaps you'll read an article about travelling in South Korea on the next blog post ;).

Just a short blog update for now. May I do my job well here, and may I can enjoy a vacation every weekend (when I wrote this post, I got an email from my boss to come to office tomorrow (on Sunday!) ... well, **it happens, life goes on! =)

Yeouido Park, South Korea

좋은 하루 되세요!

Android SDK for Offline Installation

Hi there. Long time not see you here :). This time I will talk about Android, a mobile operating system made by Google which is using modified Linux kernel. I knew this thing years ago, but I made Android apps just for fun, which only runnable in the emulator (Android gadget was not available yet at that time). Anyway, lately I get back my curiosity on Android development because of its good prospect (I think) and my brand new Android phone, hoho :). Hopefully in the following month I will publish some free Android apps for all of you :)


Let's get into the main point. If we want to develop Android-based application, at least we need to have:
  1. Android SDK and its components
  2. Eclipse
  3. ADT Plugin for Eclipse

Android Robot

We can download Android SDK at http://developer.android.com/sdk. Google provides Android SDK for 3 platforms: Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Just download it and extract the .zip or .tgz. After that, we can read the fine manual and start using AVD manager or "SDK Setup.exe" to perform online installation: download and install its components/packages, such as Android Platform, documentation, Google API, etc.

Anyway, if we want to perform offline installation, we need to download it components manually. Actually, Google doesn't provide any hard link for those, but we can use folder http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/ and file http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/repository.xml for reference. So, here it is a list of download link for some Android SDK components (for other version of API, check the xml file above).

After that, we just need to extract those components in the correct folders. See the following structure (for example, if you extract the SDK in the C:\android)
android/
|-- add-ons/
    |-- google_apis-8_r02/
        |-- docs/
        |-- images/
        |-- libs/
        |-- samples/
|-- docs/
|-- platforms/
    |-- android-2.2_r02-windows/
        |-- data/
        |-- images/
        |-- skins/
        |-- templates/
        |-- tools/
        |-- android.jar
|-- samples
|-- tools
|-- usb_driver
    |-- amd64
    |-- i386
|-- SDK Setup.exe
Next, download the ADT Plugin for Eclipse manually (for offline installation) from http://dl.google.com/android/ADT-0.9.7.zip (for version 0.9.7) and read the fine manual how to use it in Eclipse. In the end, take a look at HelloWorld application to see if your installation works perfectly. Happy coding! ;)

How To Sync Google Contacts with SyncML

Some days ago I lost all my cell phone contacts due to silly factory reset. Unfortunately, I did backup my contacts 1.5 years ago. Yeah, it's been so long time, but it's better than no backup at all, rite. To prevent this silly thing happen in the future, I should backup my cell phone contacts regularly.

There are two major ways to do backup your cell phone contacts: offline backup and online backup. Offline backup means you store your phone contacts in a file located on your phone memory card or your PC. Your cell phone usually has this feature (to backup contacts to memory card). Otherwise, you can use cable data (or bluetooth) and your phone PC suite to sync your contacts to your PC.

Another method is online backup. You can store your phone contacts in the cloud. I prefer Google Contacts for this purpose, because I use Gmail for my primary email. Actually Google has a service called Google Sync, which is using Exchange ActiveSync technology, that implemented in recent smartphones, such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile phone, Nokia S60. For "not-so-classic phones" user, like me with my LG KU380, you can still use Google Sync service by using SyncML, which is platform-independent information synchronization standard. Here I will describe how to sync your cell phone contacts (in my case: LG KU380) with Google Contacts using SyncML:
  1. LG KU380
    On your cellphone, go to menu [0] Connectivity → [2] Server sync → [3] Server synch. centre. You may find it on another menu if you use different phone.
  2. Add new server synch. centre
    • Profile name: Google
    • Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml
    • Username: <your gmail address>
    • Password: <your gmail password>
    • Contacts: On
    • Contact name: contacts
    • Sync type: Normal
    • Access point: <your cellphone APN>
  3. Prepare your Google Contacts, especialy "My Contacts" group, because only this group that will be synchronized with your cell phone contacts.
  4. Synchronize your contacts
    • Go to menu [8] Contacts → [8] Settings → [2] Synchronize contact, or
    • Go to menu [0] Connectivity → [2] Server sync → [1] Connect
Voilà! Your phone contacts is synchronized with Google contacts. Now you can add/update/delete contacts through your cellphone or Google, then sync it later. If your cell phone doesn't have feature for autosync, then you should sync it manually and regularly.
    Just my another $0.02. Cheers! :)

    3 Idiots

    Aal izz well.. aal izz well..

    3 IDIOTS. Inilah film India (Bolywood) terbaik yang pernah ada. Film bergenre drama komedi ini sudah memenangkan berbagai penghargaan di tanah airnya, selain memecahkan rekor sebagai film India yang meraih pendapatan tertinggi. Oya, ini mungkin film India kedua yang pernah saya tonton sampai selesai ini (setelah "Slumdog Millionaire"). Jarang-jarang lho saya nonton film India.. 😜

    "3 Idiots" bercerita tentang persahabatan 3 mahasiswa teknik (Rancho, Farhan, Raju) di sebuah kampus terbaik di India. Rancho adalah seorang anak jenius dari keluarga kaya yang betul-betul menyukai teknik mesin. Farhan adalah mahasiswa salah jurusan, yang sebenarnya menggemari fotografi, tapi terpaksa kuliah di teknik mesin karena dipaksa orang tuanya. Sementara itu, Raju adalah seorang dari keluarga miskin dan ia sangat terbeban karena menjadi satu-satunya harapan di keluarganya. Ketiganya dikonfrontasikan dengan dekan mereka, Prof. ViruS, yang terkenal dengan gaya pendidikannya yang kolot, kaku, dan semena-mena, hingga pada suatu saat Raju pun melakukan percobaan bunuh diri karena mengalami tekanan batin.



    Ada banyak adegan yang mengena di film ini: saat Farhan memohon kepada orang tuanya untuk menekuni dunia fotografi setelah lulus kuliah, saat mereka bertiga memilih untuk menginap di rumah sakit (karena ayah Raju sedang sekarat) daripada belajar untuk ujian keesokan harinya, dan masih banyak lagi adegan lainnya yang lucu-lucu, seperti saat Rancho menolak untuk diospek lalu kabur dan menyetrum seniornya dengan medium air kencing. "Salt water is a great conductor of electricity. 8th standard physics. We all studied it; he applied it!" 😹😹

    "3 Idiots" juga menyuguhkan berbagai adegan wajib film India, antara lain: joged India (pas bagian ini mending tidur aja :p), ada yang bikin ketawa dan nangis, ada tokoh yang mati, ada satu wanita cantik (pasangan tokoh utama) yang memiliki kedekatan dengan tokoh antagonis, dsb. Tapi, overall, ada banyak pesan moral yang bisa diambil dari film ini, baik untuk pelajar, guru, maupun orang tua. Sebuah film yang sayang sekali kalau dilewatkan (mumpung ada di bioskop). Saya beri rating 9.5/10 untuk film ini! Very recommended!

    Don't run behind success. Follow behind excellence, and success will come all way behind you.

    Libur Akhir Tahun: Solo & Jogja

    "Vacation is what you take when you can't take what you've been taking any longer."

    Setelah beberapa bulan bekerja ekstra, akhirnya liburan akhir tahun yang ditunggu-tunggu tiba. Beruntung, saya mendapat libur dari kantor selama 4 hari kerja, sehingga totalnya saya bisa beristirahat selama 10 hari, 25/12 - 3/1. Pada kesempatan itu saya sempatkan diri untuk berlibur selama 3 hari di Solo dan Jogja, tempat kelahiran dan kota di mana saya menghabiskan masa kecil.

    Stasiun Bandung

    Berangkat seorang diri dari stasiun Bandung (Senin 28/12) jam 8 malam, saya menghabiskan malam itu di dalam kereta api Lodaya. Di masa liburan akhir tahun seperti itu, harga tiket ternyata sangat tergantung hari keberangkatan, tidak peduli itu untuk kelas dan jurusan yang sama. Sembilan jam kemudian tibalah saya di stasiun Solo Balapan.. jadi inget lagunya Didi Kempotning setasiun balapan, kuto solo sing dadi kenangan, kowe karo akuuu.. halah.. XD

    (Selasa 29/12) Setelah makan nasi liwet khas Solo, kami, saya dan dua saudara yang menjemput saya, langsung beranjak ke rumah Oma, bersilaturahmi dengannya selama beberapa jam, kemudian dilanjutkan dengan nyekar ke makam Eyang. Setelah itu, saatnya berkuliner makan siang dengan Tahu Kupat, makanan khas Solo lainnya.

    Tahu Kupat