The Wahyudiharto's Blog

Happy new year!!! I posted this article when my watch shows exactly at 12.00. Anyway, Want to look out for cheap HTPC which can replace your hi-fi home theater, Set Top Box, Digital Video Recording, PlayStation and much more functionality on a single machine? This article will explain you more about my experience on this. One thing for sure that you need a mini PC which has slim and sleek design so that it will fit best on your cupboard family room, also considering the physically style to increase room aesthetic and convince that the console box is more than a hi-fi system. For this objectives you have 2 options; you can search for a complete mini built-up PC or you can build the PC from scratch with barebone case. Both choices are a kind of hard job since you have to considering some points which is (1) VGA capability, (2) sound card enrichment and (3) others things which can make the PC easy on operate (as easy as you can play your hi-fi system).

VGA Capability
Unfortunately, many built-up PC comes with integrated VGA chipset that shared up memory from RAM and it has under average capability. Shared up means that it would consume a great number of RAM and off course it will decrease the amount of RAM that the PC has, the impact is slower performance. For me, a standardize VGA of HTPC must fulfill some specific criteria which are; (1) it should have TV output, (2) low voltage operating – for those who sensitive with electricity bill and (3) contain valuable chipset – so that it can decode DVD smoothly and good enough to play 3D games – Nvidia or ATI is a great choice. So, it’s strongly recommended that you have to supply an additional VGA card based on your appropriate motherboard. Note that you also have to aware with the power voltage needs and how much the VGA will consume it. Its related one to others; more powerful your VGA is, more voltage it needs from the CPU power supply. In my experience, since I still have an active NVidia AGP GeForce 4, so that I planning to find out a Pentium 4 based CPU and motherboard which compatible to the VGA.

Soundcard
Currently, a home theater/hi-fi sold with at least 4.1 sound speaker systems. If your soundcard PC doesn’t have those or you only have 2 or 2.1 speaker system, then get ready to hear joke comes out from your friends. Moreover, hearing music or watching DVD movies or playing games doesn’t seems more pleasant with that, and clearly, you will loose the surround experience. Forget about it if you have 4.1 speakers, but I suggest you to upgrade the soundcard which has at least two output lines (front and rear speaker). Don’t feel troubled with a brand new soundcard, since a second-hand is already enough (as long as it doesn’t break). Fortunately, on current experiment, I still have a C-Media soundcard with different front and rear speaker channel. This configuration is good enough to hear sounds out from speaker (even I only have 2.1 speaker system, I used it as front sound and using both speakers from my TV as rear sound). Maybe I’ll buy a real one in short. Just hope me to do that.

Others
This seems quite difficult to explain since it relatively to other persons: first, it’s a benefit of yours if your PC has a remote control. See, you don’t want too disturbed with the use of wired keyboard or mouse during DVD movie playback or playing games, do you? Also, it will be great if your PC equipped with Bluetooth so that the file transfer from other media will become more easily. To playing around with games, I suggest a gamepad to take control of whole activities. Lots of above consideration will bring your decision to choose whether you need to buy a built-up PC or create a new one. So think before you buy.

So, What are the Built-up Alternatives?
There are a lot of alternative machines you can choose to build your HTPC. Most of them are based with Pentium 4 – sorry, I don’t recommend netbook desktop such as ASUS deskbook or MSI nettop which based on Atom processor since lots of limitation covered on it. Here below I explained (including CPU price only) what may best fit to your room and needs:




Above alternative is only some examples, there are also others brand circulate out up the store such as Samsung, LG, NEC or else. You may find another better complete second hand CPU with reasonable price, more functionality and suitable for your needs. Or you think better to build your self a CPU with weird computer case?

My Experiments
Anyway, after tired turning around all day long on some computer mall, finally I was interesting on Samsung built-up brand. You know that Samsung had released a special purposed PC dedicated to home multimedia entertainment. They called it with Magic Station. This Magic Station actually produced with many series & style (mini tower and slim desktop), but somehow – CMIIW - it was officially introduced only in Korea. If you are considering one of these units, be sure you know which version you are getting. My particular model is MT20 series – a slim desktop style – which is the low profile version. The MT20 is powered by Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz with 512 DDRAM, DVD Combo and 40 GB hard drive. All of this cost only US$79.



For second hand CPU, the price is worthless and I’m so pleased with it. Why? Because:
(1) The slim desktop case with cute style is exactly fit on my cupboard
(2) There’s 3 PCI and AGP slot available, so that I can plugged in my AGP card and soundcard on it



(3) There also attractive digital led in front panel showing CPU activity such as power indicator, hard drive, CD player, processor speed and more



(4) On hand soft buttons dedicated to multimedia accessibility under the led panel, helping to play, pause, stop, increasing or decreasing volume during DVD playback or other multimedia activity



(5) The CPU can stand for 2 boot mode; computer and CD player. There’s a switch (at left of the led panel) to turn on CD player mode without activating the operating system



(6) Various digital output port available in front panel, contains 1 USB, speaker line out-in, IEEE 1394, S-Video and video in
(7) It also have memory stick reader on the left bottom of front panel.
(8) The MT20 also fully equipped with eHome infrared transceiver built-in hardware, but I didn’t get the remote control when I buy this unit.



Even though, I can used a Philips DVD remote control to operate the CPU as well as Media Center remote. I though it doesn’t compatible with the frequency but it does. For this purposed, I used a free software named HIP (Human Interface Programming), a better one than Girder, in my opinion.



Maybe I’ll reviewed these both remote control and HIP more deep on the next articles. By the way, I programmed it so that it has the same functionality as common DVD player remote control. To help maintenance and operate this computer, I also attached it with wired mouse and numpad, since there’s no keyboard plugged in.



Anyway, for wide gaming activities, I also attach my HTPC with USB double shock gamepad. Now, it seems my system similar to PlayStation but with better 4.1 sound channels.



Different from my previous experiment with Windows Media Center, now my MT20 installed with Windows XP SP2 Professional Edition. Why XP SP2? The answer is for faster booting. If you want your HTPC look like a DVD player, try to install PowerDVD 9 and let the software started in cinema mode automatically during Windows start up. And here we go, the HTPC now ready to serve us.



Anyway, I don’t know how long does the MT20 will still stand for me since it’s kinda difficult to look out for the spare parts. But if it will broke soon, nothing I buy except a brand new of Magic Station from Samsung. Thrust me…

Labels: HTPC, Modifikasi PC, Multimedia, My Share, PC Modding, Windows Media Center

Anyone knows that updating such that distributed application is a boring activity, especially for those who have tons of PCs. It can make peoples from IT department wasting their times to upgrading client application. Moreover, looking forward email contain application attachment from software vendor also can bring much troubles for wide company and I mean this is an old-fashioned way. Why don’t you just suggest the vendor to change the update method with an online way? But for this, you need to make sure that the client PCs has internet capability so that you only have to tell the operator to download the update.

The update method is very simple and I did this to one of my client across Jakarta. It’s easy for them to update and me as the software developer to publish the application. Any latest update, I just store it to my domain immediately. How to do that? Look at image simulate the process below:



The process is quite plain; just tell the application to generate a link in any latest version available from web server, but simply ignore the priors so that it will only show the fresh version link. Got that? Ok, let say that you have an online web server named abc.com. Next, prepare a single web based script to generate a link if there is any newest version on hand (on this example, I used PHP script and named it with app.php). Now, the question is, how the scripts can detect and compare between current version and others up-to-date? Well, it’s as simply as that app.php needs to catch what the current application version is. This means that you need to retrieve current version number from the program and make it as a parameter when the URL has navigated to app.php. In case I used Borland Delphi for this test, so I drop-in a TWebBrowser component in a form and let it navigate to http://www.abc.com/app.php?v=1. The "1" number refers to current version application.

…
const InfoNum = 10;
InfoStr: array[1..InfoNum] of string = ('CompanyName', 'FileDescription', 'FileVersion', 'InternalName', 'LegalCopyright', 'LegalTradeMarks', 'OriginalFileName', 'ProductName', 'ProductVersion', 'Comments');
…

procedure TFAbout.FormShow(Sender: TObject);
var S: string;
n, Len, i: DWORD;
Buf: PChar;
Value: PChar;
Begin
S := Application.ExeName;
n := GetFileVersionInfoSize(PChar(S), n);
if n > 0 then
begin
Buf := AllocMem(n);
Memo1.Lines.Add('VersionInfoSize = ' + IntToStr(n));
GetFileVersionInfo(PChar(S), 0, n, Buf);
for i := 3 to 3 do
if VerQueryValue(Buf, PChar('StringFileInfo\040904E4\' + InfoStr[i]), Pointer(Value), Len) then
WebBrowser1.Navigate('http://www.abc.com/app.php?v='+Value);
FreeMem(Buf, n);
end;
end;

Done with client application, now it turns to PHP script app.php. The app.php consist of comparison between both current version (delivered from client via TWebBrowser component) and others up-to-date version. Take a look at completely app.php below:

<?
$v=$_GET['v'];
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Download Update</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body bgcolor="#E4E4E4">
<em>Current Version: <?=$v?></em><strong><br>Download Update</strong>:<br>

<?php
$wrong=0;
$right=0;
if ($handle = opendir('.')) {
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
if ($file != "." && $file != ".." && $file !="app.php") {
$file_zip = substr($file,0,1);
$file_tmp = substr($file,1,1);
if ($file_tmp>$v && $file_zip=="v")
{
$right++;
echo "&#8226; <a href='$file'>$file_tmp</a> (" . filesize($file)/1000 . " Kb)<br>";
}
else $wrong++;
}
}
closedir($handle);
}
if ($right==0 && $wrong>0) echo "-"; // shows �-� if no update available
?>
</body>
</html>

Store both of app.php and latest zipped application (v2.zip on sample) in a same path over the web server. At last, try to do a test.



Voila, those little scripts now works helping IT department from updating application task over the internet and buried the ancient way. The above scripts can be expanded to do various things for your Win32 application. Good day and don’t forget to leave your comment here.

Labels: Delphi, My Share, My Tricks, My Works, PHP, Programming, Web Programming

AdBrite is one of international online advertising services similar to Google AdSense. If you intended to work on it, both services can bring you additional reasonable revenue gained from internet. Well, this current article will share you a short review about my first experience on incoming cheque from my AdBrite account (which was registered since 2007 – the same year as my Google Adsense account was created).

After running this both online ads within the same year (2007) until now, at least I can say that my AdBrite revenue is 1/10 lower than my Google AdSense. Still, this comparison rate is relatively to others, but in fact, this is all I’ve got. I’m not telling more detailed about targeted ads on a page or other aspects involved to it but one thing for sure that I used this service only on this blog. Note that I just want to proof that this is payable to Indonesian publishers & will cause benefit like any else online advertising.



Regarding to the terms and conditions – unfortunately - AdBrite support cheque payment method only. For the first time – as usual – I need to make sure that my own cheque can be cleared to local bank. In order to do so, as possible as my balance reach the minimal limit, as soon as I have to make a withdrawal. Here’s below the chronologies:

May 1: AdBrite processing my balance automatically after it reaches minimal amount limit
May 6: Post stamp the mail goes from California
May, 13: The cheque delivered to my office
June, 2: Withdrawal transaction started made to BNI
July, 9: The money was collectable on my account on BNI

From occurrence above, I can conclude that AdBrite has sent the cheque faster than Google AdSense (read my first revenue from Google cheque article on this link). It only took 6 days for AdBrite mailed the cheque after the system detected the minimal amount limit. The mail also arrived after 7 days delivery from California to Jakarta, and this is what I called instant service! (a very fast service equal to Google AdSense delivered by mail, but not with Western Union)



Like to what I said before, this is only my first AdBrite payment test. So that I only need my first US$ 101 from AdBrite. Please consider that this amount was collected over 2 years right up on this single blog (since November 2007), and however, this is what I called a mess! (a very unsuitable environment appealed to Google AdSense, at least it happened to me).



So, what the heck is WELLS FARGO BANK? Just like something weird bank name. But, from the internet I found that this is a European Union bank headquartered in Ireland. At first, I so doubt that I can make withdrawal collection from local bank since I didn’t recognize this name ever! But then, thanks to International Collection Clearing staff at BNI which calmed me that this will withdraw able.



After waiting for 5 weeks - from June 2 to July 9 - finally the money was succeeded transferred to my account on BNI. I checked from BNI Internet Banking & there’s a record tracked to my AdBrite collection transaction. Look that I only receipt Rp 472.350 for US$ 101 withdrawal. By the rate of exchange Rp 10.080 per US$1 on July 9, it’s means that BNI charge for this took US$ 54 (similar to Rp 545.730)! I don’t know about bank correspondences charge rate but as I remember for previous transaction, this is a “special gift” for me. For god sake, but I enjoy it.

Labels: AdBrite, My Share

It’s nice to hear that Google Adsense officially introduced Western Union as a new payment method in Indonesia on early February 2009. For me, this payment option is quick, easy, and free compared to conventional checks delivery, as we don’t have to wait checks to arrive, passing couple weeks verified from local bank to US Citibank & eliminating fee to clear it. On this chance, I’d like to share you my first experience about cashing Google Adsense money with Western Union. This is my several times earning money from Google, but this time, it’s only need less than 20 minutes to process! With checks? It could be more than 2 months…

First, let you sure that you ready to receive a payment issued from Google. You might check it out from Earnings and Payments Summary on your account.



Once you have it, track the details link to see the MTCN code (MTCN = Money Transfer Control Number).



For more specific explanation, see the Statement of Earnings. I suggest that it would be good if you print these both information out to papers before going to Western Union agent.



Next, prepare to go to agent & don’t forget to carry your own valid citizens ID (KTP = Kartu Tanda Penduduk). For this test, I using agent in one of PERUM Pegadaian branch office on Jakarta. At the agent, ask for To receive money form & fill those 4 information which is receiver first name, sender first name, MTCN at the right of the form & the amount of money to receive at the bottom. Also, sign the form.



If nothing goes wrong, then final receipt will be issued in a minute together with money in local currency as a result from amount of USD money times current local Western Union exchange rate. No extra surcharges spend neither revenue stamps cost required for it.



Although Western Union exchange rate is lower than bank (approximately Rp 200 per USD), but it’s still more reliable to cash it in 20 minutes than wasting cost needed to wait & clear the checks at the bank in 2 months. Do you prefer Western Union?

Labels: Google Adsense, My Share

What’s this article mean? It’s nothing except playing around with Vista Live released by CHIP international magazine (If you like, here is a link to download via torrent). Even that it seems dated, but I just interesting & want to know what’s behind on it. Well, it’s another live CD tool similar to XP Live build from Bart PE (I wrote an article about it sometimes ago). Anyway, it’s easiest to boot with BIOS pointing to CD in usual way, but this time I’d like to test to boot it with SBM.

SBM (Smart Boot Manager) tool let any bootable media to boot with it. However - on this case - it required UNIX to start. In other way, it’s suitable to work with GRUB as add-in module which helping out booting any bootable media such as USB flash disk or CD (e.g. your old computer which hasn’t any capability to boot from BIOS).

First of all, download SBM files to your computer right on this link (25 Kb contains 2 files ~ memdisk.bin & sbootmgr.dsk). To install it, boot to your Linux then copy both files to any directories you prefer – here in my experience with Fedora 7 - I made directory /boot/grub/sbm & copied the files into it. Then edit grub.conf under /boot/grub directory, add an appropriate line so that GRUB will read it & show as new boot menu. Here below is my example:

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
…
# Add these 3 lines at the end of file
title SBM
root(hd0,0)
kernel /boot/grub/sbm/memdisk.bin
initrd /boot/grub/sbm/sbootmgr.dsk

After editing grub.conf, save it & make a reboot. Now, GRUB menu will add a new boot menu as same as image below.



Try to insert the CD (Vista Live) then select Boot Manager menu. A new window SBM will show up & it will list automatically which media that able to boot from.



Select CDROM & press enter. The SBM succeeded to load & read the CD. Please be patient while the Live CD loaded successfully.



In couple minutes, a new splash welcome page will show up. Just like the name, this CD purposed for diagnostic tools & bootable windows enhanced with anti spyware, password checker, anti virus & also data recovery.



After it loaded successfully, it will display a desktop similar to Windows XP completed with simple file manager & group of tools under start menu.



As it automatically detect & recognized NTFS partition, so I recommend this tools as 2nd live CD after Windows XP in Stick to rescue your NTFS based OS (such as 2000, XP, Vista or Vienna which known as 7). Somehow, I still wondering, why they give name with Vista Live while the environment OS much similar to XP than Vista?

Labels: Live CD, My Share, Windows Vista

Did you know that one of greatest cost on PC modding is a computer case? Except for those who have lots of money, expends on it could similar to a complete AMD Phenom or Intel Quad Core PC. Although that this only PC case price now is start from US$21 (Rp. 250.000) until US$320 (Rp. 3.824.000), but here in my situation the problem is not that high case price. As I still have an oldies PC (powered by Pentium III 750MHz) which I purposed as Media Center in living room, but anyway I actually intended to make it as a barebone looked like, without changing any of new hardware absolutely. Just try to re-substitute it “skin”.

The problem is that my motherboard which is ASUS CUSL2-C isn’t a Micro ATX based form factor which has dimension of 20.8cm x 30.5cm. So that I can’t see any chance to place it on any barebone case. But then I got inspired from somewhere on internet - which I forgot the URL was - where I can think any possibility to make a PC frame from PVC tube.

I then immediately take off & strip all the devices attached from old case. From this, I started to create an optimal layout for new case & finally I found this one below :







After composing layout, I have to calculate the material needed & measured the dimension in order to define length, width & height the PVC slices. Here below is a complete list of the material:




Fortunately that I have stock parts #3, #4 & #5, so I didn’t know how much prices expense exactly for that. You can check all of the parts to home depot near to you or check from this link. Anyway, based on layout I then slice the PVC into various small parts which was 16’s of 6cm, 5’s of 17cm, 2’s of 9cm & 4’s of 10cm.



After sawed the PVC’s, I begin to bunch the parts to make a base frame for PSU, hard drive & DVD place.



Next stage plan is to make 2nd frame for motherboard & the rest of devices. Don’t forget to neat the cables & fixing power & reset switch orderly.











From this point, you have completed about 75% of the total progress. The last is to bunched the wrench case so that it will tight fastened.









It’s done & now the time to test it. Apply all of additional devices attached to CPU & let it burning in any way to make sure that the case is now ready to show off.

Labels: Casing, Modifikasi PC, My Share, My Tricks, PC Modding, Windows Media Center