A quick help for people who are developing GWT (Google Web Toolkit) applications on Mac OS X. GWT uses Safari for its development hosted mode. When I tried to ran it today, I got the following error message: "GWT quit unexpectedly while using the libgwt-ll.jnilib plug-in".

The problem has been fixed but will not be pushed until Safari 4.0.5. The bug report can be found here.

And a solution is posted in the comments.

Hope this helps out anyone experiencing this problem. It is not your code! I also thought that it was due to a coding error. in fact many thought so.

The European Union has just ratified a new law that makes the Internet fall under the list of services considered to be of "general interest". The law that governs this list of services (which includes water and electricity) protects residents from being cut off by the supplier. Every EU resident is guaranteed by law to have use of basic services like electricity, water and since today also Internet. Here's the article (in Dutch).

In contrast today, here in our home in Jakarta, our water well dried up. The water table level has dropped below the point our pump can reach and we will have to make our well deeper. We live in a suburb of jakarta, about 16km from the center. Yet there is no public service water network to which we can connect. Let me list some of the things that we use water for, because it's something I'm so used to being available and then suddenly you realize what you can't do: wash (clothes, house and yourself of course), provide a living environment for fish (pond), use the toilet in hygienic way, ...

Digging a deeper well is not really a long term solution and it has some dangers of its own, as this article dating from 2007 warns about.

Another serious problem in Jakarta is power. This week we started off with a power outage that lasted 7 hours in the night from Monday to Tuesday. Try to keep your food fresh (refrigerators have to be < 8 degrees C constantly to keep food healthy to eat). And try to sleep without air conditioning or a fan in a tropical climate.

Then they cut of the power for another 4 hours on Tuesday afternoon. Totalling a power outage of 11 hours in a 24 hour time frame. What's worse, the state owned electricty company PLN said Jakarta will suffer blackouts "indefinitely" because of "budget constraints" as explained in this article.

I don't know where this is going. I used to be optimistic about life here, but I don't see any signals that anyone is busy trying to improve things. Legislators of this country fall asleep in the general assembly instead of passing laws. Corruption makes money disappear into the pockets of filthy rich people instead of being used for developing much needed infrastructure. Where is the waste / water recycling plan? Where is the water distribution development plan? What is done about the electricity shortage? Building new power plants? Ha! From what I can tell from the article's I've read regarding this matter, it's not that there is not enough power being generated; it's the distribution network that cannot handle the amount of power that needs to be distributed.

A few months ago some transformers blew up in electricity substations. Overheated (probably because of aged equipment and bad maintenance. Have you seen some of the buses that drive around in the city??) because they were running at 90% capacity (PLN's safety standard is 65% capacity). Note to the people in charge: When you plan to build new power plants, make sure your current network can support the added capacity. In other words, look at the whole picture.

This place needs a strong ruler, someone with a "no bullshit" attitude and legislators who are litterate. Politicians should be academics, not army generals or businessmen.

Thus far my rant and personal opinion on things.

Watched The Big Lebowski again the other day, ah what a movie. Legendary.

I checked out the original motion picture soundtrack and I was very disappointed. Two songs I think they should have defintely included:

• CCR - Looking out my back door
• Elvis Presley - Viva Las Vegas

I'm testing out the new blog engine code for this site. I've updated Rails to version 2.3.3 and added some improvements. It's now possible to find older posts using the tag cloud on the side. This still needs some work though.

I've also updated the syndication feed. Switched to an atom feed now.

Haven't updated this blog in a long time. In fact it was so long ago I didn't even remember my password.

I want to get in touch with the Ruby / rails community in Indonesia / Jakarta. Maybe I should have done this much earlier because one simple search on Google brought me to World of Ruby Indonesia, a blog maintained by a guy called Arie.

Too bad that Jakarta.rb, an event for Ruby enthusiasts in Jakarta, took place less than a week ago. I missed it!

Anyway it's great to hook up with people who share the same interests.

There's an Indonesian Ruby group on Facebook as well, called the "Indonesia Ruby Society".

Not to self:

Need to fix some stuff on this blog app. Pagination for one thing. And I should update the content on this site anyway.

A few weeks ago we started on a new project, klasifikasia.com . It's a classifieds portal for Indonesia. We launched it yesterday.

There's two reasons behind it. First we wanted to get some extra rails practice and attempt to draw some attention to ourselves here in Jakarta.
Hopefully someone might get interested in hiring us for a project.

Secondly we think there is room for another classifieds portal in Indonesia. Granted, there are a few already. But they're all quite chaotic.
We're trying to keep the interface as clean as possible. Also we're working on integrating the site with as many technologies as possible.

We'll be offering an API and build mobile integration.

My friend Michael Hendrickx, who is the main developer behind places.ae has recently implemented a Nokia S60 widget for places.ae.
This is something we will be integrating for klasifikasia.com as well.

Nokia widgets are pretty cool, they're not really fully fledged programs but they contain the static content of your website on the mobile device and allow you to have it load content information dynamically without starting your phone's browser.

More advanced features of the Nokia WRT widgets will be available in the future, like access to device features like GPS
(which is currently in Symbian 3rd edition only available to native C++ coded programs).

Another major feature we'll integrate on klasifikasia.com is a translation into Bahasa Indonesia. This will hopefully be an incentive to more people to use our service.