anhe51’s blog

I buy gas for my motorcycle every Tuesday and last time I went to the gas station, it shocked me with the price. I never felt the rapid increasing price like this. I usually buy a 92 octane gasoline (Premium Grade) and it has reached Rp. 10.600 per liter (about US$ 4.39 per gallon), last two weeks I bought it in Rp. 10.300 per liter (about US$ 4.26 per gallon). Six months ago I could bought it in price Rp. 8.600 per liter (about US$ 3.56 per gallon).

I could do some saving if I use the octane 88 (Regular Grade) one which price is Rp. 6.000 per liter (about US$ 2.48 per gallon) instead of the 92 octane one. Well all I can say is it just a matter of habit. When you usually fill up your tank with a higher octane there are a lot of consideration if you want to downgrade your gas.

But I’m not all alone, other countries has the same condition with me in Indonesia. For example :

(more…)

Before we go to the topic, I just want to say that this post doesn’t suggest you to be ready to use KDE 4, but in contrary I just want to review and give my opinion about the brand new KDE 4.

If you are the Linux user, before you log in you can choose the type of sessions (except if you are Ubuntu users), there are Gnome, KDE and XFCE. Every users has their own preferences, I don’t know about Indonesia, but as long as I know that American users prefer more to Gnome and European users prefer more to KDE since Gnome is from US and KDE is from Germany.

I used to be preferred more to Gnome because of it’s more customizable, but since KDE 4 launched and released officially, it has attracted me with the widgets and it’s Vista-like layout. So I could show it to my friends and prove that Linux is cool!

I’m running Kubuntu 8.04 (not an official version but a community development version with KDE 4 inside) at my laptop and OpenSuse 11 at my desktop. Then I found several problems in using KDE 4 :
(more…)

Still related with my previous post about insurance, if I had talked about the threats that insurance companies must face, now I’m going to talk about the insurance companies itself.

There are several problems that Indonesian Insurance Company have, those are :

Over Supply

The insurance market in Indonesia actually is not as big as expected. So there is an oversupply in the market. There are 40 life insurance companies and 92 common insurance companies in Indonesia, but none of them have significant market share, even with the market leader. AIG Life (life insurance) only have 13.76% and Jasindo (common insurance) only have 13.3% (2005 data).
(more…)

I’ve told you that this is my second blog, because I never expect that UI would provide a blog for each student.

Actually this is my first time of using Wordpress, i have practiced blogging but at the Blogspot, and I’m having some difficulties to do the same thing as I did on my first blog. I’m talking about how far you could customize your blog, adding the widgets, embed some videos and other things you could do to differentiate your blog from the others.

Honestly I was almost desperate to decorate this blog in order to have a better look. This blog is lack of widget, and the way you could add the widgets is totally different from Blogspot. Then I realized that I couldn’t add any widget on my own.

Is that because of the Wordpress? At first I do think so. But if the Wordpress doesn’t have the customizing ability like the others, it would be at one big leap behind the others at the blogging service war. Then, why Wordpress bloggers whom I visited still could install the widgets (including the ones that I want)?

The reason why they could and I couldn’t is because I’m using the Wordpress MU, I go browse for some information, and here’s what I got :

Wordpress Multi-User (Wordpress MU) is a fork of WordPress created to allow simultaneous blogs to exist within one installation. Wordpress MU makes it possible for anyone with a website to host their own blogging community, control, and moderate all the blogs from a single dashboard. Wordpress MU adds eight new data tables for each blog.

–
Source from Wikipedia

So, it means that I’m not using an ordinary Wordpress, and all the things related with widgets, java scripts and HTML scripts of this blog are depend on the Administrator, means I don’t have a privilege to fully customize my blog.

Well. I”ll keep on trying to make this blog as beautiful as I could. All I need to do is to find another way.

–
Anton Hermansyah

They are the big three distros in the Linux World

OpenSuse

OpenSuse is a powerful distro, originally it came from Germany, but later the company bought by Novell which is an US company. It’s a very stable but conservative distro, they would not include the program if that’s not stable yet, For Example they still put RealPlayer^tm 10 rather than RealPlayer^tm 11 (and it almost one year after the 11^th released).

• Strength
It’s very strong and stable distro, rarely crashed (unless you try to install something which not compatible). The YAST control panel is an easy and user friendly configuration tool
• Weakness

Yet it’s stable but it’s out of date (or yet it’s out of date but it’s stable, i’m confused), you can’t enjoy the latest version of the program as soon as another distro, and it’s rather difficult to hack this distro, because the alternative package is difficult to find.

Fedora

A free operating system from the famous distro : RedHat. Fedora offers You an easy to customize system. A lot of RPM available everywhere, and it’s easy to install (like .exe programs).

(more…)

Indonesia is a potential market for insurance, since It has billions of people and relative high growing economics. But why the insurance doesn’t grow as it expected.

I browse to the net, follow the lecturing, done some discussions with my friends, and here are the reasons that I got :

Religion and Belief

Indonesian society has strong belief and religion, they believe if the disaster get on them, it’s because of their failure or disobeying the God, if you get insured means that you don’t believe on God’s protection, and it’s a taboo to talk about disaster (it would be difficult to explain the insurance to them)

Education

They felt they have educated enough about insurance, and all they know in generally is : “If I don’t have a trouble, I don’t get the money. My life is almost trouble free, why should I get insured? It’s just wasting my money!”

Financial Perspective

Prior to previous reason, they haven’t realize insurance as an investment, “If you want to invest, why don’t you buy a house, land or jewelry?” Those still a good investment methods, but not liquid enough.

Financial Condition

It’s all about the ability and the stability. We must have the ability to buy the policy and stabilty to pay the premiums consistently. I’m not sure about the number, but I think many Indonesians don’t have either the ability, stability or both. As long as I see, the insurance buyers in Indonesia are from the middle up economic level and forth, in fact there are many Indonesian people living below the poverty line.

–
Anton Hermansyah

Well, first I just know that UI has provided each of students a blog. I’m confused, what I should write at this blog. Because I had my own yet it’s in Bahasa Indonesia. I have write much there, so what should I do to differentiate this blog from my another Blog?

First, I decided to write the blog in English, about the topic? Well I think about that later.

Just give me a suggestion and I’ll start to write something good in this blog

–
Anton Hermansyah

Welcome to Blog Mahasiswa UI. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!