Batista Harahap

Over the years, a lot has changed since I first venture into making opportunities available for myself. Throughout most of the years, there is only 1 thing staying consistent: hunger. Call it a hunger to better myself in more ways mostly personally which impacts directly into my professional life. My first intro to programming was as early as my first instinct to get to know how to speak English. Subtitles in past TV serials helped me a lot and my Grandparents, they talked in English sometimes but mostly left me to figure it out on my own. [Read More]

For the last few months, I’ve been coding in Python relentlessly. It’s new to me and it just makes sense. The one thing I really like is keeping codes and logic simple. You can comment Python’s OOP implementation but then again, everyone got a favourite right? Most of the servers I handle everyday are CentOS 6.x distros with Python 2.6.x preinstalled by the system. You DON’T wanna upgrade it through yum or any other method, you will break the whole system. [Read More]

I have been having questions every time I am served ads by Google Adsense for the last few months. With Adsense, essentially everywhere you go on the Internet, you are followed by it. Almost any website with ads I visited were serving them from Adsense. It is annoying! Not because of the nature of being served ads but because of being served the same ads over and over. My first reaction when I began realizing how annoying this has been was to figure how Adsense can pull something like this. [Read More]

Just a few days ago, an accident happened. It was 4 AM and I am moving this blog over to CloudKilat. Already got the MySQL dump transferred, would need to have the whole site rsync-ed to the new server. So I did it. Without me realizing, I misplaced the source and destination ending up the new server’s home directory rsync-ed to the original server. A fundamental mistake. Luckily, as I said above, the MySQL dump is already safe at hand so to rebuild another Wordpress blog would be a matter of configurations. [Read More]

I came across Qualys SSL Labs a few minutes ago while reading through Hacker News. Immediately triggered my interest to question how secure top websites in Indonesia when it comes to their SSL. Urbanesia Since I am at Urbanesia, the first goto is clear. Typed in Urbanesia.com and the initial audit result was needs more work. So the audit results came back as a B. The server didn’t mitigate BEAST attack and that’s the main reason the grade was dropped. [Read More]

It has been quite a while since my first Hello World in BASIC and I have since absorbed a few more languages to my liking. Back in college, C and C++ were 2 of the primary languages taught which is fine. But then, there’s this junior who asked me: “Why do I have to learn something nobody can see?”. That guy asked a very valid question. For some, crunching codes into you favorite editor with only you and the machine communicating is of the utmost fun but for others, it’s not as fun. [Read More]

Been doing some more work with this OAuth 1.0 Provider and as it turns out, my implementation so too lean. Having said that, it’s exactly what I aimed for in the beginning: A simple lean OAuth 1.0 Provider implementation without getting buried over the concept of OAuth itself. This iteration still have more things to be introduced. As pointed by willhn at GeekTalk.in here, OAuth 1.0 allow the OAuth authorization data to be passed through HTTP Authorization Header and POST. [Read More]

Just finished work on a Naive Bayes Classifier in Python. Was interested to benchmark Python performance with large data sets. Also had the chance to get to know more about Cython. Indeed as a C extension, it increased performance. So this project all started from my own implementation in PHP here. As it turns out, PHP is more performant than Python as of version 1.0.4 of this library. But there are differences. [Read More]

Just a few days ago, I had a pretty long geektalk with Dondy about OAuth. He wanted to talk about which OAuth version is best for his needs. Long story short, the answer was OAuth 1.0. He was the one who ‘introduced’ me into Python and I instantly got an itch to have a try in building an OAuth 1.0 Provider in Python. First of all, I have no plans at the moment to support 3 legged authentications. [Read More]

I love Hacker News. There’s a lot of reading materials there that’ll empower you to do or even not do things. However, it’s not localized to where I have my most interest: Indonesia. So there you have it, a clone. First things first, GeekTalk.in is built with Telescope, a Hacker News clone coded for Node.js with Meteor. Meteor is great for real time web apps, it’s very principle is database everywhere meaning that any CRUD operations is available everywhere within the server and the client with the same codebase/API. [Read More]