Arrival of something beautiful
Instantly captures the hearts of many
Radiant, your smile is
Enchanting, your eyes are
Natural fair, your complexion is

Alhamdulillah …
Islam is your faith
Shahadah is your declaration
Hadits after Al-Qur’an, is your life guidance
Akhlakul Karimah is your personality

After 9 months of journey, you came among us
Regardless what the Doctor predicted, you have your own will
Instead of 28 October, you pick 18 October
Far away, I was startled and surprised
All my projects, tasks, I immediately left them behind
Nevertheless, I couldn’t witness your miraculous birth
Thanks to God, for the safety and health of you, and your mother
Only to God, we worship. And only to God we ask for help

Welcome to the world, my beautiful daughter–Airen Aisha Arifanto. Your Dad and your Mom always pray that you become a beautiful, healthy, intellectual, strong and pious muslimah with akhlakul karimah.. Amiiien…

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As your blog become more visible to the search engines’ bot, it is also become more visible to the spammer-bots (spambots). A spambot is a program designed to promote shady websites, sell dubious health products, sell counterfeit goods annoy and slow down your database.

Usually, spambots is run in a botnet. Botnet is a network which consists of computers that are controlled by black-hat hackers. If suddenly your friends complained that you send them spammy messages from your email/instant Messenger, check your PC. Your PC may already become a botnet members.

Back to the topic of this post, this blog is used to be plagued by many spam comments/trackbacks. But with my recent configuration, I am confident that it will able to thwart most of the spam comments without causing too much of irritation to the good visitors of this blog.

If you think your WordPress blog is currently being targeted by spammers, you should try these two WordPress plugins will keep them at the bay:

1. Akismet

Akismet works by intercepting all submitted comments & trackback. It will submit the comments and trackbracks to their web service for test. If the result turns out positive, it will allow the comments/trackback. If negative, they will go to spam folder. I highly recommended you to use Akismet.

2. Spam Free WordPress

Although Akismet is good, it’s not enough. With Akismet, the comments/trackbacks are still be saved in the database anyway. So if you have many spambots posting comments to your blog, it could slow down your blog. Because of that, I recently deployed Spam Free WordPress. This plugin works by generating a unique password for each post. This way, a spambot can’t directly hit you with a FORM submit. Instead, it needs to download the whole page, parse the HTML, extract out the password, and finally submit the FORM.

So yes, this plugin has a weakness. But parsing a whole page is not economical to the spammers, so this plugin will deter most of the spammers. But if they somehow managed to submit the spammy comments/trackbacks, Akismet will be ready to catch them and throw these SOB to the spam folder.

Conclusion

Once you have these two plugins deployed in your blog, your blog will have two security layers to defend from spambots attacks. On the outer layer you have Spam Free WordPress plugin that requires the bot to read the post before posting. And there’s Akismet standing behind, ready to catch any comments/trackbacks that managed to bypass Spam Free WordPress.

Goodluck with your blog!

Did you watch the SEA Games Football final match between Indonesia and Malaysia on Monday (21st Nov 2011) night? I did. Although I felt I would be a little bit happier if Indonesia won, but I know that it would be best if we lost the match.

And why would you think like that, you might ask. Well, I think we (Indonesians) have many serious problems that need to be addressed.

1. The Supporters

We are rowdy, childish, deluded and lack of sportsmanship. We prefer to jeer the opponents rather than to cheer our own team. We were drowning in euphoria when we won the previous matches. We thought our footballers were so good; they deserve a place in elite leagues in Europe. We were so high, that it felt really hurt to taste a defeat.

And oh boy, how do we react to a defeat. We just can’t take it when we lost, do we? We would do unsportsmanlike behaviors to cover our shame, pain and to vent our anger. We would do things like singing our national anthem out loud, although we didn’t win the game. So loud, it is effectively drowning out the opponent’s national anthem that is being played. We really can’t show respect to the winning team, can we?

To make the matter worse, we have a bunchthrong of cheapskates that didn’t buy the ticket, yet forcing themselves into the stadium by breaking the gate. I just couldn’t comprehend why did they do that. If you didn’t buy the ticket, go find a nice place to watch the game. Find cafe that’s showing the match in big screen. I believe many Wartegs, Warungs (street food vendor) have TV and is definitely showing the game. Instead, they choose to damage a public property, tussle with each other, and possibly endanger themselves and other spectators in the stadium.

Update: Two supporters died in stampede. Sigh, when will we learn?. Do we need to go through Indonesia’s own Hillsborough Disaster?

2. The Players

I think we are not good enough to win the game. We should feel lucky because Malaysia squandered so many good chances to score.
Seriously, long balls? Our players may have the speed, but they didn’t have the height. It is more difficult to control a lob pass than low pass. We already made the mistake in AFF final. Why repeat the same mistake here?

We must graciously admit Malaysia did play better, their through-passes were dangerous, and their counter-attacks threatened Indonesian goals so many times. Why can’t we play more like them? It is proven successful, and I must admit it is more beautiful to watch.

And please stop blaming the referee. Look hard again on how we played. How was our passes compared to Malaysian’s? How was our off-the-ball movements? How the players positioned themselves? Let’s focus to our own weaknesses instead of focusing to others’ weaknesses.

3. The Government

The only way to improve our country’s football quality is by fixing the quality of our domestic league. Yet, we are taking shortcuts. Instead of revamping the leagues, build and promote football academies, we took many players with Indonesian ancestry from European leagues into our team and hoping that it would auto-magically work. Sadly, these players were not even the first-team back in Europe.
Stop taking shortcuts! Improve the stadium quality. Improve the field quality. Improve the supporters’ culture. Improve the safety measure!

Look at what Britain did to regulate their football. They used to have hooligans and mass fights after the game. Look where they are now. Look how much the football teams contribute to Britain’s economy. No, no, no. We don’t need to send useless members of DPR there, we already have internet. Almost everything is available in internet. We can always research what we need there.

Update: Apparently PSSI has found back their sanity. Now they realized that naturalizing foreign-born Indonesians doesn’t work. What do you expect for such an instant approach?

Conclusion

Now that we lost the match, it’s time to look back in the mirror and reflect why did we lose? Did we play badly? Did the opponent play better? Don’t let emotion clouds your judgement. Be honest with yourself.

I know we are sad, and some of us is angry. But we should stop being angry because angry is a sign of weakness. We have a lot of things to improve, our football quality, our sportsmanship and our graciousness to defeat.

I’ve mentioned before about Stages of Grief before. So let’s move on from our stages of grief, and start plotting on how Indonesia can play the Beautiful Game, beautifully.

Thanks for reading my rant till the end :D.

Image taken from: The News