The last leg of my March travel was Indonesia. I went to Jakarta to see my parents, and then I took them to Bangka Island, to visit the birthplace of my mum. The pictures above were all taken on the island.

I felt a certain disconnect to the rest of the world when I was in Bangka Island. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t use the Internet at all, but then again, most of the locals I talked to didn’t give a jack about world news, social media, or anything else online that occupies our lives these days. It was quite refreshing.

Other than visiting some distant relatives I didn’t know about and some of mum’s childhood friends, I also had a chance to visit a semi-traditional factory producing fish and prawn crackers, to check out their machinery and to learn about their distribution system. It’s pretty awesome that that little factory had their products exported to several countries, including Australia.

After returning to Jakarta for a few days before finishing the trip, I just had to tick off the items on my TOEAT list. These were my most favourite food in the world, highly recommended!

The first one was fried wonton from Bakmi GM. My offer still stands, if they open a restaurant in Melbourne, I will have my lunch there everyday for two months in a row.

The next one was Padang food, probably one of the tastiest food on earth. The cow brain curry was not for the faint hearted :p.

And last but not least, the simplistic nasi goreng, my all time favourite. There must be tens of different types of nasi goreng in Indonesia, love them all.

So that ended my travel in March, ten flights (can’t wait for Star Trek transporter), four countries (stayed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on four separate days for connecting flights), a pair of sore legs (for obvious reasons), and one great journey.

The episode, #11 kontribusi ke open source project dalam waktu luang, was uploaded earlier this week. We discussed about my experience contributing to several small open source projects and various other tech-related topics.

After listening to the episode, I figured that I didn’t answer Ronald’s questions well enough. I admit that I actually got lost when there were several questions asked in one go, my mind was digesting part of the questions and lost half of them when it was my turn to talk. Note to self: prepare a pen and a notepad.

There were a couple of things that I would like to clarify since I wasn’t very clear with my answers. First one is that I misunderstood the question about why Hudson Build Monitor was made as a Firefox Add-on have (as opposed to subscribing the build feeds directly on Firefox toolbar). My revised answer would be that it does have a benefit in domain knowledge which allows data visualisation (coloured orbs, etc) and action triggers (starting a build, clearing up stuck executors, etc) amongst other things.

The second one is on the bit where I talked about commercial products bundling open source software and using open source tools during the development process. I could’ve formed my sentences better. I just want to clarify that I wasn’t implying that commercial is the opposite of open source since there are tons of open source commercial products out there. Instead, I was referring to my experience back in year 2000 when most commercial products thought of open source as a non-option.

Thanks, Ronald, for the invitation, and all the best with Teman Macet podcast project. I believe that the show has plenty of opportunities in the Indonesian market.  To those unfamiliar with Indonesian language, ‘Teman Macet’ roughly means ‘companion during traffic jam’.