Ali Kuru

I saw the first of these ads today on Twitpic, one that say “I’ve been tagged” in three photos, and clicked it with curiosity on whether Twitpic started photo tagging on its system or not. It was the official account of the magazine I’m working for, hence it was important to check if the content was appropriate.

After I clicked the ad, it redirected me to an executable file named “etype_setup.exe”. Certainly, I haven’t downloaded or installed the executable on my system. But, since these ads are obviously misleading users to an installation file without any proper description and warning, it feels like a stinky situation.

Is creating its own botnet a new business model for Twitpic?

Hit the link for the full page screenshot and click on the image to see a larger version.
(more…)

Remember my complaint about how slow is DealExtreme? I wrote in a post that it would probably take more than hundred days for them to deliver my item, and I think I owe them an apology now. I forgot to mention that my item has been arrived last Saturday, 2^nd of April to be exact, which means the DealExtreme were able to deliver my item in exactly 100 days, not more :)

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

When my recently married brother asked my help for recovering his missing photos of their honeymoon from the memory card of their camera, I said him “don’t worry, I’ll figure something out”.

Because I always delete files with shift+delete combination, there have been several occasions in the past that I needed to un-delete the files which I mistakenly made disappear. In fact, once I deleted a directory containing all my close-to-finish PhD studies – years of work has gone in a blink of an eye! Thanks to Dropbox, which is a real life saver by the way, I was able to recover them all.

You probably know that files still remain on the filesystem in a masked state, even if you think you permanently deleted them. That in my mind, I always have a recovery software installed on my computers in case of an emergency.
(more…)

I’m using Firefox for almost 6 years now – since the v1.0 – and consider myself a fan but, after the 4th stable, I’m thinking that it may be the time for me to migrate to a better browser, like Chrome. Actually this is not the first time I’m thinking to switch to Chrome, which attracted my attention even from it’s initial release. Only thing preventing me is its lack of native proxy management, particularly SOCKS support. Hope they implement that future soon and save me from Firefox.

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.

DealExtreme is one of those Hong Kong online retailers which you can find a lot of goodies at no price with free shipping. I’ve bought a lot of things from them in the past and, although their service was little bit slower than usual when considered to local sources, I was overall happy with their service. Their support were able respond you in a couple of days and they always returned with a reasonable solution.

Unfortunately, they appear to left those good days far behind.
(more…)

Our ridiculous consistency about nuclear energy as a nation despite the recent events finally made its way to international mainstream media :)

Wish the article published today on New York Times was a fine piece of satirical humor. On the contrary, it contains the sad but true facts about our ignorance on nuclear energy, from top government officials to the average Joe.

I quote:

“Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in 25 years,” Mr. Gurbuz said Monday during an interview, referring to the Turkish government’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, fallout from which hit Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 1996, Cahit Aral, the trade minister at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, coaxed Turks to drink tea from the contaminated harvest, telling them that “a little radiation is good for you.” Mr. Aral, now 84, drank the tea on television to persuade compatriots to follow his example. The then-prime minister, Turgut Ozal, proclaimed that “radioactive tea tastes better,” while Kenan Evren, then president, claimed radiation was good for the bones.

Even without a nuclear reactor, Turkey in 1999 rated a level 3 incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale, classified as “serious,” when a container of highly radioactive Cobalt-60 turned up at an Istanbul junkyard, Mr. Gurbuz said.

You can read the full article here.

Radikal, a Turkish newspaper with a name coming from the adopted English word “radical”, overhauled its physical form and welcomed readers with its new tabloid-ish size today.

I say tabloid-ish because the papers’ new size is little bigger than the tabloid standard. According to their new editor in chief Mr. Can, they choose this format – the “Radikal Size” – because it suits better for Turkish readers needs (comparing it with the tabloid size) and, combined with contextual changes, this represents “a radical revolution in media”.

I have to admit that I liked the new size. It’s now much easier to read the paper, i.e. you don’t need think if you’re going to disturb the by-sitter on the bus while turning the page. However, contrary to the Mr. Can’s idea, I think they choose this size not because of the limitations of the tabloid, but because of the newspaper stands here in Turkey.

Since all newspapers in Turkey use the traditional “broadsheet format”, stands have pockets for holding broadsheet newspapers folded in two. If they would have gone for tabloid instead of their current format, Radikal would fell short in size when presented with traditional newspapers in conventional stands and, to the untrained eye, image of Radikal would seem more like a magazine than a newspaper, which obviously would affect their sales in return.

Radikal’s new size is equal to a traditional broadsheet newspapers’ size when folded in two and, as you can easily see in the picture I took on the top left, the first thing a reader probably recognize would be its layout, rather than its size. I think what Radikal doing here is trying to soften the switch by mimicking the traditional.

I hope their clever marketing trick will ease the consequences of their revolution bold move :)

Although I had an account at Facebook for quite some time, using it never really interested me before.

Now, I’m about to permanently leave the town which I’m living for 14 years and the university which I’m working for nearly 9 years, thought that I would probably need something more efficient than email and IM for keeping connections with my friends and colleagues. Since all of them are using Facebook (just like the rest of the world must I say, if we consider the network is dwarfing any other alternative with its 400 million users!), using it seems inevitable. So, I decided to came out of the rock I’m hiding under for years, and created myself a profile.

Since every once in a while I read about privacy concerns of Facebook users on the net, I was skeptical about how it handles the privacy, and this was on top of my list of reasons for not using Facebook. However, I found their way of handling privacy more robust than I imagened. It looks like Facebook listens their users voice (“scream” could be more appropriate here), and evolves with their needs, which is good know.

I still have few annoyances about the service though; (more…)

After six years of tiring course work and boring lab studies, I’ve successfully defended my dissertation at the 23^rd of last month, and welcomed 2010 with a new title; “Doctor of Philosophy”.

Now, I’ve dedicated myself enjoying the unusual emptiness in my life, which feels eternal for the time being but will last with the beginning of April :/ Military service is mandatory for every healthy men in Turkey and I have postponed it to date because of my studies. The first week of April will probably mark the beginning of that duty.

There are several alternative ways for serving in Turkish Military depending on your education and in my case it will either take ~6 months if I’m lucky or a whole year if I’m not!

So, please wish me luck :)

This is kind of late reporting and I’m sorry about it. I was really busy at work and couldn’t create much time for an update. Anyway, it is always better late than never, right? So, here is the rest of the story;

A week after I blogged about the Philips customer service’s approach to my problem with my Philips earphones, a friend advised that “Why don’t you file a dispute at the local commission of consumer problems arbitrators at the district governorship? It’s a much more effective way than writing on about your problem on your web, just let the officials deal with them”. And I thought “Why not?”. (more…)