Ali Kuru

I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

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.
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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.

Looks like Google has won their data liberation slapfight with Facebook at last. When I was checking my Facebook settings to see if there is something related to new messaging system, I found something more interesting: there is now an option to download your user data from Facebook, which includes all your data (updates, photos, posts etc.) as well as your friend list!

Facebook still says that “Your download is currently being generated. You will receive an email when it’s ready”, I will inform you once i got their zip.

Update: Downloaded the zip file generated by Facebook. Unzipping it produced a directory tree containing HTML files and hotlinked stuff in separate directories. When you browse your friend list using the sidebar navigation at “index.html”, you only see your friends names, without any other information about them, no emails! Also, no email’s in the “friends.html” page code either.

Looks like nothing is over :)

After two weeks waiting, I’ve received my Google Wave invitation today. Wave had generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks and, what I understand from what I read/listen/watch about it, almost everybody have the same impression; Google Wave will blow! Well, either in a good or a bad way :)

Anyway, my account came with 20 invitations. Please leave a comment to this post if you are looking for an invitation. You don’t need to publish your email address at your comments body, I’ll send the invitation to the email address you filled in the comments form. Invitations will be send first come, first serve basis.

And, please don’t forget to come back and tell your first impressions about the Google Wave, I’d love to hear what yo think.

UPDATE: All gone, no invitations left, sorry. Please don’t post anymore requests!

Also, note that Google Wave’s invitation system is more like “nominating you for an invite” than “directly issuing you an invitation”. Since I “nominated” you for an invitation, it’ll take some time before you actually receive an invitation.

Here is what’s been told on my invitation Wave;

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

I’ll let you know if I receive more invitations. You can subscribe to my feed, or follow me on Twitter (@alikuru) for updates.

I have all of the main browsers installed on my computer(s), including Google’s Chrome (dev channel, v2.0.169.0). Nowadays, I’m trying to create a new theme for this blog, and I was using Chrome only to see how my design is performing on it.

Although I hated the installer and its registering of Google Update both as a service and as a timed job, I liked the Chrome’s look since its first release. I’m a long time Firefox user and I usually spend 5 to 7 hours in front of it every day. Yesterday, I’ve decided to give it a chance and switched to Chrome and ditched the loving Firefox for a day. I did my usual browsing including some standard emailing, roaming, searching, reading my RSS subscriptions, banking and I remotely accessed to my lab PC via LogMeIn. Also, I’ve browsed our internal FTP server for updates.

Here are my thoughts after the day; (more…)