Rubik Cube

What is it?
Rubik cube is built from smaller cubes (or their edges) whose surfaces are differently colored. The number of cubes changes according to the size of the cube (2*2*2, 3*3*3 ...) designed. The purpose of the game is to pile up the same colored edges of the small cubes on the same edge of the big cube. The game was invented by a Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik. It has been renamed as Rubik by Ideal Toys. The youngest person solved the game is 7 years old Lars-Erik Anderson from Norway.

Rubik cube fans can find some online information from:
http://www.rubiks.com/

BerkeleyDB , SFS and TSocks

Although it is really useful and popular in academia, there is an ongoing chaos with BerkeleyDB. I am not sure if there is a commercialization process behind the scenes (I mean removing the project from the open source etc., after takeover of sleepycat) but it is highly possible nowadays that you will get a "404 page not found" error on BerkeleyDB related web page. Anyway, BerkeleyDB owner company Sleepycat has been taken over by Oracle and hopefully the stable downloads are from here any more.

SFS (Self-certifying File System, I prefer Secure File System) is a popular file system with fine authorization and sharing (in a decentralized manner) mechanisms. More information here.

I just discovered TSocks. It is a really useful tool for Socks based connections. Tsocks wraps the application that requires Socks connection and takes it through the way it knows. You can find the details here.

Stay tuned...

What is hot?

Fight for kisses : http://www.ffk-wilkinson.com/ (Quite absurd but really original ...)

Generators

Scientific Paper Generator : http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Bullshit Generator : http://www.erikandanna.com/Humor/bullshit_generator.htm

Here, there, everywhere awake minds ...

Laissez faire, Laissez passer

"Let them do" belongs to Adam Smith, the founder of economics science according to some ...

Later on, big economies have been rescued from WWII crisis by Keynes who provided a different approach for the explanations of economic.

So, there are two main theories to explain macro economic processes. The former is defined as the classical theory and the latter as the modern one.

Adam Smith advocates for invisible hands and expresses self-interests will create community benefit in brief.

Keynes states there is a need of intervention to the economies.

Comments on the Results : AKP Vote Increase

My personal analysis for the AKP vote increase briefly outlined below:

1. There was no better alternative for AKP. CHP (especially with the current leader) has a known but unfavorable standing. MHP and DSP have been tried during the last coalition government (though they were in the coalition not in full power, so couldn't reflect their programs). DYP and ANAP couldn't unite so lost lots of votes. And the rest were already hopeless because of their less chance of entrance to the parliament.

2. CHP (again with the current leader) has a gap in its communication with the public. There is a big status change (in people's mind) of CHP such as they are a higher class of people away from public reality.

3. Although there are still debates about the economical achievements during the previous ruling period, the economical parameters were good (at least the ones appeared in the media) to change the opinions.

4. The local managements of AKP worked so hard to earn the votes.

These are the major reasons I have in my mind for now ...

I am not a conspirator but I like conspiracies. Because I believe they are kind of brain storming until/unless they cause mental ilness :).

So here is my conspiracy about the election: AKP won the election because the US and EU supported them. The reason for the US support is obvious because of Turkey's position with the current government for Iran and Iraq cases. For EU support, Europe (the majority) doesn't want Turkey in EU. But there are already given promises. Although the current government has done so many regulations about Europe compatability, it is possibly the main party opposing Turkey's accession to EU because of its roots. By the way this is not a criticism, I think an/a economical/trading collaboration is a better option for AKP voters as we have different moral values, religion etc. (that is a reality).

To the conspiracies ...

Current Situation : President Selected ...

Although there were some other expectations for the candidacy of Abdullah Gul, he has been nominated for the presidency and selected as the 11th president of Turkey. During the selection process, MHP and DSP provided their own candidates by coming to the parliament, and CHP didn't come to the parliament to boycott/protest. At the third tour of the process, the parliament reached enough number of votes and the selection has been completed.

Now, there are still oppositions against Abdullah Gul's presidency, lots of critics and but also support appearing. A point to note is there is no political/economical storm as exaggerated by some journalists. There will always be an eye watching on him because of the tension the selection process created.

On the Election Outcomes

When I was writing the previous post I was still away from Turkey. So I concluded that I had stayed away enough to lose the general concept from Turkey is the first excuse for the deviation in my guesses of the elections. The second one is not an excuse actually but an explanation or a clarification attempt of this error. The election produced a bewildering result even the prime minister was surprised. The common belief of this is the reaction against "Abdullah Gul's candidacy for presidency and resistance to him" event.

Anyway, no excuses... I made me a mistake.

The actual results are the followings:
AKP : %47
CHP : %21
MHP : %14
Independents : %5
DP : %5
GP : %3

More comments on the results and current situation to come ...

Elections in Turkey

Yes we have national elections in Turkey within 2 weeks ...

I will try to analyze the possible results from my perspective. These results don't show neither my political ideas nor show the actual results (which we will see in two weeks time).

There are 5 main political parties right now with the possibility of entering to the parliament (that doesn't mean that I also believe so) according to the surveys and the media:
AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi - Fair and Justice Party)
CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi - People Republic Party)
MHP (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi - Nationalist Movement Party)
DP (Demokrat Parti - Democratic Party)
GP (Genc Parti - Young Party)

AKP is the current ruling (governing) party and CHP is the main opposition party in the parliament. Of these political parties CHP is left and the others are right sided. MHP, DP and GP are loosely connected to the religion if compared to AKP. The current government (AKP) is achieved a lot in the sense of rights / regulations and also according to some views in the economical performance. But there are strong oppositions to their acts in rights / regulations point of view. The main argument is to "Pick-up from Europe and Apply here" logic. This argument states that AKP, for Turkey's accession to Euroepan Union, accepted and deployed some regulations which theoretically makes sense but in practice not applicable to Turkey. What makes the things worse is, without any adaptations, these regulations cause problems in Turkey. Economical view arguments involve that "the world economy is rising so Turkish economy is rising". This argument is based on the economical achievements of the countries at Turkey scale (such as Brasil, Mexico and Argentina).

CHP earns points because of its possibility to enter to the parliament and the actions it followed during the presidential elections. But CHP loses points because of its president Deniz Baykal, especially internal reactions are the main concern.

MHP sits on top of nationalist ideas and earns points because of its support for PKK leader execution. Especially after the elections in France (Sarkozy with strong pronunciations against Turkey's accession to EU) and bad steps in EU process, MHP is one of the destinations for the voters as a reaction.

GP is strongly against AKP as its leader Cem Uzan and his holding has been ruined by the current government. GP also has similar political view to MHP.

DP has the following drawbacks: (Although everything has been cleared in courts) Its leader has some bad impressions in minds. Secondly, the failure of combination with another right side party (ANAP, Anavatan Partisi, Homeland Party) created a bad impression in minds.

There are also party independent candidates for the parliament and they are in a big number but as I can't analyze their ideas individually, I left them out of scope.


So after brief situation summary, here is my guess for the results (if anything extraordinary doesn't happen):
AKP --> %25-27
MHP --> %18-20
CHP --> %16-18
DP --> %9-12
GP --> %6-8
This is my opinion...

Another view is the vote percentage of AKP will increase to %37-40. And in another one AKP will be %22-24 and CHP will be around %20.

So that is all for now. We will see the results in two weeks.

But there is a certain fact that Turkey is rising .....

Install Vista From HDD

Installing Vista from HDD instead of CD/DVD ROM is clearly/briefly explained here :
http://11011.net/archives/000645.html

Today I got an e-mail from my friend about Microsoft Surface Computing, Touch Screen Table. It is an interesting product. Watch here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DasPNFrP24.

G8

They met again today ...

They decide about the future ...

They don't take China ...

They agreed on global warming ...


Are they really big?

This is the news!

Pardus

I do support Pardus...




Stay tuned...

Enjoy Beryl

I still couldn't get the Vista release ... The emphasis on the visualization from its earlier versions pushed me for the alternatives. Beryl as a desktop manager (with support of different window managers) was a good candidate. I installed it (although it was a little bit problematic because of my vga card) and I enjoy the wonderful OpenGL effects.

Don't wait, use it ...

http://www.beryl-project.org/

Tendencies

What I learned nowadays (in a really abstract/general manner) :

Software agents paradigm is regarded as the future computing paradigm for software development. The frontrunners of this paradigm mainly argue to OOP and emphasize its lackness of expressibility on contemporary requirements. That is the current discussion. There is the notion of artifact in agent oriented computing which has its computational capabilities (internal and external behaviours). This notion opens so many ways of research/idea directions to be researched. So we (will) hear both "artifact" and the "context" more often in this field.

Information Retrieval
An important observation is the absence of foundation (founding theories, models etc.) in IR.

Nutch (as crawler, "the software bundle of Nutch already includes Lucene internally", and search engine interface) and Lucene (indexer). Nutch works with Tomcat. You crawl the (intranet) web sites with Nutch and index them for retrieval.

On the other hand, you can create your own customized search engine with Google (Google Customized Search Engine).


Next --> Trust Management

Stay tuned...

Feelings and Being Busy

Do we have feelings when we are busy? Are they the pushing force to do something or we don't feel when we are really busy?

I force myself for the blog: I must write, I must write :). But I am so busy that my agenda changes so often. So I forget to text up my feelings at that time and because of agenda change, my feelings are out of date when I have time to write.
Hopefully, I had time to write these :).

This is what I feel now...

Chronological/Geographical View to Important Aspects/Events

You can have a chronological and yet geographical view to Religion, Middle East and some other important events/aspects from:
http://www.mapsofwar.com/maps.html

This site is a well-prepared, informative site with good visualizations.

Back to work ...

University Rankings

I believe that the below information is really useful for prospective students searching master or phd studies/schools

1) First Anglosaxon country universities rankings as they are doing education as a business (earn money) and work more profesionally:
-US universities are ranked on the USNews

US News conducts periodical research on rankings and publishes the results annually on http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/t1natudoc_brief.php

-UK University Rankings on
http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/
You can also find special subject rankings on this web site (such as computer science ranking etc.)

2) German university Rankings can be found on:
http://www.daad.de/deutschland/hochschulen/hochschulranking/06543.en.html
You can also use this web site to customize the search criteria

3) International university ranking from China:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm
This ranking is making a good progress on the acceptance and respect.

4) Rankings according to the university web sites (and some other criteria):
http://www.webometrics.info/

That is all for now.

Better ...

Ideas imposed to us...

After a chat with one of my friends, I dived into the meaning of "better". Better, better, better something is better, that is better etc. The word itself is really /comparative/\relative/ to something. Simply the relation (I call it a relation) better is :
Better(A,B) = {A and B are the elements of the same domain say SomeExistence, A is preferred to B}

or

Better(A,B) = {A and B are the elements of the same domain say SomeExistence, B is worse than A}

or
...

You can increase the alternative definitions. A simple look to the above definitions reveal some other relations "preferred" and "worse". These relations can be defined by some other relations which breed new relations to be defined. At the end, there should be a base relation that is, in my humble opinion, an assumption. So do we know is this assumption is truely selected? What if our assumption is wrong? Then all things we say better are actually were worse?

At this point, human dimension of "better" comes up to my mind. A good point... If I say something is better for me, is this true for all people? No, some can say yes, some others say no, and there are abstainers (asking us why we called them :)). So the generalization of this dimension (human) constitutes the relativity property of the "better". Briefly, one better is worse for someone, or it's not preferred.

So, please tell me what is better...?

To be continued...

Bios of Von Neumann, Einstein and Kurt Godel

After watching the movie John Nash, I found myself searching the biographies of Von Neumann, Kurt Godel and Einstein from wikipedia. I learned some important facts that I didn't know. I had some info about Einstein but not that much about Von Neumann.

First of all Von Neumann's origin is mathematics and physics (I didn't know) while Einstein's is physics (I knew :)). Although Von Neumann is well-known with his "computer architecture" in the computer literacy, he has done really important contributions in physics (especially nuclear physics --> hydrogen bomb), economics and mathematics (Game theory).

They are three of the four people invited to Princeton. Einstein was born earlier than Von Neumann who is around the same age with Godel. Von Neumann and Einstein were born to Jewish families, Kurt Godel lived in the circles of Jewish people. I think that's why they all moved to the US because of German pressure. They all grew up in German-origin countries (Germany, Hungary-Austria).

Then I could conclude that, World War II worked for the US :)... But I would say the president of US at that time (transferring these guys to the US) is a really brilliant guy predicting the future.

Name                      Contributed to
Von Neumann --> Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics,
                                Economics (ohh man this guy is great)
Einstein            --> Mathematics, Physics
Kurt Godel       --> Logic, Mathematics


There are lots of things to learn from these biographies : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

Stay tuned...

People

We are all people, but some people are

lovely ...

devoted/loyal ...

aspirant ...

arrogant ...

natty ...

kinky ...

ambitious ...

trustworthy ...

jealous ...

similar X unique ...
ambiguous ...

beatiful ...
fickle ...

kind ...

talkative ...

timid ...

picky ...

strange ...
surprising ...

strange ...
obsessive ...

objective ...
prejudiced ...

unexpected ...
sticky ...

conservative ...
modern ...

shy ...
willing ...

respectful ...
provocative ...

happy X sad - sorrowful - grieved .........

friendly ...

rationalist ...

isolated ...
elegant ...

nifty ...
direct ...

strong X weak ...
helpful ...

intelligent ...
polite ...

experienced ..............
unpredictible ...

sneaky ...
stealthy ...

generous ........

and some are not .......But something takes over all of them :).

Find yours.

The Way Back Machine

You want to see the old versions of web sites in a chronological way ? --> then here you go http://www.archive.org

Decision Making (Quotation from Lao Tzu)

Once upon a time, there was an old and a poor farmer in the ancient Chinese empire. He had the most beatiful horse in the land. The mare was so beatiful that the emperor proposed the farmer a treasure for the horse. But the farmer didn't accept. One day the mare ran away without leaving any signs/clues.

Folks of the village came and said :"You are so unfortunate, you didn't accept the treasure and look. You lost your horse now".

But the farmer replied :"Don't hurry to judge and to conclude with a decision, may be it is bad may be not..." .

Several days later, the mare returned with another stud horse. The villagers said:"How lucky you are. You had one horse, Now you have two...".

The farmer returned and stated:"You are in hurry for the decision. May be it is bad, may be not".

While the son of the farmer was trying to tame the stud, he falled down and broke his leg.Again the villagers came and said :"How unlucky you are. You had only one son caring you and your work and he broke his leg. Now you will be poorer than the past".

He returned and said again:"Don't decide that early, may be it is bad, may be not...".

Several days later the son of the farmer broke his leg, the enemy invaded the country. The emperor of the country published a decree and called all the young people for the army.

Villagers came and said : "How fortunate you are. Your son was not taken". To which the farmer replied :"Don't hurry up for the decision, may be it is bad may be not ...".

So here is the inference :

Don't hurry up for the decision. The brain progresses and develops until a decision is made. Whenever you decide on something the development stops. So after enough progress/development, a decision should be made.

By the way I am not a Taoist :).

Scepticism and Paranoia

There is a thin line between paranoia and scepticism. Ok, scepticism can be unhealthy (not paranoia yet) sometimes, but I am talking about the pushing force of natural sciences. With the knowledge and experience I have now in my mind, I would say the breaking point of these two is the startup of instinctive forces. When someone loses rationality and starts behaving instinctively then scepticism will return into paranoia? Or there are instinctive details behind all rationalist doubts/suspicions. I will probably change my mind with the new feeds...
How did I come here? Asking??? Search for computer security :).

Read, think, read, think ...