GeekXperts

See our new blog for helpful hints on anything geek.

GeekXperts:
http://geekxperts.blogspot.com/

My new blog

After the very bad service I received from Google (they marked my blog as spam), I switched to wordpress.com

My new blog is

alpkup.wordpress.com


I will not write here again. Please check my new blog for new posts.

Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre'den seçmeler

Bu sayfa sadece Türkçe olacak. İleride belki İngilizce bir benzerini de hazırlarım. Kendi seçtiğim şeyleri koyacağım. Arada bir bakın, ama bir anda çok fazla okumayın, şiirleri anlamadan, onların üzerinde düşünmeden geçmeyin.

GALATASARAY

It is the best Turkish soccer team on the Earth. There is no debate about it. It was once one of the best in the whole Europe too. Due to poor management, it suffered lots of performance losses. Also, being far away made me forget supporting my team.

I'm going back to my old days, hoping that my team will return back to its glorious days. The greatest champion: GALATASARAY!!!

iobit

This is an interesting company. They have very few but very nice products. I strongly recommend them. At the moment, I'm waiting to see their spyware defender program too.

www.iobit.com

musicopat.com

I had this idea, and as in many other things, other people with possibly more resources implemented it before me. Nevertheless, I waited a long time for this web site, and it's pretty cool. Check it out:

www.musicopat.com

It is FREE and LEGAL music that cannot be downloaded but played online. Most importantly, they have almost all the Turkish labels. Let's support them.

Yunus Emre

Yunus Emre hakkında pek çok şey koyacağım buraya. Bu ilki.

I'll put some Yunus Emre poems here, but I cannot translate the poems. I'll try to translate some other related info though. So, let's start with this one.

Sabahattin Eyüboğlu says the following about Yunus Emre:
"Despite all his religious personality and devotion to Islam, Yunus was not a man from any religion, any sect; he was not even a man of the religion. On the contrary, he was beyond all different religions, mosques, churches, sanctuaries; he was especially against strict religious people. His religion did not have a book, a worship ritual or direction. The only rule, dogma of his belief was love: the widest, limitless, the most humanist love; pure love. When you asked Yunus about his religion, his God, he would say nothing but LOVE, ATTACHMENT, and COMPANIONSHIP."

Brown banner is THE WORST web site I've ever seen

How can my university pay some people millions of dollars (which was millions more than the anticipated amount) to create the world's worst course registration service. Even the naive paper-based service and boca was better. I can list the bad sides of it, but I don't want to fill my blog with it.
I want my money back. Actually, even I could have designed a much better one for much less money. I am sure someone got rich without deserving, most probably only by using his/her connections. I'm also sure the connection got richer. Yet, I'm not accusing any particular person. They are already aware of this fact.

ipod rocks

Interesting news: Sony gave up its fight against Apple in the music industry. The old giant is replaced by the new one. I tried some sony mp3 players before buying my ipod two years ago, but they had only 3 levels of volume: low, medium, high. You can easily tell how shitty they are. Read the news about their defeat:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136659-c,onlineentertainment/article.html

BEWARE of amtrak and enterprise

Very well known transportation services, the amtrak train service and the enterprise rental car service, have tried to cheat us. So, be really aware when using them. The incidents are below:

Amtrak: One amtrak agent told something, while the other told the opposite later, denying my right to get back my refund for a ticket cancellation. After waiting for 1 hour 15 minutes on the customer service line, I somewhat managed. But they are not to be trusted.


Enterprise: If they ask you to upgrade your car level, never do that. This means, they don't have that low level car at hand, and they'll have to upgrade anyways. They are just trying to get some more money for that.

Don't think large companies are nice!

lens.com and justlenses.com DO NOT BUY

DO NOT BUY from lens.com or justlenses.com
They try to make every effort for the customer to suffer. Their shipment is extremely SLOW, their sales support is very POOR.
So, NEVER ever SHOP from those two web sites (don't even click):
lens.com or justlenses.com

More new technology

Today's topic is the new Adobe Acrobat Reader (it's name might have changed, but everyone knows what i mean, the pdf reader). Now, it really reads.
Yes, you select some part of the text, and then tell the program to read it out loud for you. It can easily read numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. All this is in just your very basic pdf reader, nothing more...
Note: Don't download the adobe photoshop album starter edition, which they try to make you download with the reader. I hate when they try to trick you doing such things. Such a big company like Adobe should not be doing those tricks.

Ruckus

OK, I have advertised lots of other services I use, why not advertise Ruckus too?

So, it's a free music service for college students (mainly in US). You register with your college e-mail address, and then you can download and play tons of music on your computer. Of course, it's legal and free.

Why wait? Go to
www.ruckus.com

Armenian-Turkish Concert (CANCELLED)

Our Armenian-Turkish concert was prevented by outside parties pressuring our musicians not to perform. The Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association at Brown are still committed to creating events of mutual benefit aimed at creating apolitical dialogue. Even though the situation was completely outside our reach, we apologize to all our friends and guests for this unfortunate cancellation and any inconveniences caused by that.

Brown Turkish Cultural Society and Armenian Students' Association

More Technology

I'm discovering more and more Yahoo! products nowadays. They are all good, actually, better than Google in many cases. One of my newest discoveries is the Yahoo audio search. Try it, it finds the audio files for you, easily.

http://audio.yahoo.com

Picasa

I just realized how Picasa web albums are improved. They offer 1GB free space for your photos. By the way, currently my 150 photos take only 25MB with 1024x768 resolution (a pretty good quality). They have lots of new features. Definitely check it out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/

Concert

Nowadays, we are working on a concert project. It's going to be a very nice one hopefully, with very good music and food afterwards. The concert is a joint Armenian-Turkish concert, dedicated to a healthy dialogue.
Come, join, bring friends...
April 6th, Brown University, Providence, RI

http://students.brown.edu/Turkish

Technology

Back to technological issues.
I realized that currently the best image search engine is Yahoo
http://images.search.yahoo.com/

It really is the best. Actually, Yahoo was also the first to introduce the video search engine. They are still good, with better advertising, they'll keep up.

Technology

I saw a kid, who was using some machinery on his ears. That small 'computers' made him able to hear. Since he hears using those, his speech was not that good, because speech is just imitated hearing. But, can you imagine how happy it is for him and for his parents that he, who most probably could not hear and speak without those devices, can now both hear and speak? If, the technology can greatly improve even only that one person's life, then it is worth. From now on, no one can tell me technology is making things worse...
And by the way, computer science rocks :)

Türk-Amerikan yaklaşım farkları

Melvin'in yazısından alıntıdır (hoş, o da tahminen bir yerlerden aldı ama olsun, kendi hazırladıysa da helal olsun :)


Amerikan: hey dostum burda bir problem mi var ?
Turk: noluyo lan burda ?

Amerikan: nasil gidiyor mike?
Turk: napiyon lan?

Amerikan: korkarim seni oldurecegim!
Turk: salavat getir pezevenk!

Amerikan: oov dostum hic cool olmamissin.
Turk: bu ne lan götüme benzemissin.

Amerikan: hey steve, neden kendine bir icki koymuyosun?
Turk: la suleyman, kap iki bira gel bakim hemen!

Amerikan: lanet olsun sana christine!
Turk: allah belani versin nurcan!

Amerikan: tanri askina brad kes sesini artik!
Turk: allahim sabir ver, sus lan yeter!

Amerikan: aman tanrim simdi napicaz?!?
Turk: ha siktir sictik?!?

Amerikan: help me please...
Turk: baksana lan!!!

Amerikan: ne derler bilirsin jack, hayat beklenmedik surprizle doludur
Turk: valla oglum bir soz var hani, kaderde varsa düzülmek neye yarar üzülmek...

Amerikan 1: dante'nin bu kitabini okudun mu micheal?
Amerikan 2: aaa evet , gercekten edebi degeri olan bir calisma.
Turk 1: abi da vinci sifresini okudum super!
Turk 2: lan birak! iyice entel dantel oldun ! Layt herif !!

Amerikan: hey jerry gel pizza ye dostum...
Turk: sülo gel lan buraya mis gibi menemen yaptik...

PLEASE ANSWER

What is the color of the sky? (Please leave your answer as a comment)

Einstein was a knowledgeable man

I came accross the following the previous day. Supposedly, Einstein said it. But the quote is more important than the owner:

"A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it."

I strongly believe this is true, especially since I'm trying to write a conference paper.

Best Translation Award (given by Cengiz)

I got the "Best Translation Award" from Cengiz for the following translation of a Turkish song. You can listen to them from my voice if you'd like.

The original is:

Hatırla sevgilim
O mesut geceyi
Çamların altında
Verdiğin buseyi

Beni mesut ettin
Sen de olasın
Aşkımı inkar edersen
Allah'tan bulasın



My translation is:

Remember my dear
That happy night together
That kiss you gave to me
Under the willow tree

You made me very happy
May you be happy too
But if you deny my love to you
Then I am cursing you

Google Documents

I was expecting this to happen. Everything is moving online. In foreseeable future, all the things will be running online so that you can reach your information anywhere you like. Although, there will be privacy issues, it a very nice thing.
So, go check http://docs.google.com/ and see the online document and spreadsheet editor of Google. It's free, so use it. You can reach your documents anywhere you like and you can convert them to the most useful file types. Give it a try.

FC TSA Soccer News

FC TSA vs Your Mom: 5-0

Free Image Browser

The best freeware image browser and photo editor is Fast Stone. Go check
www.faststone.organd get must-have applications for free. I've been using it for the two years now and I'm perfectly happy.
Have fun :)

on IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)

Nowadays IDEs show which right parenthesis or brace matches which left one. They should at least do the following two things:

- Instead of showing just the one on the right or left of the caret, show both.

-- Even better, they should color every left one with different color, and color the right one with the color of whichever left it's ending. For example, the first left parenthesis can always be red and I can thus know I should put right parenthesis until I get to the red one.

1st

Just trying folks