Eternal Search of My Perfect Personal Blog

I’m writing this post from my PDA over an EDGE connection using Opera Mini. My main computer is away from me, though I don’t miss it. Only thing I miss is a keyboard as HTC Prophets only provide the on-screen type. I have been checking my personal e-mails, reading rss news and surfing the web with this device and I do not care about if there is a wireless ethernet connection or not.
This experience made me think why we need wireless ethernet anyways when we are able to connect to everything everywhere. Just bring 4G baby. Also since even a PDA is ok for me an Asus eeePC should be more than enough for casual use.
by the way, landing a simple robot is so last century. 21st century is being able to see photos taken on Mars from a mobile device by the pool in 12 hours.

Last night’s clash between two top English teams for the European title in the Champions’ League final was a great match with lots of dramatic turns. Manchester United proved that they are the better of the two and the best in Europe by winning the title following their victory in the English Premier League.
The game started with Man U dominating the field and had their chance when Cristiano Ronaldo scored with a header. This made some (including me) to think a clear victory for Manchester was inevitable. But Manchester leaned back as they have done in their semi-final match-up versus Barcelona and expected Chelsea to come onto them. This did not result in dangerous attacks by Man U, but rather a goal buy Chelsea’s Lampard with a bit of luck.

Second half was all Chelsea on the field with Manchester successfully defending their march forward. Before the penalties, Chelsea missed their first chance to lift the cup when Drogba hit the post. The game had a nervous air around it. This resulted in players arguing in the field several times, which we have witnessed during Fenerbahce-Chelsea match-up in the quarter finals. Drogba proved to be one of the players who have influenced the result after he was sent-off during one of these.
The penalty shoot-out gave Chelsea their second chance when Cristiano Ronaldo (top scorer of the Premier League and Champions’ League) missed a penalty. The chance was turned down by a bit nervous John Terry in the final round. Successive penalties resulted in Man U goalkeeper van der Sar saving Anelka’s penalty and bringing the second cup to Manchester.
van der Sar definitely saved the day for Man U and Cristiano Ronaldo by saving the final penalty while Anelka couldn’t do the same for his captain John Terry. It was an unfortunate night for Chelsea’a manager Avram Grant (who by the way resembles very much of Boss Nass of Gungans), at his first final he had a stronger opponent and a better team. Chelsea seems to be missing that team feeling. They seem to be a group of very good players.
Overall, it was a fun game to watch with lots of drama, however it was a well deserved victory for Man U.

Everytime I fire up a soundtrack in my iTunes I keep thinking: “Something is missing, this is not the same song I have listened in the movie theater”. Well obviously something is missing.

The experience we have at the movie theaters is a combination of lights, sounds and a concept. The atmosphere is very much sealed with the darkness and sound properties of the movie theater.

Listening to a soundtrack alone is very much like watching the movie with no sounds, unless you are listening to the soundtrack because you like the song but not touched by the movie. This usually is not the case for me as I listen to a soundtrack because I find something mattered to me in the movie because of the song, thus, listening to the soundtrack alone does not give me that much of an excitement. It is a bit better when the soundtrack has lyrics like “Juno”, or “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”. “Iron Man” however, has a very strong soundtrack, but no lyrics. In the end this is ruining the whole soundtrack fun.

I propose soundtracks should always be published with lines from the movie like “Pulp Fiction” or should be consumed with teasers, trailers or suitable scenes from the movie itself. What do you think?

Wow, this is big news for me. Embarcadero Technologies decided to buy CodeGear (Development Tools Division) from Borland. Since I am working for the Turkish partner of Embarcadero, Borland and CodeGear this may not affect things in our side but it will definitely change the game field and I hope it will be beneficial for both the companies and their millions of users world wide.

For details you can check out CodeGear’s, Borland’s or Embarcadero’s main page or click on this, this or this link directly.

The X Lab has great tips for managing Spotlight here, some of which saved my day today so I will post them here:

To stop indexing a volume:

sudo mdutil -i off /path_to_volume

To erase spotlight indices:

sudo mdutil -E /path_to_volume

My wife is working on her Ph.D thesis and I feel completely useless being unable to help her. Anyhow, she had some drawings to be done in xfig, which is not been used since the 15th century. I said, OK my mac has BSD under the hoods so there should be some kind of Xfig available there. There are in fact two different projects for using such UNIX tools with Mac OS X. One is called MacPorts, and the other Fink.

MacPorts was installed on my Mac when I was using Tiger, however we had problems with Xfig so I searched a bit more and found Fink which actually does the same job. Unfortunately Fink does not have a binary distribution for Leopard.

Currently I am installing both of them on my Mac at the same time. I hope one of them will help us run Xfig. For those of you out there having problems with either MacPorts or Xfig during installation just keep in mind to put your Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installation DVD (or a backup of it) and install XCodeTools.pkg and X11sdk.pkg which are not installed by default. That will solve most of all your problems. Problems not solved with this tip, is unfortunately too complex for me and I can not be of any help. Go ahead and asked the communities and developers.

I had an idea to put on the blog for a while. It was about all those things that did not by themselves constitute a blog entry. All those things I see every day, read about and hear. All those things I would like to share.

I will call these “Small Pile of Even Smaller Things” and make them into a series of blog posts, much like Nick Hodges’ “Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene”. There won’t be any constraints for the posts except for the length of each “thing”. I will write about new interesting software, websites, videos, music and games. Anything that comes to my mind. Starting tomorrow

Today I received an e-mail from my dad about a site near Şanlıurfa (southeast Turkey) called Göbekli Tepe. Findings there suggest dates back to 9000 BC, and predates all farming activities known. It is important because up to now scientists had thought that people who are only dependent on hunting/gathering could not build monuments and temples. However these ruins show the opposite.

It is sad that this place has been discovered over 30 years ago, and it is now that I learn about it. Anatolia is a large geography with such a long and dense history, every corner you look, you can find something interesting.

This is actually an old post of mine back at “The Unofficial Mac”. I am reposting for convenience.

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One of the reasons I was itching for an upgrade to Leopard had been the new Mail. I have been using Thunderbird as my e-mail client on my Mac from Day 2. On Day 1 I gave a shot and used Apple Mail for a while, but we were not ticking together so I dumped it and switched to good old Thunderbird.

Now I am on Leopard and shiny new Apple Mail is just waiting for me in my Applications folder so I decided it is the correct time to give it a try.

After I set up my e-mail settings through a very simple wizard I chose Import from the File menu and there was Thunderbird. Import took a few minutes and all my e-mail was available in Apple Mail.

There has been a few glitches for the past few days but everything is normal now. The problem was that, and it happens again time-to-time, when I open a folder none of the e-mails there seem to have content. I noticed this when I have searched for a mail that I know existed but received no results. I don’t know the exact cause of the problem, but it gets fixed by itself when I closed and re-opened Mail so I believe it is somewhat related to Mail not being able to process all e-mail (over 10,000) in the first pass.