visnum
When one door closes, another opens.
Turkey is in a race with China on Censoring the net
May 14th, 2008 by Osman S BoruteceneOn May 5th, Youtube is censored again in Turkey. Apart from this, after opendns had a great failure on resolving google.com and some other subdomains on google, I changed my settings back to normal, that is having an automatic dns which is not opendns. Then I saw the grim reality of censor in Turkey.
I realized that there are many, many web sites that are censored via court order. One of them is Geocities.com. Another one is CNN.com’s technology section.
I am really upset. Turkey always tried to become a european country in the last 200 years but hey, we are getting farther from that, not closer.
Ubuntu is disappointing me
May 14th, 2008 by Osman S BoruteceneAfter approximately one year, I turned from gnome to kde once again. The reason is, gnome is behaving like windows day by day. First of all, performance is weak and its getting weaker while you continue to use gnome. It is not being a ram monster or it is not about something called the registry in windows. It is something else and I don’t know what it is.
Firefox performs better under kde than gnome. Many other software opens faster in kde than gnome. Gnome is useful, very useful at times, I can’t deny that but performance sucks.
Now, for the last 24 hours, I am on kde and I can see the difference once again. I have to admit that I only work with kdebase or kde-core but I don’t think that this is the difference.
I believe that the font rendition mechanism on gnome is affecting its performance. There may be other factors affecting the performance too, but I believe that they are similar things like font rendering.
I have read somewhere on the net that firefox on ubuntu with pango causes performance problems. What is kde using?
Anyway, if you are on ubuntu with gnome, try giving a chance to kde (3.5.8 right now) and see the difference. All you have to do is this:
$ sudo apt-get install kde-core
Have a nice Wednesday.
Buggy Internet Explorer 6 and other vulnerabilities
May 12th, 2008 by Osman S BoruteceneI am in an internet cafe right now and I can’t login to visnum.com
Maybe it is forbidden (!), maybe not, but there is this unlock visnum.com option here, too. And this unlocking does not unlock visnum.com but it locks Internet Explorer and I have to start again all over.
Well, this is a present form Microsoft to us. I even don’t have any idea why this setting doesn’t allow me to see visnum.com but the same settin allows me to login into the control panel of wordpress which is also on visnum.com
What is the logic, reason and idea behind this?
Serious issues on Ubuntu with latest Firefox
April 1st, 2008 by Osman S BoruteceneThere was a Firefox update for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The update was from Firefox 2.0.0.12 to Firefox 2.0.0.13. That was a security update as usual.
After the update, Firefox has gone berserk. I thought that it just stemmed from a failure in the 2.0.0.13 issue but after I tried it on Windows XP (thanks to Virtualbox) there wasn’t any problem.
The problem occurs on web sites with ajax applications. I was in trouble with Facebook. Ajax in Facebook didn’t work properly on Firefox. It works very well on Epiphany and other Gecko based browsers. I have also tried Firefox 3.0 Alpha and there wasn’t any problem either.
I hope this will be fixed soon.
VirtualBox
January 18th, 2008 by Osman S BoruteceneI decided to try VirtualBox.
I installed it on my notebook which is running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) via apt-get. The only thing you have to do after installing via apt-get is to open user administration and add yourself to the group virtualbox so that your user can have permission to use some parts of the software which belongs to VirtualBox user.
That is, when you are on a Gutsy Gibbon host, setting up and using VirtualBox is much easier than installing and debugging VMWare (I mean both player and the workstation). In that sense, VirtualBox feels like much lighter than VMWare.
One drawback is the Host Key preference. On VMWare, whenever you hit Ctrl+Alt, focus comes back to the host machine. On VirtualBox, there are no key combinations but only one key to do that. Moreover, your chances are limited with Shift, Alt and Ctrl keys. You can only decide which one of them you want to use, that is whether the one on the left of your keyboard or the right. The default setting was Ctrl on the right which is not present on my notebook’s keyboard. So I had to wait for the virtual machine to finish its business and turned it off and only after that I could go and change this Host Key setting. Even then, the phrase “Right Ctrl” is misleading. It makes you feel that you have to hit Right Arrow key + Ctrl. Anyway, now I’ve set it up for Ctrl on the left. Because this is the key I use least. On that point, I realized that I use both Shift keys very often. I use the one on the left for capitalization and the one on the right for symbols like /, (, %, … which usually stay above numeric keys.
Anyway, I tried two guest operating systems. First one is Debian Etch and the second one is Windows XP Proffessional with SP2. I would try Vista too if I had a license for it. Both of them worked much better than they had on VMWare. For the memory part, I tried Etch with 256mb and Xp with 192mb. Right now, for another testing purpose, I am writing this post from within the virtual Xp, using Internet Explorer 6.
Briefly, I can say that VirtualBox comes with much less clutter than VMWare. Of course, capabilities they offer differs and I am in no way an expert in virtualization. Take this post as the opinion of an ordinary PC user who likes to mess around virtual machines.
Do you remember computers?
August 11th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneNowadays, I have the feeling that computers we use now are far more different from the ones we used to have in the past. By past, I mean something like 10 years ago.
Today, we use computers for nearly everything, but the most different usage in comparison to past is about multimedia.
I can’t think of a camera, phone, etc. that can’t talk to my computer. There is no movie that I can’t see in my computer. I do graphical work, photo editing, sound editing with my computer that can be done only in specialized electronic devices in the past.
And with the computers in the past, usage was mostly either scientific or close to scientific. When you have a periodic table of elements software than that was fitting to the fashion for a computer 10 years ago. When you have a software that helps you keep track of the coordinates of some stars, that was fitting to the fashion for a computer 10 years ago.
Today, we use computers with no sense of the old excitement about computers.
I am not a nostalgic person. I am not going to say let’s go back and use computers for just some nerd purposes. I love my computer today and I love the things it can achieve. All I am trying to say is that human mind is capable of creating helper objects for them and the limit is human mind, not the physical world.
It is not the physical world that changes into something else when you do an important discovery, it is just your own mind of expanding, seeing, figuring out of what can be achieved with what we have as some basic rules for the universe for ages; for millions of years.
Computers, especially my notebook… Thanks God we have them!
A hot, interesting commercial
June 26th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneBelow is a lingerie commercial. I think that represents more than the effort to get attention and make sales. Rather, to me, this is a representation of what we have become recently, as humanity.
I will not play Asimov, I am not talking about danger that would come from the robots. Instead, I want you to focus on the violent nature of our commercial thinking.
Apart from that, in my opinion, this is a successful advertisement.
Time For Take-Off
June 3rd, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneIt has been a long time that I was only busy with my blog in Turkish. I have built an audience of nice people. You win some, you lose some though. I was unable to pay attention to this blog in that time span.
Today, I feel that it is the right day to start paying more attention.
I have written nice posts about blogging on the other blog, people loved them. I plan to translate some of them.
More importantly, this will be the new home for all of my blogs in English. There aren’t too much but that just means increasing topic variety. Anyway, we’ll see what it’ll evolve into.
Writer’s Block
May 26th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI have created a new theme for my blog and changed the layout and visual aspects. I was really eager to go on and write new posts under this new image.
However, in the past several days (and including today and now), I am suffering from kind of a writer’s block. I can’t add new material to my blog easily. Even this post is a pain for me.
Over the editor area of WordPress, there are four drafts waiting for me to complete; Issues With Blog Themes And Templates, Top Tips and Tricks For the 21st Century Economy, Internet Explorer Myth, Enhance Your Productivity With Web Based Applications.
I am not sure when I am going to start writing them.
Anyway, this was just a quick note to tell that I am alive.
Don’t Worry Robert
May 21st, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneUPDATE: Robert Scoble made an explanation about deleted comments.
Robert Scoble posted about the censorship in China. His blog is censored in China too, among many others. Don’t worry Scoble, don’t worry. You are accustomed to censorship on your own blog.
I noticed recently that Robert Scoble deletes comments almost arbitrarily on his posts. When I follow through comments that I came across which are deleted afterwards, there is no clear pattern for a cause of deletion.
Hard to understand.
The last comment that I have noticed being deleted was from Goddess Artemis.
Anyway, censorship is not a solution to any of our problems on the net. There seems to be little difference between Robert and China. LOL.
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