Goodbye

Goodbye my friend, Goodbye my hero.

Just moonwalk

Deniz OKTAR hakkında 25 ipucu

1- çok üşengeçim…

Scalability in Web Applications

When I met with a scientist from Last.fm on RecSys08, first thing he asked me about our iletken project was that: “how did you solve scalability issues? “ So, I have decided to talk about scalability and caching issues according to my experiences I had on my Internship at Turkcell Teknoloji. I will also try to explain a spesific product: Oracle Coherence, which is a clustered cache solution (or data grid). In the future, I will add some test results to this post. The main reason I am explaining Oracle Coherence is that I had the chance to work on it and they have very good examples/illustrations of data topoplogies which explains the different approaches of distrubted caches. There are many alternatives to Coherence but I do not have enough experience with them.

All the images below belong to Oracle.

If you are designing a customer oriented web application, you might want to consider the days when your users will exponentially increase. The mythical question is that will your application scale easily? Meaning that would your load capacity/performance of the application increase as you add more servers? The answer is not quite simple and don’t believe your IT department if they easily say “well… yeah sure. Why not? As we have more users, we will get faster or more machines “Scalability is actually very related to your initial design choices and it is hard to fix a non-scaleable system. So, scalability is not a hardware but a software design issue. A software architect must take scalability issues into consideration.

Strande prize :)

Check our website: iletken-project.com

Hi, check our new website for the iletken project: www.iletken-project.com

Success !

We have been chosen as one of the 5 finalists of “Strands $100,000 Call for Recommender Startups” with the project “iletken” which I have ben working on for 2 years. I will be presenting our project at the “ACM Recommender Systems 2008 Conference” at Switzerland on October 23-25.

It is a very joyful and encouraging development for us. The winner will get $100k funding but the most important part is to attend to the conference and meet with people who researches on recommendation systems. There were 25 competitors and this call was actually made for companies. So, as 4 collage students, we consider presenting at RecSys08 as a big success. Meanwhile, if we manage to get the $100k that would be just fine !

The other finalists are announced at RecSys08 website. I am excited to see that a there are two Netflix price competitor ( commendo (BigChaos) and Gravity RD)  in the list! Wow These two guys have the 2nd and 5th place.

If you are interested on what we are working on, this post includes some details: Modern Oil War of Web: Social Data War

Edit: I want to thank Turkcell Teknoloji for sponsoring some of our travel expenses for the conference.

iletken: murat deniz

9 sene sonra o adami bulmak ! Linux…

Mail gruplarına yazılan mailler konusunda dikkatli olmak lazım. Google da adımı aratınca hala karşıma çıkan pek rezil bir mail mevzusu var. Bundan tam 9 sene 6 ay önce, linux kurmaya çalışırken yaşadığım bir sorunla ilgili Bilkent Linux mail grubuna yazdığım birkaç mail seneler sonra ilginç bir süprize dönüştü. O zamanlar 14 yaşında bir orta okul öğrencisi olan ben, soru sormaya çalışırken komik tabirler kullanmış, cevap gelmeyince “yaaa noooluur cevap verin lütfeannn HELP HELP HELP” gibi devam mailleri göndermiştim.

(devami var)

Build your own secure Chrome then!

Instead of crying because of the privacy issues of Google Chrome, developers of the open source world can build their own secure-release of Google Chrome, if they seriously think there is a big threat !

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I read the whole user agreement before downloading something !

And I saw that there are some critics going on about Google Chrome’s EULA, especially about the privacy issue. This morning, Google changed their EULA a bit as a response to those critics.

The question: Does or Will Google gather our web browsing data remains unclear to me since there are no official announcements. The only valuable information was on this CNET blog post:

edit: there is a privacy information page from Google.

“Provided that users leave Chrome’s auto-suggest feature on and have Google as their default search provider, Google will have access to any keystrokes that are typed into the browser’s Omnibox, even before a user hits enter.”

“A Google representative told CNET News that the company plans to store about 2 percent of that data–and plans to store it along with the Internet Protocol address of the computer that typed it.”

As I have stated in my previous post, Google seems a bit greedy for the user data. I believe Usage Data is useful to provide better services. So I am not a person to be over-protective, However, this has to be done very carefully. So, if there are this much discussion going on, then it seems like Google was not careful about how they explained their product to the public. Well, there are still no evidence if Google is  gathering your usage data. Here is a link of a nice blog post explaining what he knows about Chrome-Google communication.

So here is a free idea: Since Chrome is opensource, build your own  – secure – no data sending – blessed Chrome? I’m sure you’ll get some fame.

Ps. I am not an expert on license. I know google uses BSD-like license. If what i have suggested cannot be implemented, please let me know.

Google tricks Chrome users for data?

Google Chrome is available for the public. This might be a very important step for the next generation web experience. However, the part that got my attention is different and I wish to discuss it.

Here is the screen shot of the download page of Google’s new browser. As you can see, optional checkbox which allows Google to gather your data is located at the same location as “I read and accept” checkbox that every user checks without even reading it.

Even though making “optional” keyword bold a is gesture of good will, I think it is a little tricky to put it on the same exact location where most of the users are conditioned to auto-check. What do you think ?

Once you have checked that box, Chrome installation comes in with pre-configured to gather your data. of course, it is still available to opt-out. And if you do not check the box, Cohrome will ask you one more time to enable it at the first time you launch the browser.

As I have previously discussed the importance of such data in the post: Social Data War , it is quite understandable why google deeply wishes people to share their data. Considering this browser is a step for next generation web experience (web-os), it is acceptable to assume that gathering data is an important portion.

Conclusion: Google is watching you. Google is wise

iPhone 3G will be in Turkey with Turkcell too

The rumours are finally confirmed ! Apple and Turkcell shaked hands about bringing iPhone 3G to Turkey.

This was the biggest news of this morning.

This is a very important strategic step considering that Turkey is about to have Number Portability.

To see this importance, we can take a look at the recent developements at Japanese market. Acording to an article at apple insider, many customers in Japanese maket had changed their operators due to the iPhone effect. Check this link to see what happened in Japanese market.

The fight between Turkcell, Vodefone and Avea continues and it is quite beneficial for the customers.

The price and the release date of iPhone 3G had not been announced yet. Keep checking Turkcell website: www.turkcell.com.tr

Edit: Pre-order link available.