BeLoged

Orhan Karsligil's Ideas, Thoughts and Collection of Resources

Ideas around a Motif Cleanup Algorithm

I was trying to create an algorithm that would take the list of motifs/regular expressions and extract redundant sections out of them.

I think it is easier to explain this with an example:

Planning to upgrade my Phone


Android Phones That I am interested in...
I am planning to change my phone/provider after November.

Horrible Drivers

Everybody has bad days in traffic. Lately I started having more than one bad day a week. Just today in the morning I was getting killed by an idiot who was either texting or searching for something, or putting a CD into the CD player or eating/drinking something while drinking. He was driving right in front of me. I saw the guys head disappearing a couple times and he moved between the lanes while doing that. Lucky him there was no one in the other lane. Then again he was doing something other than driving and suddenly the traffic slowed but since he was not looking he had to react drastically when he again had a chance to look in front of him. He hit the breaks, the tires locked and he swirled like crazy, turning almost 90 degrees and then miraculously was able to gain control... he was almost hitting me since I was unlucky at that moment being in the next lane.

This happening more and more. Phone in one hand coffee in the other.. who or what is holding the driving wheel? Worst is the people turning and talking on the phone. They cannot signal since they hold the phone with their left hand, the right being their driving wheel hand, then they cannot turn quickly since can only use one hand and to top it off they do not pay attention to the traffic since they are doing too many things at the same time. If you honk they get angry and start telling their friend on the phone about this rude guy having a road rage...well some of us want to go home in one piece. People who want to talk on the phone while driving should be in one lane... let them kill each other. I think it is time to require hand free sets for every new car. Even that is bad but at least people can use half of their brains and both of their hands.

Feasibility of BioFuels

Okay everybody is talking about Biofuels. All big companies are investing in biofuels. Some do it to look nice and use it as a PR stunt (most oil companies), knowing that the current attempts will not even make a dent in their market share or profits, some others do it because it might be profitable in the short term locally, but globally I need to see proof of its feasibility.

September 2009 AMP Design Update

I updated the design algorithm over the last couple of months to be more rigorous and to incorporate underlying data and experimental result biases. Below you can find the presentation.

Musings with Volatility

Volatility is a vague term. There are strict definitions but within limited context. There is always something "implied".

I will try to do some research and find some answers for my questions.

Online Books and Resources

My objective with this thread is adding links to online resources that might be relevant to my research. This should be a linked page from the home page.

Email Posting Of Blog Entries

Today I was working on the blog little bit and figured out that some of the widgets are not working anymore or there is something wrong with them.

It looks like something with their javascript components went berserk. Maybe they will get fixed maybe not, but until I see changes I will not enable them. I might actually simplify things and user pure RSS feeds for most the stuff. If I can find PICASA feeds I should be perfectly fine :).

Orhan out,

Asked at Lunch

Today when I was eating my Sashimi at Shogun one of the regulars who I talk to about history and Turkish language asked me about a Turkish movie he watched recently (Kurtulus Savasi).
He said in the movie any time the general ordered something the soldiers were saying “Bas Ustune” and the badly translated subtitles were saying “With Pleasure”. I explained him that it is a phrase used in military and also in the common daily language but it sounds like “Bagas Ustune” and was not sure if the “Bas” meant really head or not. Then I checked and indeed it means head. I could not find the etymological roots but will look into it again. Another example of that most people use phrases without knowing what it exactly means (Bahs Ustune?, Bagas Ustune, Bagis Ustune, Bas Ustune???). It is also funny that that I learn more about Turkish and history by talking to foreigners than talking to other Turks, maybe because when Turks talk they repeat the indoctrinated teachings and there is nothing to learn…

Ideas about my Blog

I am planning to create some workflow around my blog posting process. I am planning to make some entries
“live”, meaning I will start them and continue working on them. I might create an index page where I display all these entries, or even I might change the home page to be a static page displaying a welcome message, some links, and maybe a summary for newest posts. For that I might need to play with the template. Although I understand the basics behind the template file I am not sure if I am willing to spend to much time with it. We will see.

Finally blog migrated

After using Wordpress on my own server for 4 years I decided it is time to move to the cloud. I have other plans for my server. At that time I liked the fact that I could upload and share papers and my code without any restrictions but today online storage is freely available and easy to configure. I can change everything about Blogger including templates to a level that it looks like it is not on Blogger. I am now trying to finish the forwarding settings for my domain on Godaddy. It does not work as “advertised” :) Need to figure out what to change exactly. So far I did the following for migration:
  1. Exported content from all my other Blogspot blogs and imported them into my main blog.
  2. Exported my Wordpress blog content than converted the xml file into blogger import format and imported that into my main blog.
  3. Searched and found a new template.
  4. Customized the new template, added some gadgets.
  5. Found a javascript tool that converts some format of latex into nice equations. It works perfectly and I think it will work perfectly for what I want to do: $$ \pi=\sqrt{sample} $$

TEX test

Here I am testing a math equation using some JS code:

$$ \pi = \sum_{i=1}^{\infty} i^{2*i} $$