Archery Event in Okmeydanı, İstanbul
Posted by havan in Turkish Archery on May 27th, 2009
This saturday we will be performing in an event at Okmeydanı (archery arena). Hopefully there will be much participation from people and governor so it will draw some attention to the state of the Okmeydanı today.
Event will be held in 14:00 at 31 May. You can chech out Google Maps coordinate of the place or come direct to the Keçecipiri Mahallesi, Kulaksız Caddesi, Okmeydanı No:105 Beyoğlu/İSTANBUL. There is also an anouncement page in Turkish and a Facebook event.
Small information about the state of the Okmeydanı today, here is the photos of the range stones that still stands;
Release Schedule of Pardus 2009
Posted by havan in OpenSource on May 22nd, 2009
Pardus 2009 maintainer Onur Küçük announced the release schedule of Pardus 2009 today. So here is the long awaited 2009 release;
- 27 May – Alpha
- 19 June – Beta
- 3 July – RC1
- 10 July – RC2
- 17 July – Stable
In this release Pardus 2009’s main desktop will be KDE4 and all the Pardus tools like package manager, network manager will be ported to Qt4. You can download cd images from the official page when they are out.
Compression Tools: lzma, bzip2 & gzip
Posted by havan in OpenSource on May 11th, 2009
Today I was taking a regular backup of our server in the office. After I collect all the files, I tried to burn them to a DVD and see that 4.4GB DVD is ~50MB short. I did not want to burn another DVD for a 50MB, so decided to zip the Zimbra backup file, which is 2.5GB in size. I choose lzma because I’ve read somewhere that its ratio is better that others. But that was clearly a bad decision!
Compression took ~50 minutes. Despite the small file size of ~750MB, didn’t worth it because of the very long compression time. So I decided to make a small compression tools test. I have used a 355MB svn dump backup file. Here are my results* with lzma, bzip2 and gzip;
Compression test results (lower is better)
So, with a little loss in compression ratio, gzip performs much faster. Of course, I know that this chart would be different if the input file, svn dump, is a different type of file or size. But I use to backup mainly this kind of text based files, so this works for me.
* Test system: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo T5750 (2.00GHz) CPU, 2GB ram, Pardus 2008 (Linux 2.6.25.20-114) OS, lzma sdk 4.32, bzip2 1.0.5, gzip 1.3.12, default settings used for all tools.
Turkish i18n for Fusion Theme
Posted by havan in OpenSource on May 6th, 2009
I translated Fusion theme (this blog’s theme) into Turkish for my Turkish blog. I contacted with Milenko Popović the designer of the theme and hopefully it will be in the version 2.8.
I have also created a Git repository for this purpose. If you do not want to wait you may check out turkish-i18n-for-fusion-theme repository at Github.com
An archery day in the Belgrad Forest
Posted by havan in Turkish Archery on May 4th, 2009
We, my brother, my cousin and me, went to the Belgrad Forest (İstanbul) for a picnic and archery exercise. It was a beautiful day. We can not get to our regular spot because of a bicycle race but it was ok. Here are some photos from the trip, demonstrating different kind of draws in Turkish Archery:
Even WebFaction sucks!
A few weeks ago, I signed up with WebFaction. I read nothing but the good things about them all over the Internet. So I bought a “Shared 1″ plan and setup a pair of blogs for this domain. One for Turkish articles and one for English. It was a very good experience. Control panel is very easy and in a few clicks you get your application ready and running. I have post a few articles and then went out to Ankara Gazi University for a Turkish Archery Workshop.
It was all gone when I get back from the workshop. When I try to open my blog I get 504 time out errors from nginx. I’ve login to my accound with SSH and check for my WordPress applications and I’ve stunned; there was no WordPress directories. After I’ve try to determine the reason for a while I’ve headed to the WebFaction status blog and I’ve found that the server, which my account is on, had a filesystem error and it was recovered from yesterday’s backup. That was a relief. I thought there is some glitches with the recovery process and all will be fixed soon.
After that, I have login to support center and filed a ticket for my missing applications. After a long wait and a poke to the user forum I get my answer and stunned again. They say that there was a bug with their backup script and my applications can not be recovered. They also mentioned that they encoure their users to maintain independent backups. Ok, I work as a software developer, I can understand that scripts and codes and hardware can be buggy. But why do you keep your users uninformed about the loss of data? Why do you not mention that critical bug in your status blog? That’s not how a responsible hosting firm should act.
I’ve canceled my account because of this, but please WebFaction, do not hide information from your users in the future. You were the best host I’ve signed up with until this circumstance.
Turkish Archery Workshop
Posted by havan in Turkish Archery on April 22nd, 2009
There will be a workshop about Turkish Archery this monday in Gazi University. We, a bunch of Turkish archery enthusiast, will be presenting some articles and perform an archery demonstration. We also have a friend from Poland, Mr CIESZYNSKI, who will talk about Turkish sword Yatagan. He will also participate the demonstration.
The Announcement page is in Turkish, so I will try to translate at least the titles.
| Time |
Presentation | Author |
| 13:30-14:00 | Opening Speech | Metin ATEŞ |
| 14:00-14:20 | Pre-Islamic Era Turkish Archery |
Adnan MEHEL |
| 14:20-14:40 | Islamic Era Turkish Archery and Okmeydans |
Z. Metin ATEŞ |
| 14:40-15:00 | Break | |
| 15:00-15:20 | Turkish Bow: Characteristics & Construction |
Dr. Y. Metin AKSOY |
| 15:20-15:40 | Turkish Shooting Techniques |
İlkay DEMİRHAN |
| 15:40-16:10 | Turkish Swords & Yatagan |
Dariusz R. CIESZYNSKI |
| 16:10-17:00 | Archery & Swordsmanship Demonstration |
|
| 17:00 | Finish |
If you are interested in traditional archery come on and join us at this workshop. It will be great!
Date: 27 April 2009, 13:20 Place: Gazi University, Gazi Concert Hall, Ankara