Pinar Yanardag's Blog

Last week has mostly been taken up with QCon London. I really had a great time and I would like to give a big thanks to Google for supporting my travel and registration costs.

QCon is a conference focusing on 19 different tracks. Some to mention: Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, Software Craftsmanship, Functional programming,  Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects,  Pragmatic Cloud Computing, Agile Evolution, How do you test that? and Browser as a Platform. I attended to one or two talks from almost every track except .Net and Java oriented ones. Keynotes from Dan Ingalls (Forty Years of Fun with Computers), Ralph Johnson (Living and working with aging software) and Robert Martin, aka Uncle Bob (Bad Code, Craftsmanship, Engineering, and Certification) were inspring.

I also got the chance to chat with Dan Ingalls (principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk). I asked him if he follows a method while working (like Pomodore that Dan North recommended in his “Simplicity – the way of the unusual architect” talk). Hopefully, we share a similar characteristic: we can’t work if we don’t like the job but when we like it, we can’t stop working from morning till night.  He recommended me to go where I think I would have the most fun. If something bothers you, it is ok: “If it’s hot, it is hot. If it’s not, it is not!” There’s always something to do when you can’t work; empty the rubbish or wash the dishes. And when you concentrate, start to work again -but know yourself very well.

Me and Dan Ingalls

We also talked about the lack of women in computing. He shared some of his observations; for example in a conference about Wikipedia, he observed there are almost same number of women and men. But when it comes to more technical and less social conferences and events, there are really very few women participating. He also added maybe there’s a genetic factor about this. He has two boys who cannot stop being “boys” –always breaking/fixing things but in fact, that’s what all about the computers!

There are lots of ideas and keys to share, here are some main ideas:

From Uncle Bob’s keynote (slides are available here):

• Follow the Boy Scout rule: Always leave things a little better than you find.
• Methods should be less than 20 lines.
• Don’t have a function that takes a boolean. It is clear that it does two things; one if its false, another if its true.
• Cut/Paste is bug replication
• Extract until you drop! Keep extracting until all functions only do one thing
• Source code represent the design -not the UML tools.

Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About was one of the tracks I wondered about =] Some gems from (Facebook: Architecture and Design) by Aditya Agarwal (Director of Engineering at Facebook):

• Services of philosophy: choose the tool for the right task. They use Thrift, a lightweight software framework for cross-language development (C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, etc.)
• Most important thing in their engineering team: How quickly can you move?
  

Agarwal said despite being a small team (over 1 million active users per engineer) they do great because of the Facebook culture. There are three very important things in FB:

• Move fast and break things
• Huge impact with small teams
• Be bold and innovate
  

Agarwal also gave some important tips for MySQL. They have about 6k server-years of runtime experience without data loss or corruption (can you believe it?!) Here are my notes:

• Don’t ever store non-static data in a central database
• Data driven schemas make for happy programmers and difficult operations.
• Logical migration of data is very difficult. Create a large number of logical databases, load balance them over varying number of physical nodes.

There are 1,200,000 photo requests a second in Facebook and scaling takes iteration. They serve 20 billion photos in 4 resolutions =  80 billion photos (which would wrap around the earth more then 10 times!)

• They use cachr: cache the high volume smaller images to offload the main storage systems, and only cache 300 million images in 3 resolutions. Then disribute these through a CDN to reduce network latency

There are 400 million unique home pages and 50 million operations per second in Facebook. They have a love-hate relationship with memcache; it is easy to corrupt and has a limited data model. But it is simply crucial and it does what it does, really good.

At the end of the talk, I asked to Agarwal about their operating system choice and he told me they are probably  going to use Centos.

One of the most interesting talks was Building Skype. Learnings from almost five years as a Skype Architect by Andres Kütt (architect of Skype). First, some stats:

• There are about 650 employees at Skype (which makes 800k users per employee)
• 27.2 billion minutes of Skype to Skype calling per quarter.
• 210k minutes of calls each minute (71k contains video)

Points Kütt made:

• Rules of thumb does not apply: It is always tempting to use patterns that have worked previously but they should be used as a starting point for discussion – not as a solution.
• Functional architecture is important. You neglect how the functionality of your system is organized at your own peril.
• Simply things work. The simplier things are the more intelligent they are.
• Buzz words are dangerous: They are both dangerous as carriers of meaningless chance but also as a catalyst for breaking down relationships.
• Architecture needs to fit your organization. There’s no such thing as a beautiful system design. The design either fits what your organization needs or it doesn’t.

Dan Ingalls keynote was very entertaining. He showed his early codes and he made all the demonstration in Squeak and also shared demonstrations of lively kernel. One wise quote from Ingalls talk:

We’re bad at learning the lessons from the past because:

I have a lot more notes in my Moleskine but I need to take some time to transfer them into the blog.

I also had the chance to visit the gorgeous O’Reilly stand and buy some books (I even have Erlang Programming and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know signed by the authors!)

I had a great time and I look forward to being back the next time. Thanks to Google, again!

By mid of November, I left my job after working two years at TUBITAK UEKAE. I worked with one of the best Open Source teams in Turkey and led Pardus Security Team, therefore I am a bit sad about leaving that early..

Fortunately, the reason for leaving my job leads me closer to my dreams: I have been selected as a Fulbright Ph.D. fellow and hopefully, I am going to continue my education in USA next year. As I am currently doing my master degree at Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, I had to give my full energy and time to finish my education in Turkey, so I decided to contribute Pardus as a non-TUBITAK employee.

Last week I attended to Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex, Mountain View. It was definitely one of the best time I had in recent years. First of all, thanks to Leslie, Ellen, Cat, Chris DiBona and Google Open Source program office and everyone who made this happen (I should also thank to Sam Lantinga (writer of SDL) who let me to use his travel stipend.)

My adventure started at Los Angeles; thanks to my Google Summer of Code t-shirt, I met with Fridrich (from Go OpenOffice project) at Los Angeles and we made all way to Sunnyvale from San Francisco with Thorsten (also from Go-OO). After travelling for 20 hours, I went to the opening party at Wild Palms on Friday. It was really nice to see some familiar faces from last year’s summit; Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), Sam Lantinga (SDL), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL), Jacob Appelbaum (Tor), Gary (Pidgin), Marty (Etherboot) and many others that I cannot name now.

(Kaptan Pardus welcome wizard which aims to help user to configure basic settings on first boot.)

Note: This is the Beta release for Kaptan 4. Design (graphics, colors, layouts) can change until Pardus 2009 stable release (30 days to launch! \m/)

Kaptan4 looks like Kaptan3 but it is fully written in Qt4 and Python. As always, comments are appreciated :)

More screenshots ->

Whenever I try to be a stable blog writer (one post each month seems fine, huh? =)) I just FAIL. So I’ll write a summary of last few months, ..

• A couple of days ago, I got the following e-mail from Google Diversity Team that was saying I am one of six award winners to attend linux.conf.au:

  Thank you for your application to the Google-Linux.conf.au Diversity Delegates Programme. After careful review by a committee made up of Linux.conf.au organizers, Linux Chix, and representatives from Google – your application has been selected as one of the 6 award winners!

  I had a list of talks in mind to attend @linux.conf.au. But unfortunately, it seems I can hardly get the visa on time (remember the MySQL case -and other side of the coin.. *click*)

  Wonderful news.. but,.. well.. just news. =)

• * It’s 19th of Jan. but I forgot to tell you Project 366 was succesfully finished! I started Project 366 just for want of trying, but lately it became a long-year album. I see how Photojojo was right. It’s an amazing way to document travels and accomplishments, relationships, .. and so on. Time moves surprisingly fast.

  Btw, i made a video from all Project 366 photos:

  
  Project 366 (2008) from Pinar on Vimeo.

• I have some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious plans about school, ah.. frak school.
• And at last, I started to use KDE4 on my daily system, but it’s more like a mutant (using Nautilus as a file manager is enough?)

Finally, I returned to hometown after a painful roadmap (San Jose -> Denver -> Frankfurt -> Istanbul). But the only thing that makes those hours quickly spendable is the people I met –hopefully I can always find some interesting people to talk with :) This time, at my last transit flight (after 4 + 9 hours on air) I met with two men, it was really funny. In fact I just asked if they want a dark Twix or not, but one of them told me he’s just too tired to eat. So I wondered if they’re from CA, too.. Then we started to talk. After a while, I realized one of them was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt :)

- Uhmm.., you’re working for Microsoft?
+ Yes, we are.
- Oh, I’ve just attended to a summit in Google. Actually.. I am working for a Linux distribution.

Then we started to laugh.. and some kind of funny fan stuff. Then it went like that:

+ So what are you doing exactly?
- I am from the security team, I am tracking vulnerabilities and fixing them. And you?
(they started to laugh, and I was trying to figure out why :))
- Hey, what’s wrong? :)
+ We’re from Microsoft’s security team!

I think it was a really nice conjunction, think about that: you find somebody to talk -> you’re colleagues -> and you’re working in the same specific area + they are from a very different point of view.. So we talked about security, open source, Microsoft & Novell and so on. And Android! Damn, despite unlocking it successfuly, I still can’t sign in my Google account.. They were really nice people and shared their knowledge about unlocking phones :) So I realized I have some extra things to do rather than just network unlocking.

And at last.. the funniest part of our conversation:

+ So why are you working for open source anyway?
- For freedom! :)

PS: I spent my Halloween in California’s Great America and had a lot of fun. :) Picturezz ->

photo by Austin Ziegler

I was at Google Mentor Summit this weekend. It was at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was really amazing to meet with other FOSS developers.

It took 22 hours to arrive CA but hopefully I was strong enough to directy go to the welcome party. :)

First of all, I’d like to thank Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and any other Googlers who participated to organize such a wonderful summit. I really had a great time.

During the summit, I attended several sessions including Android related ones (which made me to buy a TMobile G1 yesterday!) and Distro Leader’s summit that Donnie (from Gentoo) proposed (Karsten Wade from Fedora, Joe Brockmeier from OpenSuse, Steve McIntyre from Debian showed up) and we talked about how to get introduced more people with Linux. And of course, Sam’s Open Souce Game Development session was one of the greatest ones.


pic. from open source security session

I also led a session called Open Souce Security. It took much more time than I thought (90 minutes instead of 30′). A lot of participants from various level of security showed up– Google Network Security Team Leader, Eugene Teo from Redhat Security Team, developers from Tor project (you can remember Jacob Appelbaum from his Cold Boot Attack Research) and so on. At first minutes, I got really excited because there were a lot of security experts who have much more knowledge and experience than me. :) But the session went quite good and we mostly discussed about tracking vulnerabilities, disclosing security flaws, patches to OSS projects that possibly have security vulnerabilities and criterions of accepting them, and GSoC students’ secure coding.

I’d like to thank some of my friends that I met at the event -in order of appearance :)

* Eugene Teo from Redhat Kernel Security Team. I knew and respect him from OSS security society- it was really nice to meet and talk about security with him.

* Donnie Berkholz from Gentoo. He’s currently Gentoo council member and maintains X.org–which I think is a quite hard job :)

* Sam Lantinga, lead software engineer and leader of the group of gameplay programmers on World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertaintment. *cool* He’s also the creator of fabulous library, SDL. He became one of my closest friends during these two days. I’m really so lucky to meet with him. :)

* Nils Kneuper and Mark de Wever from Wesnoth. We used to know each other with Nils but I totaly forgot that he’ll attend to this event. But thanks God, we met at lunch by chance! :) Mark is also a cool guy from Wesnoth and *i think* he had a great time while watching me when I was drinking *natural* Green Tea (it was the worst thing i’ve ever drunk. ahh.).

* Austin Ziegler, from Ruby Central. He is a cool photographer and ruby person and I am looking forward to see his group girl photos.

* Selena Deckelmann, from PostgreSQL. I always glad to meet with other women in computing. I am looking forward to participate in a WiC project with her.

* Mike Melanson, Justin Ruggles, Reimar Döffinger from ffmpeg team. They were really funny people and we had a great time while Mike was talking about the times that Ismail’s complainings on Turkish support :)

* Alisson Yagi Costa, from Umit. We went to San Francisco and Santa Cruz with him and his words to describe me were quite remarkable :“you’re not normal, but you’re not strange” :)

Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!

PS#1: There are some photos (the giant anroid, too!) on my Flickr set: Mentor summit, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Stanford, Palo Alto.

PS#2: To Turkish readers: I merged my Turkish blog (and RSS’ also) with this blog address, so from now on all my entries will be in English. Thanks! :)

Or Display Configuration Manager.. Hhmm.. name sucks, doesn’t it? =) (But it will stay like that until you suggest something cool =))

Anyway, we have released Pardus 2008 Beta this week. It comes with a new manager (I and Fatih – “the Xorg guy” =) were together in this) which enables you to configure Xorg server (drivers, monitors, dual screens etc.)

You can reach DM via Tasma -> System -> Display Manager or simply by typing display-manager command from the line. Please do not hesitate to share your opinions and bug reports via Bugzilla.

There’re some screenshots here:

I should have been written this post months and months earlier, but I was waiting for our superb designer, Gokhan’s designs for layouts. He did an excellent job, both for Kaptan and Yali (you should have seen last screenshots of Yali in OzgurlukIcin.com magazine, if you haven’t yet, have a look at here).

Well, as some of you may know, Kaptan was written in C++. But as all of our tools (except TASMA) are being written in Python, we decided to port Kaptan into Python, too. Actually, it only works on Pardus (network and package manager stuff) but I’ve been thinking to write a generic welcome wizard for KDE- but wait until we port ourselves to KDE4 =)

Okay, okaay.. here’re the screenshots =)

Planet is full of with Guadec posts & reviews – everybody is having a fine time in Birmingham I see. I should have been in Birmingham at 14th as Adam wrote and was going to give my little poor lightning talk at Wednesday. But because of my mother got an accident at the day I was going to fly (thanx God), now I’m only counting my fingers & coding my SoC project :)

But I recently got a news that Guadec 2008 will be in Istanbul! Wow, if that’s true, I’ll really be happy to see all of you in my country.

Let’s see where you’re going to come via this cool video :)

Google’dan Leslie (tüm öğrencilerle yakından ilgilenen şirin hacker), geçen ay her sene olduğu gibi bu sene de gsoc öğrencilerine sürprizler hazırladığını söylemişti. Postayı almam gereken tarihin üzerinden iki üç hafta geçmesine ve herkesin listede ikide bir sürprizin ne kadar süper olduğunu söyleyip beni meraktan çatlatmasına rağmen yine de posta gelmeyince bana da boynumu büküp işime devam etmek kalmıştı… Sonunda dün posta elime ulaştı! :) Karl Fogel‘dan imzalı Producing Open Source Software kitabı!

Her gsoc öğrencisine giden kitapta olduğu gibi benimkinde de “Happy Hacking!” yazısı ve Karl’ın imzası var. Ama bir tanesinde (easter egg diyorlar) özel bir mesaj gizliymiş, malesef bana rast gelmedi :)

Bu arada kitap özgür lisansla yayınlandığı için online olarak okuyabilir ya da PDF olarak indirebilirsiniz.

Last week I went Ankara for the biggest FOSS event of Turkey!

I was an invited speaker at a panel entitled: “Women in Computing: Career to the Life“. Other speakers were Prof. Dr. Nese Yalabik from METU, chair of Department of Computer Technology and Programming Reyyan Ayfer from Bilkent University, and Fusun Nebil. As you can guess from the panel’s name, the main topic was about women in computer science, how to encourage more women into computing, what to do and what not to do, etc. I specifically talked about academic and social life of a woman computer engineering student, and then I discussed advantages and disadvantages of being a woman in free software and Linux community.

And a pretty good news was, I won an award: “The Most Hard-Working Penguin of 2007″ from Turkish Linux Users Association. It is so sweet, a little crystalline penguin sits on a wood panel:

Anyway, it’s time to work hard about my SoC project. Details are coming soon, wait! ;)

Note: Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to interested in console games for a long time. Steven (author of Linux Quake HOWTO and my team friend of LinuxQuake.org) sent me a screenshot from Tomb Raider Legend. Last time I played Tomb Raider was 6 years ago, and I suprised to see her in this gothic style. Damn cool!

Next Saturday, i’ll be giving two Ruby seminars in IBM Linux. First one will be about nuts and bolts about Ruby. It will took one and a half hour – i hope.

The second one will be about GTK programming with Ruby. I’m planning to talk about GTK and its features for a while, then we’ll see how can we make things easier with using Glade. It’ll be like a workshop. If nothing goes wrong, i’ll show how to make a web browser in 5 minutes like Rubyzilla.

Anyway… It’ll be good to see my old friends in Ä°stanbul ;)

PS: It won’t be my first seminar about Ruby, but others were at universities. So it’s a bit easy to talk about general features. But this time, i’ll talk to specialists in IBM. So i’m thinking to talk about advanced topics about Ruby.

So any suggestions are welcome :)

Important Note: You have to register your name at least one day before the seminar. It’s IBM’s security politics, i don’t know about it. Register from Here.

William Henry Gates III geldi, ve beni bir kez daha ticari zekasına ağzım açık bırakarak gitti… Hırs bu kadar gözle görülür hale en son ne zaman geldi, bir insan beyin kıvrımlarından geçen en ufak ihtimalleri böylesine kuvvetle nasıl yok etmeye çalışır, acaba gerçekten vizyon dediği şeye inanıyor mu, yoksa vizyon dediği şey = para mıydı… Herneyse…

Microsoft’un şimdiye kadar, gözlediğimiz en çiğ yayılma stratejisi, ürün anahtarının elden ele dolaşmasına ve lisanslı yazılımının ücretsiz dağıtılmasına bir şekilde göz yummasına; sonra da kullanıcı sayısı belli bir niteliğe ulaşınca zorla çatır çatır kullanıcıları ya da şirketleri lisans ödemeye zorlamasıydı. Microsoft’un e$$iz mühendisleri için, üzerinde bir süre çalışıldığında korsana karşı daha sağlam bir sistem yaratmaları işten bile değildi, ama o yine kullanıcıların üzerinde aşinalık ya da alışkanlık yaratma stratejisini izledi, ve pazarda 1 numara haline geldi.

Sonra ne oldu?

Etrafında olan bitenlerin farkında olan insanların yönettiği ülkeler, peşisıra Linux’a geçmeye başladı. Böylece, Bill amca’nın gözleri haritaya baktığında Ortadoğu’yu yeşil bir alanda istiflenmiş $’ler şeklinde görmeye başladı.

Peki, sonra ne oldu?

Milli eğitim, yüzbinlerce öğretmene ve okula (ve bu okulların milyonlarca öğrencisini varın siz düşünün) bilgisayar dağıtma projesine girişti.

Varan 1: Bill Gates para kokusunu aldı, ve anında Türkiye’ye damladı. Amacı, daha çok kullanıcıyı sistemine bağımlı hale getirmek olan birinden bu davranışı beklememek fazla iyimserlik olurdu herhalde. Üstelik, yüzbinlerce öğretmenin, okulun ve öğrencilerinin topyekün ne kadar büyük bir kitle oluşturduğunu düşünürsek milyonlara tekabül eden bir rakam bu. Eh, sonuçta bilgisayarlar gözgöre göre içinde Microsoft ürünleri ile gitti…

Peki, şimdi ne oldu?

Pardus çıktı, insanlar dağıtımı kopyalayarak birbirine dağıtmaya başladı, insanlar kendi ülkelerinin geliştirdiği bir işletim sistemini çoşkuyla karşıladı, merak etti.

Varan 2: Bill Gates, Pardus’un sandığından daha büyük bir tehdit olduğunu kavradı, ve soluğu yine anında Türkiye’de aldı. Gene vizyonermütevaziadam rollerinde “İlk Bilgisayarım” diye dandik bir proje sürdü ortaya. Belli ki, bu sefer de daha bilgisayara yeni adım atacak kullanıcıları hedefliyordu — (ki bu Linux hakkındaki önyargıları da kulaktan dolma duymuş güruhtan kullanıcılar ise eğer; daha önce görmedikleri bir işletim sistemi ile *boğuşmak* yerine, Kırpık İşletim Sistemi Windows Starter Kit zımbırtısına -diğer lisanslı Windows sürümlerine göre hatırı sayılır bir ucuzlukla- almak daha kolaylarına gelecekti.

Şimdi top, son kullanıcılarda. Ve Bill Gates’in şu an uyguladığı strateji belli; zorlanmadan satın alınabilecek bir İşletim Sistemi (!) ile gene yüzbinlerce yeni kullanıcıyı avlayacak, kendi yazılımlarına bağımlı hale gelen birer köle haline getirecek, sonra da (hiçbir son kullanıcı 3 uygulama, 7 pencere çalıştıran süper bir bilgisayara 1 seneden fazla dayanamaz çünkü) gene diğer üst dağıtımlara geçmeye zorlanacaklar (upgrading için de bir güzellik bekliyoruz tabii). Tabii kendi üzerimize düşen, olabildiğince potansiyel ‘av’ı bu çarklardan uzaklaştırabilmek ..

Bugün, 20 senelik hayatımın ilk seminerini verdim :)

Konu: Ruby Programlama Dili‘ydi; önce genel birkaç özellik ve temel felsefesinden; sonra birkaç dille kıyaslamasından, basit kod örneklerinden ve ekstra birkaç özellikten daha bahsedip bitirdim.

İlgilenenler; seminerin html halini buradan görebilir.

Linux dünyasındaki insanların nasıl daha etkin sunum verebilecekleriyle ilgili ipuçları içeren minik NASIL belgesi, Event-HOWTO‘nun çevirisi şurada.

.

Gezegen‘e merhaba ve iyi dilekleri için herkese teşekkür.
Tam zamanlı bir iş sayılmasa da, ilk işime, Bilgi İşlem Daire Başkanlığı‘nda birkaç gün önce başladım, şimdilik “ufaklık” adını verdiğimiz 16 MB RAM + 800 MB hard diske sahip 95 model bir dizüstüye Debian kurmaya çalışıyoruz. Pencere yöneticisi olarak hafif birşeyler bakıyoruz tabii ki. Belki flwm ya da xfce olabilir.

Bu arada, dün daha önce farkına varmadığım bir siteye rastladım; RubyQuiz. “Perl Quiz of the Week”‘den esinlenerek her hafta ruby-listesine bir soru gönderiliyor, belli bir süre geçtikten sonra cevaplarınızı gönderiyorsunuz, böylece hem eğlenmiş, hem de kendinizi geliştirmiş oluyorsunuz (soruların pek de kolay olmadığı aşikar :).

Bu sene üçüncü sınıfını okuduğum bölümümde Görsel Programlama adı altında C# dilini göreceğiz.
Bilindiği üzere .net teknolojisiyle alakalı bir dil bu. O yüzden açıkçası dersin başlarında biraz korktum; acaba uygun bir editör var mı? Acaba Linux’la ilgili bir sorun çıkar mı?

Eve gelir gelmez, hemen bilgisayarımın başına geçtim ve Debian deposunda minik bir araştırmadan sonra o sihirli kelimeleri yazdım :)

apt-get install monodevelop

Mono projesi geçen sene ülkemize de gelen, Gnome’cuların da çok yakından tanıyacağı Miguel de İcaza tarafından liderlenilen bir proje. Amaçları, GNU/Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X ve Windows tabanlı makinelerde çalışabilen .net uyumlu araçlar yaratabilmek olan Miguel ve ximian ekibi 2001 yılında duyurdukları bu projeyi şimdilerde hemen hemen microsoft’un .net teknolojisiyle geliştirilen (asp.net de dahil) tüm uygulamalarını çalıştırabilecek düzeye gelmiş.

Not1: Mono & C# hakkında daha ayrıntılı Türkçe bilgi bu adreste mevcut.

Not2: Geliştirme kısmı, MonoDevelop‘la hallolabildiği gibi, emektar Anjuta‘da da hemen hemen yapılabiliyor ;)