baran.ozgul.net

Haters will hate

2011-11-02T15:14:00.001-07:00

John Gruber again on just how much google sucks.
Google’s New ‘Native’ Gmail App for iPhone and iPad

GTAC 2011 KeyNote Speech

2011-11-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

Alberto Savoia gave an interesting keynote at the Google Test Automation Conference in Mountain View this year.

Imagine the first movie you watch to be Rio in 3D

2011-10-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

This year, Eti (read Turkey's Cadbury), the company that set the anchor in Turkish people's hearts as the producer of many memorable and tasty snacks, are celebrating their 50th anniversary through a series of surprise events. These events vary from unannounced busking gigs by famous Turkish musicians to making it snow in one of the warmest cities of south. My favorite, and I think this is the most recent one, is this:

The Eti team travel to Rize Çamlıkköy in North Sea Region, build an open air cinema and invites the villagers, most of who have never been to a cinema in their lives, to watch 20th Century Fox's "Rio" in 3D. The pictures and the clips from before and during the event are amazing.

A short advert about the event:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150314383308285

Good news for bloggers

2011-09-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Good news for bloggers!
The new Google Blogger interface is excellent! A UI revamp that was long overdue, but it feels like it's going to be worth the wait.

What I like the most:
- It's much faster than the old version,
- Very snappy, almost no page refreshes were required to manage my blogs
- Navigation is excellent, very few clicks gets me to sections I need.
- The analytics integration is even more organic now

Well done Google Blogger team, I am impressed!

What is manual testing good for?

2011-09-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

I don't closely follow Michael Bolton (the test specialist, not the one that sucks - see "Office Space"). But this passage in his uTest interview resonates with what I believe manual testing should be about.

" Meanwhile, I observe that many Western firms—mostly the Americans—are making life difficult for testers in India and other developing countries. These firms didn't know much about testing to begin with. They viewed it as a rote, clerical activity, piecework, checking work, commodity work that delivered little value. They knew how to do checking, sort of, very slowly and very expensively. But they didn't know how to do testing, or how to increase its value, so they focused on cost and outsourced it.

The developing countries have millions of intelligent people who want to develop skills, but the West is still requiring these overprescribed, expensive, low-value, confirmatory approaches in which smart human testers are being asked to behave like slow, dumb machines. Confirmatory tests do find problems, but to a great degree, programmers should be pairing and low-level automated tests to squash those problems before testers ever see them. Then free up the testers to look for higher-level problems and previously unanticipated risks."

Testing the Limits with Michael Bolton: Part I | Software Testing Blog
http://blog.utest.com/testing-the-limits-with-michael-bolton-part-i/2010/01/

The manual testing is most effective when it's done to generate ideas about how to test an application or when it is impossible or not cost effective to automate. At Google we try to play by this rule when making decisions when to introduce manual testing resources for a project.

Some call this the "exploratory testing", and I couldn't care less about the nomenclature. :)

Varyag, an urban legend in Istanbul has been located!

2011-08-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

Heh, I remember Varyag causing a stir in Istanbul when it was towed under the Bosphorus bridge because of its height. Then papers wrote it was bought by China to be converted into a floating theme park. It's now being tested as an aircraft carrier.

Here is what BBC had to say about this in 2001: "A floating casino".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1632156.stm

China's first aircraft carrier launches amid regional tensions

Sea trials of former Soviet craft underline China's naval ambitions and fuel concerns about growing military strength

View or comment on Baran Ozgul's post »

Godaddy: It takes a rifle and a CEO to ruin it all

2011-07-31T00:53:00.000-07:00

I hadn't heard this until a friend tipped me. Back in March'11 godaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons videotaped himself and his "team", hunt down and kill an elephant in Zimbabwe. Closed caption in the 3 minute video says they did this to protect the villagers who would otherwise face starvation since the elephants were damaging the crops. The video also shows villagers butchering the elephant and fighting for each other over pieces of the animal.

I am not staying with godaddy for another second. I doubt this was the first animal murdered by Parsons. I don't want to be related to this entity anymore. I started the transfer of all my domains to gandi.net.

Chinese county photoshop fail

2011-06-28T23:35:00.001-07:00

I don't know why this keeps happening, but yet it does!

Chinese government photoshop disaster goes viral

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web

2011-06-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

Google's official blog post on Google+ launch.

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web

Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com

2011-06-28T13:36:00.000-07:00

An interesting read by Steven Levy, on how Google+ came into existence.

Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social | Epicenter | Wired.com

Now off to some field trialling.

WANTED: Web site developer for a research project

2010-11-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

A firend of mine is looking for someone to create her a website for a research project of hers. If anyone wants to contribute to an interesting academic research project and make a bit of an income, contact me.

Here is her description of the project:

"I am looking for someone to build a joomla-type (content management system) website for a research project. The basic idea - I will need participants (around 20 at a time) to be able to sign into the website, and fill out a questionnaire (saving this data). After this, they will be directed to an interactive experiment with two stages. In the first stage, they will be asked to solve a series of nonogram games in a limited time amount (likely 5 minutes). Each time they win the game, that needs to be tracked (saved as a variable). They will be paid per game, so the saved number of wins will be multiples by some amount and saved as a new variable. In stage 2, they will be asked if they want to have a partner. If they say no, stage 2 will be exactly like stage 1. If they say yes, they should be randomly partnered with one of the other online participants who also said yes. For the partners, they should have the ability to chat with each other (only with each other), and they will each complete the nonogram games.

So, I need someone to build this who can implement an on/off chat function limited to certain online individuals, and create a nonogram game with trackable outcomes. I think those are the key functions, along with text and other basic items

Baron Funkenhausen (My Band) live at Google London

2010-04-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

My band performed on 5th of February at the Google London office. This was our first ever gig. This is the first of 5 videos, follow through links on YouTube play list for the rest of the shots.

Goodies from Google, only a fool would pass.

2010-04-01T10:38:00.001-07:00

April fools' day jokes from Google started pouring into my inbox this morning. You can now apparently store anything in Google Docs, for example your car keys or your cellphone. Or you can ask the question 'Where am I?' to in Google Search for Mobile, and you will discover your whereabouts. I turn out to be in Laputa.

My favorite is the Google Translate for Animals. This is hilarious.

Both Google Books and Google Streetview announced their 3D features too.

Sending a task to the background on Linux

2009-10-14T03:58:00.000-07:00

Often I find my self having typed something on the command line and waiting the task to finish. I've just learnt there are better ways of doing this:

"... CTRL Z usually puts a job to the background and u get a bash prompt back , then if u type: - jobs , all the backgrounded processes r given a 'job No' the u can type:- fg(job No) and that job will be brought to the fore. I'm not at me linuxbox at the mo so thats from memeory , but think its more or less accurate.

If u need the background process to keep running rather than remain in suspended state .... after staring the program press CTRL Z and type bg (background). the program u invoked earlier will keep running in the background rather than remain suspended"""

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/send-process-to-background-202974/

Adding maps to my wife's travel posts.

2009-08-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

My wife wanted to add some sort of location information to the individual entries she have been posting to her travel blog, http://gezgin.ozgul.net. She had been complaining that such a simple feature was missing from Google's Blogger for so long now, I felt obliged to implement a poor man's map solution for Blogger. It's indeed missing at the moment, but we are working on it. :)

So to clarify, what she needed was:

Be able to set a location for a given post. E.g. she would like to add the latitude and longitude information of Bodrum, Turkey as a meta-data, into the post she wrote about Bodrum
Be able to display this location information for each of her posts, in the post footer. E.g. "Posted by: John Doe, Location: Bodrum, Turkey".
And be able to display a Map of the location next to the post.

I earned that day's dinner by the help of some simple scripting and, Google's beta blogger site, http://draft.blogger.com. Here is the final result: http://gezgin.ozgul.net.

I looked at http://draft.blogger.com, where Google Blogger team serves a public beta-tester version of blogger, with features not yet released on http://www.blogger.com. There I noticed the feature to set a location for a given post. Apparently my wife was not the only one asking for this, and Google Blogger team was responding. With this feature (still in beta), you can then see the location in the post footer. Still using the http://draft.blogger.com, I went to the settings of my blog and clicked through to Layout > Edit HTML. I expanded the widgets int HTML view and searched for the word 'location'. I came across a 'span' tag with a class attribute 'post-location'. This was indeed the widget section which printed the location name in the post footer.

Those who have used the Google Maps API will know, that in order to display a Google Maps widget on the page, I needed to add a 'div' tag here. Since there would be more than one posts per page, the div would have to have a unique id. This is easily doable by generating an id to this tag using a value unique to the post; I used the internal post id:

<div expr:id='"map-" + data:post.id' style='width: 250px; height: 400px;'/>

To be able to display a map, I also needed to know the latitude and longitude that the map would center on. In the post-location there are some references such as:
data:post.location
data:post.location.mapsUrl

but nothing like:
data:post.location.latitude or data:post.location.longitude.

Depending on this publicly available knowledge only, my best bet was to use the available data:post.location.mapsUrl, which usually has a pretty standard format, to parse the latitude and longitude values:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Bruges%2C+Belgium%4051.2094345%2C3.2252377&z=10

So I added a javascript function to the template HTML, and implemented a brute force parsing inside:

 function load(id, mapsUrl) {
   if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
     var coords = mapsUrl.split('%40')[1];
     var lat = coords.split('%2C')[0];
     var long = coords.split('%2C')[1].split('&')[0];
    
     // div tag, unique for a post
     var divElement = document.getElementById('map-' + id); 
     if (divElement == null) {alert(id + 'not found');return;}
     var map = new GMap2(divElement);
     map.setCenter(new GLatLng(lat, long), 13);
     var marker = new GMarker(new GLatLng(lat, long));
     map.addOverlay(marker);
     map.setUIToDefault();
   }
 }

Finally, inside the widget, I added a JavaScript section, which calls the load function I added above:

<script type='text/javascript'>
load("<data:post.id/>", "<data:post.location.mapsUrl/>");</script>

Check out the page source code at http://gezgin.ozgul.net for the real action.