Started using twitter feed

I've just started using twitter feed.

It is supposed to automatically tweet using my blog post's title in the associated twitter account.

I had already connected my twitter account to my facebook status.
So from now on, when I write a blog post, there will be an automatically generated tweet for the post, and a facebook status update.

Guess what? Facebook offers an application to update your twitter as well! What if I set both? Do they check for "circular automated updating"? Does such a thing exist?

Look all the power I have. I can push the entire internet in an infinite loop!

Collatz conjecture

Collatz sequence, if nothing else, is an interesting thing.

The clever German mathematician, Collatz, all of a sudden thought that any positive integer number, would create a sequence ending with 1 (or alternatively entering the 4-2-1-4 loop) when the following partial function is applied to it.

collatzSequence x
    | x <= 1 = [1]
    | even x = x : collatzSequence (div x 2)
    | odd  x = x : collatzSequence (3*x+1)

[ This is valid Haskell code by the way ]


And Collatz was right, most probably. That's not for sure since no proof for it exists, but using quite a lot of computing power a counter-example couldn't be found. So the question of whether Collatz was right or not stands as an open problem.


I, humbly, did some experiments and tried to have an idea looking at the lengths of such sequences. In addition to the analysis of lengths I had also tried to plot the sequences and investigate where sequences for consequent numbers catch up.
It was at least 3 (or 4?) years ago. And now that I present a more scientific profile, I thought I might come up with some more clever points. Initial results are *NOT* promising, but I'll keep on thinking.

Switching languages

[This is a rather unorganised chattering about programming languages and related thoughts.]

Being a devoted user of Microsoft technologies for some time, I am experiencing hard times switching to the real world again.

I was very much used to using C# for everything. I've been using it from the days of framework version 1.1 (now the version is 4.0). Actually I should make my point clearer, as a person suitable for the left-top part of this graphic, I've been using many technologies in parallel. Let's list the programming languages I used in the past 5 years:

C, C++, PHP, Javascript, Java, C#, Perl, Ruby (On Rails), Haskell. (tried to keep it chronologically ordered)


They all have pros and cons, compared to others. But I must admit; I loved programming in C back in the day, I never really liked programming in Java (although I had considerable amount of work done with it), and I enjoyed programming in C# very much.

As I said they all have some advantages over the others. For example Haskell is wonderful for some tasks, that you cannot deny using it. On the other hand Ruby with the wonderful On Rails framework was by far the best choice for our Senior project's web based information system.

I am pretty sure I can use the languages listed above (and possibly some others) effectively. But the one I feel myself comfortable with is C#. There are many reasons for this; such as it being a relatively newly designed language and consequently having a nicer design, the wonderful IDE support of VS, and many more.

I am now doing some programming for my PhD studies, and I am about to choose a language and a respective environment, given the constraint that I am using a MacBook now. It is too bad that my native (programming) language, C#, cannot be compiled to native code. (OK I know there are some options, but they are all hacks and tweaks)

Social networking (cont.)

As I already listed here, I have accounts on most of this social networking thingies.

Now I've one more: Google Wave, the tool even Google doesn't know everything about :)

We'll see.

PS: If you ever want to find me on Wave, I'm "ozgurakgun".

Edit your PATH environment variable in Mac OS X

I am fairly new to this environment, and if things are not done automatically I easily get lost.

Editing the PATH environment variable on Windows (Vista for this case) would be straightforward for me: right click computer - select properties - change settings - find environment variables button under advanced tab - here you go.

It is (of course) something similar in Mac OS X. At least they have the same terminology :)

open the file "~/.profile" with a text editor - add one more export line, making sure you copy & paste from the existing line properly :)


That's all!

Social networking

I've just edited my Blogger profile. There was one interesting question though, asking about my homepage url.

What can I say? I don't have a proper homepage, and I have many proper homepages at the same time. Have a look at the following listing:

• http://www.facebook.com/ozgurakgun -- Facebook account
• http://www.twitter.com/ozgurakgun -- Twitter account
  
• http://ozgurakgun.blogspot.com -- Blogger account [this one!]
• http://www.ozgurakgun.name/?en -- Yes, I own a domain with my name :)
  
• http://stdhomes.ieu.edu.tr/~ozgurakgun -- Student homepage back in IUE
  
• http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ozgur -- Homepage in St Andrews
  

Scary, isn't it?

Hi!

I always wanted to have a blog. And I did have, several times.

Having a blog is obviously not a difficult task to accomplish. However maintaining it (~ posting enough to be called "active") is hard.

After twitter-ing successfully(!) for some time, I - once again - wanted to have a blog. 140 characters is not always enough :)

Now the question is: how long will this blog last?


We'll see :)