I created an aggregated RSS feed that combines 28 different student blogs listed on Georgia Tech’s Student Blogs page. Yahoo! Pipes is such a great tool for manipulating RSS feeds easily.

Being a student for too long, I’m not a big fan of assignments or projects anymore. Among all assignments I had to do at Georgia Tech, there is one that I truly appreciate and will never forget:

First year. First semester. Alex Orso’s class on Software Development Processes. First assignment is about requirements gathering. There’s no written information given about the assignment. To learn what the assignment is about, each group has to interview the professor for 15 minutes. In a way, the professor is the customer, who needs an application developed, and it’s our job to figure out the requirements by interviewing him.

Orhan Pamuk, a prominent Turkish writer who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, lets readers take a glimpse at his inner-world and what lead him to become a writer in his Nobel Lecture:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

You know that you are living in a third world county if:

• You have to waste your time by waiting in queues all the time
• It takes twice the time it would normally take to go to anywhere because of traffic
• You don’t see anyone smiling when you are walking on the streets
• Your government does not provide you quality education, health service or transportation
• The last thing you want to trust is your legal system, it takes ages to conclude any legal case
• Your country is threatened by terrorism
• You have to risk your life and waste your time for military service
• Your money becomes colored paper outside your country
• No one obeys the rules or laws
• Your government is censoring the Internet

You might be tempted to figure out how many of your friends on Facebook have twitter accounts.

twitter does not support Facebook for finding people you know. There are no mashups that let you do this, because APIs provided by Facebook and twitter do not provide all the necessary information to perform this task.

You get hashed versions of your friends’ emails, however twitter does not let you find people using this information. What twitter needs to do is to hash all email addresses it has, and create a Facebook application to migrate the data.

From an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child association:

You call your project one laptop per child, and you mean that every kid in the entire world is going to have a laptop. Is that realistic?

If I was realistic, I wouldn’t have started this project. It’s the dream, but we’ll get close…

We need more dreamers in this world ….

If you’re one of those people that spend most of their day in front of a computer, you should make an extra effort to exercise regularly. It’s not just for staying in shape and being healthy, exercising increases your productivity as well. If I’m feeling depressed and lonely, it means I need to exercise. If I’m too excited and can’t concentrate, it means I need to exercise. Know yourself, and how your body works …

Birkaç hafta önce izlemiştim bu video‘yu, Türkiye’de internet alanında girişimcilik ne durumda diye merak ediyordum. Silikon Vadisi’nden döndüğüm için her şeye yabancı gözüyle, eleştirel olarak baktığımdan olsa gerek birden aklıma geliverdi, oysa ilk izlediğimde beni bu kadar rahatsız etmemişti:

itiraf.com gibi sitelerin kurucusu Ersan Özer’e soruyorlar, “İnternet üzerinden yatırım yapmak isteyen fikir sahiplerine nasıl bir yol izlemelerini tavsiye ediyorsunuz?” diye.

Kendisinin cevabı ise içler acısı: “Buna esinlenme mi denir, çalma çırpma mı denir bilmiyorum ama…” diyerekten başlıyor, sonra devam ediyor: “Zaten Amerika’da olağanüstü bir fikir veritabanı oluşmuş durumda… O fikri alsınlar, Türkiye’ye uyarlasınlar. Yeni fikir falan aramasınlar özetle, yurtdışından baksınlar, hangi fikir kafalarına yatıyorsa…. Yurtdışından fikri alsınlar, buraya uyarlasınlar.”

Imagine what you could do if we had establish standards on certain products regarding barcodes. Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, and they are not just phones any more, they have computing capabilities and internet connection. This opens a plethora of opportunities to make our lives easier.

Case 1: What if product barcodes were easily recognizable by our phones, then when we’re in a store, we would just scan the barcode, and our phone would search within 5 miles of distance using location based services and find us stores that offer the same product for a cheaper price.

I attended CloudCamp at San Francisco, it was an “unconference” about cloud computing. It was so exciting to be there among 300 developers, enterpreneurs and businessman. Being in Silicon Valley is one of the best parts of my U.S. experience, you can feel the innovation that is going on when you see all these passionate people talking about new technologies.The event was organized by a bunch of people, and they did it in less than 3 weeks. Sponsor money was used to provide food and cover other small expenses such as printing posters, name tags and t-shirts.