Tree of Life

Today marks my 14th year in the USA. In 4 short years, I will have lived in the US more than Turkey (18 years), where I was born. Here is a brief summary: F1 Student Visa (Summer 1998 - Bachelors), OPT - Optional Practical Training (Summer 2002), F1 Student Visa (2003 - Masters), OPT (Summer 2003), H1-B non-Immigrant Visa (Late 2003), H1-B renewal (2004 August - Job Change), PERM application for Green Card (2005), I-140 (Oct 21, 2005), H1-B Renewal (2006), H1-B Renewal (new job), PERM application for Green Card (2008 - new job), I-140 (2009 new job), H1-B renewal (2011), I-485 (2011 Aug - Adjustment of Status), I-765 (2011, Application of Employment Authorization), I-131 (2011, Application of Travel Document), I-765 renewal (2012 June), I-131 renewal (2012 June), Service Request for I-485 (2012 June), Service Request for Service Request for I-485 (2012-August, not kidding), Service Request for I-765 and I-131 renewals (2012 August) ... still an alien...

After about 2.5 years of on and off reading, I finally finished the 5 book pentalogy of A Song of Ice and Fire (which is still missing a few books). Without a doubt, this was the second best adventure/fiction novel I read after Hobbit/LoTR series. The detailed account of histories that go back up to 8000 years (according to the White Book of the Kingsguard), the variety of inhabitants, places, family trees it does take you away into a world full of wonder. I like the brutal reality of the book as well; the most beloved character, Ned Stark, dies half way of the first book!! I read that chapter 5 times to make sure I understood it correctly. Families split, villains all powerful, weak characters suffering; I am not a sadist, but this made the read much more captivating than the usual sunshine-and-bubblegum storylines. Following the HBO Series along with the books was another joy that is a priviledge to only a few generations yet. Looking forward to The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spr...

Figured out that the 0xc0000225 error is being caused by an extended feature (at least in VirtualBox - which is brilliant) called Enable IO APIC and the error goes away.

I found a great article via Hacker News by Instagram Engineering where they have a detailed description of the architecture layers, starting with OS all the way down to the DB. Very impressive. I want to emulate a cloud installation of a server using EC2 Amazon cloud (already tried a micro version of Windows). Next step is to configure it as Tomcat Java server + LAMP and go through some tutorials!

" What gets measured, gets managed "

Getting ready for the Windows 8 Developer Event , I finally got myself to install the W8 Beta that I downloaded years ago . Funny, neither VMWare workstation or MS Virtual PC was able to run the installer (returning "HAL_initialization_failed" error). I gave VirtualBox a try after reading some success stories and it works nicely. The interface of VBox seems to be pretty impressive.

There are 3 most popular ways to get a Green Card to live and work in US: Through Marriage with a US Citizen, Employment Sponsorship and the Diversity Lottery. I would like to articulate on the unfairness of the process for the Employment based applicants and its repercussions. After getting a scholarship to study at Brandeis University, I arrived in the United States on August 28, 1998 on an F-1 Student Visa. After graduating with my Master's degree, I had 1 year of OPT - Optional Practical Training which allowed me to work for companies that were in fields similar to my concentration. Next chapter in my immigration story is the H1-B Work Visa which is frowned upon. This visa provides an entry point for skilled immigrants and it is one of the very few points of entry to the US based on merit. Scorn on this quota of about 85k is well deserved on an emotional level, especially when considering high unemployment of today's workplace. Yet, working in IT and being involved with...

I am enamored with the open coursework offerings of MIT and Stanford. I would contemplate hard on going to college and go under hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt if these high quality offerings were provided for free. Why not have all material for free and offer exams ala certifications? CNBC Article . Currently watching Special Relativity from Leonard Susskind

There is a serious debate on taxation reform and I think very simple observations are enough to show the direction we need to be heading. Companies are flush with cash and individual savings are very low. NYT had an article on how low Apple's tax rate was; the most valuable company on earth with highest profits. Combined with the inequality of pay and tax rates on different income levels, I think it is obvious what the solution should look like!

A website constantly asked for the Silverlight to be upgraded. When downloading the exe, I kept receiving a prompt for a Network Resource that I did not even have !! I found the fix from the following site: (Silverlight Issues) .

When switching to Verizon FIOS, I retired my SMC router. Recently, I was complaining about the weak wireless signal to my HTPC which is on the other side of our condo. Suddenly, it made sense to use the SMC as an extender. Simply, login to the extra routers menu and disable DHCP. Switch mode from Gateway to Repeater (Bridge with some models). Connect a client ethernet cable from your main router to the WAN port of your secondary one. You should be done! Good guides: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/23864-42-exactly-connect-router-link-first http://ask-leo.com/can_i_use_a_second_wireless_access_point_to_extend_my_wireless_network.html

In my efforts to create a lab at home, I thought 6gb would not cut it. I just installed 16 GB (4x4GB) and am ready to roll. (after the "VMWare Workstation or Player RAM Issue under Disk Disguise" incident below). I also converted my 4x1.5 TB RAID 5 to RAID 10 (4 disks for a total of 3TBs - striped and mirrored). You can definitely tell that there is a performance gain and 3TB seems to be pretty sufficient for me .. already have 1.4TB left.

American Bulls was an interesting site I stumbledupon recently. Not sure what algorithms they are using, but comparing with the charts, they seem to be pretty good. Worth taking a look.

You might see the following error when starting your VM: Operation on file *.vmdk failed. If the file resides on a remote file system, please make sure your network connection and the server where this disk resides are functioning properly. If the file resides on a removeable media, reattach the media. Choose Retry to attempt the operation again. Choose Abort to terminate this session. Choose Continue to forward the error to the guest operating system. This might cause a hangup or app crash - just decrease the RAM on the VM and try again. Helped me!

Yes, I admit it, I am a geek, nerd (whatever you call it) and I do have a Desktop PC (and I am proud). I've been keeping its shell ( antec 180 ) the same for the last 10 years or so, but the interior has been changing ever since from P2 days up to Socket 1366. One of the things that remain the same is my old HDDs. I recently (and finally) decided to build a RAID. Reading about it, RAID 5 seemed to be a good idea, where you get x-1 hard disk worth of space. You have a decent tolerance for faults, unless 2 HDDs crash at the same time (which is unlikely). So I had a collection of HDDs separately living in the case. I designated 4 x 1.5 TB disks to become the RAID (called it RAIDer - cheezy I know). I also had another 1.5 TB and 0.5 TB as spare. I did a hardcore cleaning operation and filled the spares with all the data. Research lead me to using physical RAID cards for better performance but I used Intel's Storage Matrix solution. RAID formation reduced the 6 TB diskspace to 4.09...

Started to be interested in node.js ... looks interesting. It is "sugar on V8 JS engine". It is amazing how Javascript is gaining popularity - I remember reading the Atwood's Law in CodingHorror.com : (great blog) Atwood's Law : any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript. Needed to sharpen my Fedora VM to get things going. Follow the instructions at https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installation git clone https : // github . com / joyent / node . git cd node git checkout v0 . 6 . 7 ./ configure make sudo make install [sedatiko@sedora ~]$ which node /usr/local/bin/node [sedatiko@sedora ~]$ node > 2+2+ ... 2 6 > Good Starter video by Ryan Dahl

If you are having problems removing Office 2007 components (like I did, esp with OneNote), use the following script, which removes all components manually. http://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/443-office-2007-remove (I'm saving you about 2 hours here :) )

Continuing from where we left off in Cloud Foundry Test - 1 ... .. with the latest version of Fedora, I was not able to install rubygems ... so I downloaded and installed vs 1.3.2 (dont know why, probably a stale post I read)... after managing to install Gem I ran the following ( http://rubygems.org/pages/download ): gem update --system ...which worked ok... so where were we??? Following the vmc Getting Started instructions in YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqr8xWQlRcM ) ruby -v (check) gem -v (I had 1.8.3 with some deprecated components) sudo gem update --system (already done as above) sudo gem install vmc (!!!) Connect to api.cloudfoundry.com vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com (will receive ok) Now login to cloudfoundry vmc login (using the temp password) vmc passwd (to reset the password) Write a small ruby application require 'sinatra' get '/' do "Hello from Cloud Foundry - sedatiko's account" end Go into the directory you have the code an...

One of the best sites for Japanese Culture Culture Japan - Your portal to Japan .. it is like walking through the streets .. I miss Japan (eventhough I spent only 3 days there :)

Cloud Foundry is a great offering from VMWare - Platform as a Service (PaaS). It allows you to host applications (your code) in certain technologies (ruby, perl) without any hosting or administration. As a "lazy developer" this is heaven, since all you need to worry about is your code working, you do not need to maintain environments... However, even to gear for such a test, you need an environment, which was my trigger to go with Linux. So... Download VMWare Workstation and install Download Fedora iso Create new VM and install Fedora so far so good...then there are fun troubleshooting exercises, like: how to update the sudoers with my account setting up the linux display options etc .. yawn .. sudo yum install gcc make git ...