Avatar 3D

After a long time, I went to cinema, to the film Avatar. I was not sure wheter to see this film but I wanted to taste a 3D movie so this could be a good candidate for my first 3D film.

The film was more than I expected, but not the 3D effects. It had both sorrow and thrill. For the ones who was not seen it, I won't spoil it but here's a summary.

It's the year 2154 and humans want to mine a valueable mineral on the Planet Pandora. But this mineral lies under a great tree, in which all the Pandora folk lives. So humans want Pandorians to leave their homes but of course, Pandorians won't do it. So a war begins and one human, who controls a mind-controlled avatar (Pandorian body) for diplomatic purposes, sees the fact that this is not fair and lines up on the Pandorians side. Going further, he becomes the commander of them by achieving the rank "Toruk Macto".

I felt so ashamed of being a human while watching this film. How cruel these humans are!

Research Assistantship

Again, it's been a long time since I wrote last time. Things went unexpectedly and I've found myself in a position nowhere near I imagined.

I said that I applied Boğaziçi University for masters but although all of my qualifications were well above most of the applicants, I got rejected because that I did not bring a reference letter from my thesis advisor. Well, I went to him and he was off the office so I took the letters from my other professors. I thought these letters would be enough as they even admit students with 2,77 / 4.00 GPA! So reference letter should not have been a major issue. But it seems like it was.

Meanwhile, I had some job interviews but could not find an appropriate position according to my taste :)

Then my ex-professor who transferred to Kadir Has University from Işık University (where my BSc is from) offered me a position in his funded project. I was going to do my masters in Kadir Has University and get paid for working on the project. I accepted and started working. We are working on Graph Drawing and Visualization of Bioinformatics Networks. I'm using Pardus Linux and Python for my implementation works and I'm really happy about that. Thanks to my advisor who lets me be free on choosing my tools.

Our team consists of 3 members: me, my professor Cesim Erten and my ex-school-mate Melih Sözdinler. After I joined the team, I've done the unfinished part of their work and we submitted it to a conference and it got accepted. I'm really happy about that. I'll write about the paper when it's officially published (in February 2010).

My new university is pretty infant compared to my ex but I like it. At least everybody seems to be much more friendly. The biggest problem for me is that it takes 2-3 hours to get there and that much to come back home via public transport although we are in the same city. So I'm going to school on limited days.

Fall term is about to finish. I've taken Parallel Programming from Computer Engineering (my) department and Operating Systems, System Programming courses from IT department. They are mostly homework and presentation based. I've done my presentation on Parallel Sorting algorithms last Friday and it was good.

So, I'm a unofficial research assistant from now on. Great!

Back from Carleton, graduated!

Again, it's been a long time since I wrote last time. I've been struggling with writing my extensive Canada diaries in Turkish. So I couldn't write even a word here. I talked about my exchange plans and my final project. Our final project was a late success. It was late because at the first sight, we thought it was unsuccessful. But then I found out that it is indeed successful. We managed to get an error rate of 2.25% after we applied PCA on the channels.

Before finishing the project, I went to Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada. It was the 1st of January and -13*C when I got there. The weather was terrible going down to felt like -32*C. I stayed in the dorms of the university and I liked Carleton except for its dorms with cartoon-seperated walls. The system in university was both similar to and different from Işık University. In the first days, I found it difficult to talk and understand what I hear but after 3 weeks, I got used to it. Lecturers were great and they did their best to make us understand the material. They were welcoming to any kind of problem we faced preventing our studies (I would especially thank Julie Thorpe. She was the greatest instructor I've ever seen in my university life.). They were relax and I saw a nice learning / research environment.

University also provides great facilities to the students. There are over 120 student clubs and they are very active. I should admit that only Computer Society was a bit passive. They organized “Eclipse plug-in development seminar”, a faculty-student meeting, and some movie nights. That might be normal for 4 months but I get this result when I compare it with our club in Turkey.

Of course, I have to talk about Canadian People. They are very kind, respectful, trustworthy and helpful. But they won't talk first unless you start a chat. They are mostly busy people and rush all the day. But the foreigner people are more warm and welcoming. Because of that, most of my friends were non-Canadians.

Ottawa is a really pleasant city. I returned back to Turkey at the end of the April, when the best times of Ottawa had just been starting. It has a wonderful nature. Parks, green fields, waterfalls, bike paths of total 110 km... It is also very safe compared to Toronto. People, even women are not afraid to walk in the late hours of the night. Transportation is very easy. I also visited Toronto (and of course Niagara Falls) but I didn't like Toronto that much. It seems a bit dangerous.

I've been in Canada for 4 months and it was a great experience for me. Living on your own, without anybody you know to help, being obliged to speak only in English, seeing different cultures (Canada is a real mixture of cultures), meeting people from all over the world and of course examining the academic life there. I wanted to apply for Master of Computer Science in Carleton but the envelope carrying my reference letter had been opened by DHL on the way! A note was posted on the package: “This package has been inspected under the supervision of the shipper.”. Shipper seems to be the local carrier company, not my professor! So I could not apply for the masters program. Maybe I might try it later.

Among the other applications I've made, I've been admitted to Master of Artificial Intelligence program in Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. I've been put in waitlist of Purdue University, USA but then rejected because of the limited quota. And finally Sweden central placement system has lost my documents so I was rejected as they said “you haven't finished university, you haven't taken Algebra and Programming courses...”!

Returning back to Turkey, I graduated and I applied for Master of Computer Engineering in Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Now I'm between KUL and Boğaziçi. KUL will be more costly for me and recently we're facing liquidity problems. So it seems my next university will be Boğaziçi.

Exchange plans

I haven't written for a long time, among the reasons I can say is that blogspot is unreachable from Turkey and whenever it is reachable, it has a long response time. That's not the only reason of course. I've been very busy. I've completed my Pardus Internship and received my TOEFL scores. I've scored 105 (R:27, L:27, S:22, W:29) in iBt. That's a great score for me, I needed 92 to apply for exchange to Carleton University in Ottawa,ON,Canada. Then I applied and I was the only student nominated for this exchange agreement. I sent a course list that I'd like to take and after some iterations, they registered me to Computer Vision and Applied Cryptography with 3 additional social courses. But I will consider dropping some of them when I arrive there, figuring out their course loads and the study time requirements. I need 2 courses to take and I'll graduate when I return back to Turkey if I don't face any problems.

After the registration, they sent me the letter of acceptance and I applied for Canadian Visa with Student Permit. I've sent the application documents wednesday afternoon and my visa had come back the next tuesday! It is wonderful that they are that fast! The next step was to look for a plane ticket. I've spent my 2 days in searching for the cheapest and the best alternative and finally I've found one on http://www.ekobilet.com. The plane will take off on 1st of January and fly to Frankfurt and then Ottowa waiting me 6 hours in Frankfurt airport. My return flight is on 28th of April.

Meanwhile, I had made some research on the accomodation and decided to stay in the residences with the suggestion of some friends there. Hasan, Serhat and other people I've found through facebook has helped me a lot in deciding what to do in the preparation process. I want to thank all of them, especially Hasan. I've applied for the residences on the Carleton Central web site and specified my preferences (quiet, wake up and sleep early etc.) and they offered me a single suite Leeds residence room. Rooms are great as far I see on the net. There are 4 single rooms around a common kitchen and there are 2 bathrooms which are shared by 2 people each. The residences get open on 3rd of January and I'm flying there 2 days before so I will need to stay somewhere. We'll look at it when the time comes. But the only thing I know for now is that Ottawa is freezing cold around -19*C.

Nowadays I'm looking for the payment options for the residence fees and the health insurance. And I have started to pack up slowly. I won't bring my laptop there as I need a new one so I have to organize my files and take the important ones with me. I also started to-know, to-bring, to-do lists to avoid any surprizes on the way. Hope I haven't forgotten much to tell :)

We're now on holiday and we have already passed half of it :( Now I have to do the master application organization and study the courses I'm currently taking: Bioinformatics, Software Engineering, Computer Networks, Cultural Anthropology and the Final Thesis. I and my friend Remzi are working on the Driver Recognition project of Assist. Prof. M. Taner Eskil. I'm planning to focus on that issue in another post but as far as I can sum, the project aims to recognize the car driver by analyzing the driving features (acceleration, velocity, engine RPM, brake, steering). We're trying to do PCA on the features to find the most dominant features to reduce the processing time.

Hope to write soon! :)

Internship @ Pardus

I've entered my TOEFL exam and it was pretty good, except for the listening part in which I lost my attention and thought about the examination software (it was written in Java but the Cambridge, Longman etc. preparation CDs are prepared in Shockwave as I saw). I asked myself: "Why don't they write them in Java too so that I can use them on Linux? And guess what, at that moment, a lecture was being given on the computer and I lost lots of details :D

Nevermind, I started my third internship last week, in TÜBİTAK (National Scientific Research Center) on Pardus Linux Distribution Project. It's been very beneficial for me so far. I've learned lots of things about software, python, GUI design and opensource. I want to share what I've learned in this blog as much as I can do. You can see examples here. I've written a program called Sahip, which is an XML generator. It produces the installation settings for Yali (installation software of Pardus) to perform silent installs.

PyQt4 GUI Building
Let's start with PyQt4 GUI building. I used to think that we could not import GUI files from python modules and this caused us to refactor our python code whenever we wanted to change the gui, unlike GTK with Glade (you can import XML from python). But I was wrong. There was some options I could follow. One of them is the kdedesigner module for python. But I used the other one, inheriting the compiled GUI.

After you design a GUI on Qt Designer 4, you can compile it to Python code with:

pyuc4 gui.ui -o mygui.py -x

and after that we can import and inherit it as written below:

from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui
from sahip.usergui import Ui_UserDialog

class UserDialog(QtGui.QDialog):
  def __init__(self, caller=None, user=None):
    QtGui.QDialog.__init__(self, None)
    self.ui = Ui_UserDialog()
    self.ui.setupUi(self)
          
    self.ui.lineEdit.setText('test')
    # All the other stuff here or in other methods.

if __name__ == "__main__":
  import sys
  app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
  UserDia = UserDialog(None)
  UserDia.show()
  sys.exit(app.exec_())

That's all!

Opening up a new dialog
I imported UserDialog class above and used it as a dialog.

def slotUserNew(self):
      self.userDialog = QtGui.QDialog(self)
      self.userDialog.ui = UserDialog(self) # caller=self
      self.userDialog.ui.show()

Lists items with checkboxes

You can set all the items of a list have a checkbox near it with the following code:

for i in range(count):
  item = self.ui.groupList.item(i)
  item.setFlags(QtCore.Qt.ItemIsUserCheckable | QtCore.Qt.ItemIsEnabled)
  item.setCheckState(QtCore.Qt.Checked)

Handlers
In lists, I could only store the username of a user but the rest of the information should be stored somewhere else. That could be a dictionary, list etc. Dictionary was the most convenient for me but I had to define a dictionary for each list/combobox. That was a replication of code! So I wrote WidgetHandler, and specialized ListHandler, ComboBoxHandler to store them and defined addItem/removeItem, etc. methods to update both the dictionary and the widget. It was much more clear.


i18n

I have always wondered about internationalization and I saw that it was pretty easy. What you should do is to add the following code to the beginning of each of your files you want to be translated.

import gettext
__trans = gettext.translation('sahip', fallback=True)
_ = __trans.ugettext

and you will use _('string') instead of 'string' if you want that string to be translated. And here comes the pot file generation part. As you can see the example project on the link above, I have a tools, po and sahip directory. So I recommend you to create such directories. I put pot generator sh file into tools dir and po/pot files into po dir. After creating an empty po dir, you can execute the following script (above po dir)

#!/bin/bash
LANGUAGES=`ls po/*.po`
set -x

xgettext -L "python" -k__tr -k_ sahip/sahip sahip/*.py -o po/sahip.pot
for lang in $LANGUAGES
do
  msgmerge -U $lang po/sahip.pot
done

As you might understand, this script crawls through the given paths (sahip/sahip and sahip/*.py) and generates pot file by reading the py files and main (non-extensioned) sahip file. You will then find the pot file in your po directory. You can translate and rename it to lang.po format (tr.po, de.po, es.po). Then the python setup script will probably compile po file into mo file and copy it into proper place.


Setting Icon

1. Create a directory called images in the same directory of your codes.
   
2. Put an image file in it, such as icon.png
3. Create a qrc file such as resources.qrc and fill it with the content
   
   images/icon.png
   
   
4. Open your GUI with Qt4 Designer and click on ... button of windowIcon on the Property Editor when main form is selected.
5. A dialog will be shown, click on pen and then the open button (middle). Select the qrc file you created.
6. Select the icon appeared on the right side of the dialog and click OK.
7. Save the GUI.
8. On the console, apply the following command:
   

   
   pyrcc4 resources.qrc -o resources_rc.py
   

   
   
9. Generate your gui py file with pyuic4 and that's all!

Publishing the Code
I needed to copy YALI setup.py file and modify it for sahip. This file compiles po and qrc files, and then copy required files to the system for installation. Then I wrote a digestrelease.py script which copies the program directory to desktop and removes the unnecessary ones. Then the packager.py file compresses the directory and sha1sums it, updates a sample pisi pspec.xml file with the sha1sum, uploads the compressed targz file to ftp server and then build the pisi package, and install it.

It was a good way of automation for me. I could make modifications and try the result in seconds. I might have written this entry too confusing, sorry but I don't have much time. My next project is to develop a web site where files can be searched within the pisi packages so that for instance you can find which package the 'ls' file comes from. I'm currently writing the database generator and after I'll pass to the Django side.

Les Miserables

I've just finished the book Les Miserables from Victor Hugo. Yeah, it's pretty late for me, for a 21-old boy(or should I say man)! In my childhood, this novel was tought to be tough for children, so hard to read. I even remember my mother saying "Look at her! She even read the Les Miserables" for somebody whom I don't remember. Maybe I was really too young and told my subconscious even not to attempt to read that book or forgot about it later.

By the way, it was pretty easy to read it now. Because it was the Penguin simplified edition(3000-words Advanced) which I had bought in High School by mistake. I just had misunderstood which reading books we had to buy and bought the ones for the English Language class, who study English in detail. So I did not attempt to read them, until now. Getting prerpared for the TOEFL exam, I see that I have weakness of speaking and vocabulary. So I tought this book could help some. Yes, I learned more than 20 words.

The book is very beautiful, indeed I think the writer has some sadistic side because I felt really bad in the first 4 chapters(how can people be so cruel!). But afterwards, it tended to make me so curious abot what would be the next pages that I read it too fast. As a result, I probably missed a lot of words to learn. I recommend this book to be read!

New electrolyzers open up the way to Solar Century

In the earlier days of this week, while watching CNN International, I run into a wonderful news. The visitor was a professor from MIT and they were going to talk about a recent invention on storing solar energy.

As you may know, solar energy is known to be unlimited as long as the sun lives but limited as it can't be used efficiently because not only the solar panels can't absorb all the energy but also the energy can be obtained only during the daytime. It seems that the absorption is still a problem but the recent news promise in storing the excess energy.

The scientists at MIT, have found a new method to store the excess energy by dividing the water into its ingredients, Hydrogene and Oxygene. Heey, this is already being done worldwide, you might say. But this operation needed high maintenance costs and abnormal operation conditions(temperature, pressure, etc.). This new method, inspired by the photosynthesis, uses a new catalyst consisting of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode to produce Oxygen and another catalyst like platinum to produce Hydrogen and does not require any special conditions for the reaction to start.

As this is an easy-implementing method of storing energy, it is tought to change the world, contributing to the works on solutions for the global warming problem. But as the proffessor says, it will take 8 years for us to have these sets on our roofs. I wish it was closer if it was that easy to implement but maybe the other (efficient absorption) problem needs to be solved in order these products to be more efficient.

By the way, I have finished my internship. Nowadays I'm preparing for my TOEFL exam and working on Python as usual. My Python presentation went very well and I saw that most of the aspects of Python could be introduced in 2 hours! Such a beautiful language...