Dijkstra's Essays on Programming

I strongly recommend Dijkstra's essays on programming hosted on the University of Texas. Don't forget to check the audio/video section! Thanks to those who maintain this site.

The function of the university...

When I was an undergrad, we got course schedules from the registration office at the beginning of every semester. Looking at that schedule, we made our own course plan. At the back cover of those schedules, there were nice quotes about education, university life etc. (just before the schedule and the registration process went online, the backcover had started to be used for ads, anyway :-)

I was quite touched by one of the backcover quotes. So, I cut and pasted it on my wall. Here it is:

"The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization."

W. E. B. Du Bois

Nice, isn't it? I don't know which schedule was that but it was sometime between Spring 1995 and Spring 1998. I thank those who put quotes like this at the backcover of our schedules back then.

Btw, that cut part is still on my wall.

A nice BibTeX manager: JabRef

For those using BibTeX, I strongly recommend JabRef. It is written in Java (platform independent). It doesn't use extra files, just your .bib file. It has lots of nice features. Use and see what I mean :-)

BibTeX Style for Bogazici University FBE Theses

I have put the BibTeX style file that I created and used for my MS Thesis. Here is the updated version of the file. In the past, this file made me hear lots of "It saved my life! Thank you!"-like sentences :-) It was online until some errors are reported. I found it more appropriate to remove it from the web. Meanwhile, Ali Haydar Ozer (who was completing his MS thesis) made some corrections to the file by hand. So I reissued the file. I also put the original style file that I used in my thesis report.

For those interested, I had used custom-bib package to generate v1.0 and v1.1 and made some corrections by hand.

Btw, if you find any errors in the style, please let me know. Until I fix the file (or find someone to fix it :-), you can edit the corresponding bibitem in the .bbl file produced after you run bibtex command.

Enjoy.

WARNING: This is not an official file that is approved by FBE. It is an unofficial contribution to help LaTeX users relieve the pain further in the process of preparing their thesis reports. I said "further" because much of their pain has been already relieved by using LaTeX :-)

Using OpenPGP in e-mails

Today, I decided to use OpenPGP signatures and encryption in my e-mails. I know this was a bit late. For a long time, I was considering this but never had enough determination and technology (I was using Calypso, previous incarnation of Courier). So, today is the day. In case you ask: "Why do we need PGP?"

My e-mail client is Portable Thunderbird. There is an extension called Enigmail and it uses Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) . The whole setup took less than 10 minutes on my laptop (WinXP SP2) and after a few trials, everyhing is working fine. I just quickly followed the instructions on the Enigmail site.

Here is a quick start (of course please check the instructors above for other details):

• Download GnuPG for Windows and install it
• Add the directory to your PATH in which gpg.exe resides (it is C:\Program Files\GNU\GnuPG in my system)
• Download Enigmail extension for Windows and import it into your Thunderbird thru Tools --> Extensions. Next time you start your Thunderbird you will see an OpenPGP menu on the top.
• From inside Thunderbird, generate a key pair for yourself from OpenPGP-->Key Management-->Generate-->New Key Pair

That's it. No pain, much gain. Many thanks to Thunderbird, Enigmail and GnuPG people to make it so easy.

For Unix folks,

Come on... You know what to do ;-)

Here is my pgp public key.

Deneme...

As most Turkish computer professionals do, I wrote "Deneme" (meaning "trial" in Turkish) as my first attempt to try something related to computers (in programming, sending a trial message etc). Anyway...

So you and I are welcome to my weblog. I will post here anything that I consider useful for myself in the first place, then for the mankind or to put it more correctly, for the kind of human beings like me ;-) Therefore, if you don't understand the things posted here, don't bother yourself.

Enjoy.