kilic.net

Seth

2012-02-04T10:43:29Z

Can I see your body of work?
Are you leaving behind an easily found trail of accomplishment?
Few people are interested in your resume any more. Plenty are interested in what you've done.
The second thing you'll need to do is regularly note what you produce in a log or find some other way to keep track.
The first thing is more difficult: If the work you do isn't worth collating and highlighting, you probably need to be doing better work.

Openness

2012-01-03T11:13:40Z

The openness and transparency of "uptime" being reported by 37 Signals is exemplary. It reminded my about the series of blog posts from Ryan Carson on the sale of their product, Dropsend.

GoDaddy and SOPA

2012-01-01T07:47:22Z

You would have by now read about SOPA and how it is set to destroy the very Internet we use and rely upon every day (excuse the dramatics). All of my non .com.au domains were managed through GoDaddy, they were easy and cheap.

However, I've never been a big fan of them, especially when it comes to the suggestive advertising and Mr. Parson's wildlife trips to Africa. Them supporting SOPA was the last straw.

I've started to move my domains over to Hover, the whole transfer process is easy (other than GoDaddy trying it's best to make it not so) and hope to be rid of GoDaddy in the near future.

Movie reviews with hReview

2011-12-31T03:10:49Z

Having taken a few days off from work it's given me some time to watch some movies, rather than list the movies in an unordered list there exists a better, more semantic method, to markup reviews using the hReview microformat. Here's one of the latest movies I've seen marked up with hReview:

Serdar Kilic, December 31st, 2011

A Dangerous Man

★★★☆☆

Your typical action packed Steven Seagal movie. One for the fans.

p.s. Did you know that Steven Seagal also has a running TV Series named Lawman, and that for the last 20 years he's also been a Deputy Sheriff which is what his TV show is based upon? What a badass!

Telstra modem and Android Devices

2011-12-31T01:45:29Z

We recently moved our home Internet to Telstra and with that received a new ADSL modem that also features a Wireless-N router. The setup was quick and simple and we were up and running in no time.

After a few weeks though we started to have intermittent dropouts which resulted in the modem needing to be reconnected. After a bit of investigation and trial and error I fixed the wireless channel to CH13 rather than it being set automatically.

The only issue we had was with the multitude of Android devices we and our visiting friends have. None of which were able to connect to the wireless network anymore stating that the SSID was not in range. Reverting this back to automatic (this time it chose CH6) and the devices were able to connect again.

Robert Gupta

2011-12-10T00:45:19Z

I have a thing for classical music, and when I say thing I mean by today's hip-hop, rap, pop genre's that I often have in my ear, I'm willing to listen to a few notes from the classics.
I came across this video from TED talks (awesome, awesome stuff there) of Robert Gupta and Joshua Roman playing Passacaglia, great inspiring music ensues.
Also worth the time is Robert's talk on Nathaniel Ayers, whom the movie The Soloist is based on.

Styling search fields

2011-11-27T21:05:12Z

I ran into a small niggling issue whilst building a new site for a friend. Turns out Safari (and webkit based browsers like Chrome) prevent you from styling input boxes with type set to search.
Semantically this is the correct attribute to apply as it matches the function, however, and for whatever reason, they've decided against being able to style the element sans a few properties.
An article on CSS Tricks shows the limited styles that can be applied.

Single Vendor

2011-11-19T23:26:37Z

After switching to an Android handset for almost two years I've transitioned back to the land of Apple. As with the whole Mac vs Windows debate both iOS and Android have their pros and cons. I enjoyed my time with the more geeky, developer friendly Android OS but in the end I have work that needs to be done.
Some of the problems that I encountered in the two years using the Nexus One, and these were more specific to the hardware rather than the software, made me decide to switch to an iPhone and also to Apple as my "preferred vendor". I won't elaborate on the issues here but just to say that this isn't a swipe at Android or the handset I was using, the Google Nexus One.
Yes I believe Android is more open, and I'm using that term loosely. By "open" I'm talking about having less restrictions on what I can do from both a hardware and software perspective and not who owns the source code. For now I'm happy to work within the confines of the Apple ecosystem. Everything just works when you go with the same vendor, vertical integration if I may. For example I'm now using iWork instead of Google Docs, iTunes instead of Google Music (the older non-geo restricted version of the player), and, iPhoto over Picasa.
My content is synced to the plethora of devices that I own so my content is accessible as much as possible, but only on Apple devices. Dropbox also fills some of this void.
Once you start crossing borders you run into small niggling issues, e.g. I wasn't able to sync my contacts to both iCloud and Google. Little pestering issues like this help make the decision to a single vendor stack .
I'm hoping that in the end that this will fare out well and I haven't locked myself into some corner. It also means that I need to keep up to date with the Apple products to ensure my content isn't locked out by later versions.

Rediscovery

2011-09-18T09:16:34Z

(After the initial version of this post was swallowed somewhere between Ecto and MovableType I'm reposting a more condensed version of what I previously wrote).
I'm going through a rediscovery phase of Old Skoolers, listed below. It's great to see they've continued to blog throughout the years

Katia and Kylie Mac to whose podcast I've resubscribed to are hilarious and always remind me of my time in Paris.

Adam Curry ran one of the earliest podcasts that I could remember, called The Daily Source Code. It ran for around 40mins (good length) and I always looked forward to the weekly episodes.

Scott Hanselman's tools page was the go to site after paving any of my Windows boxes.

Molly.com was one of the first sites I got my Web Standards fix from, great to see her back writing some more.

On Blogging

2011-04-02T03:43:34Z

Kudos to those bloggers who have followed through and have updated their blogs for Project 52. Here's some snippets that I've collected over the last few weeks:

Tim Bray has a good writeup for bloggers over at his OnGoing weblog.
Adam Curry plays with an rssToBlog feature with the OPML Editor
and, Brent Simmons with Dave Winer discuss "baked blogs"

iPad

2011-02-25T11:10:11Z

I was lucky enough to have been gifted an iPad just recently. For one thing, it was good timing, as my impulsive nature would have led me to go out to buy an iPad 2 when it launches next week. For the main purpose of just trying out specific iPad apps what I have is more than enough (I have the 16GB WiFi version). I'm still more inclined to take my Galaxy Tab with me to work as it's the much more portable option - but it'll be interesting to see if that will change.

I'm looking forward to trying out some of the iOS/iPad only applications such as Chalk from 37 Signals and Reeder.

Rebooting the Blog: Introduction

2011-02-17T11:38:31Z

Rebooting the blog is going to be a series of articles that I'll be putting together chronicling the design and development of this blog. I've never done a "series" set of related blog posts before so I thought it would be a refreshing change of format.

This post will serve as an introduction to the project. I'm expecting only several blog posts that will outline the why's and the how's of rebuilding this weblog. For those of you reading this on my site you'll see that the site itself is void of any design aesthetics. I cleared the slate, so to speak, several weeks ago as I found that the design of the site restricted me in my posts. I'm hoping that if I can pull it off the new look and format of the site will lend itself to becoming more accessible along with fresher content pulled in from elsewhere from the web.

The plan forward for this site is to introduce several new features (self hosted url shortener for example) and to basically build the site as a platform that will hopefully serve the content in differing flavours (rss, json, atom, atc.).

Recursion in SQL Server

2011-02-08T02:21:26Z

I had a fairly straightforward SQL problem to solve the other day. Given a child record, go find the top most parent (i.e. it's parent, and then go find its parent until you hit the top most record). This is a typical data design pattern if you ever had a table of employees and wanted to create an organisational structure diagram.

One can "walk the tree" within T-SQL by recursively calling a stored procedure and passing in an identifier, and keep looping until you basically hit a NULL field value with the identifier column. However, what appears to be a more performant solution and one that's definetly more elegant is to use Common Table Expressions available with SQL Server 2005 and up.

MSDN has a straightforward article on how to use Common Table Expressions so if you ever have to need to do recursive queries in SQL Server definetly check it out.

HTML5 Badge

2011-01-20T02:24:35Z

I think the new HTML5 logo/badge does look quite nice, however, it does send the incorrect message that the html in HTML5 is one piece of the pie shared with the other newer specifications such as CSS2, SVG and WOFF.

Let's be clear about something. One can implement HTML5 without CSS3, SVG, WOFF independently of each other.

Galaxy Tab

2011-01-16T12:59:10Z

A few weeks ago I decided to get myself a Galaxy Tab through Vodafone. I mulled over getting an iPad but two reasons prevented me from doing so.

First up, it's the openness of the Android system. Yes, it's not completely open but it is open enough for me. I mount the drive on my desktop computer, copy and delete things at a whim without needing to wait for the backup-sync combo. I can also use the built-in WebKit based browser and download files directly to the system. These are just a couple of simple things we take for granted on a desktop computer that has now become a luxury on such devices as the Tab.

The openness brings with it some nasties as well, there's a virus doing the rounds that is currently being distributed by shoddy programmers through the Market store itself. The closed nature of the iPad and the strict code control measures in the iTunes Store currently prevent these types of nasties, for the time being. However, if you're connected to the Internet it's only a matter of time before *they* find a way to compromise any system.

Secondly, I just know that the next version of the iPad is just around the corner. Would I get one after owning a Galaxy Tab? Maybe. It makes the justification harder but unless I was writing an app for it then I might have to wait a while longer. Also, the Galaxy Tab is available right now, and I'm not the patient kind.

Form Factor

I'm quite happy with the physical aspects of the Tab. The 7" size along with a low weight of around 350 grams makes it ideal for prolonged use, without needing to prop it up someway. Reading eBooks is a nice experience but I find that I occasionally touch the screen and have the page flip come up. The non-touch screen nature of my Kindle makes it a more superior device for reading, if only it supported the increasingly popular ePub format.

Some Gripes

The notification bar is where Samsung has placed some controls to adjust screen brightness, and turning GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth etc., on and off. This is a great place for such items as it's always there rather than trying to fiddle around the settings app to find these items.

However, some applications, e.g. the eBook reader, hide access to this menu bar. If the lighting in the room had changed and I wanted to adjust the brightness I would have to jump out of the eBook app, make the change, and then come back in again. Some things should be standard across all devices and I think the hiding of the notification bar is a bad idea.

One other gripe is that the Application menu lists all apps in installation order with no way of reorganising them, say, alphabetically. These are some of the small nuances that I'm sure will go away once the platform matures a little more.