My new iOS app, xkcd Lite (codenamed Uvarovite) is now available on the App Store. It is a free, lightweight and open-source comic reader for the webcomic xkcd.
Please visit my “iOS Projects” page for more details.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Ayran 2.0 is Available on the App Store
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Madeni Paralarının “ilk”leri, “en”leri, “tek”leri
Cumhuriyet döneminde para basılan ilk sene | 1340 (Miladi 1924) |
Latin alfabesi ve rakamlarıyla basılan ilk para | 1934 100 Kuruş |
İlk delikli para | 1947 1 Kuruş |
Nominal değeri en düşük madeni para | 1940-1942 10 Para |
Nominal değeri en yüksek madeni para | 2002-2004 250.000 Lira |
Çapı en büyük madeni para | 1960 10 Lira “İhtilal Parası” (34mm) |
Çapı en küçük madeni para | 1961-1977 1 Kuruş (14mm) |
En kalın madeni para | 1994-1996 10.000 Lira (2,90mm) |
En ince madeni para | 1974 5 Kuruş (0,70mm) |
En ağır madeni para | 1960 10 Lira “İhtilal Parası” (15g) |
En hafif madeni para | 1975-1977 1 Kuruş (0,4g) |
Tura yüzünde Atatürk dışında bir devlet adamı olan tek madeni para | 1940-1941 1 Lira (İsmet İnönü) |
Tura yüzünde Atatürk dışında bir insan figürü olan ilk madeni para | 1959 25 Kuruş |
Yuvarlak dışında bir biçimde basılmış tek tedavül parası | 1938-1944 1 Kuruş |
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Madeni Paraları Koleksiyonum:
▸ Tedavül Paralarım
▸ Hatıra Paralarım
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Madeni Paraları Koleksiyonum
How to Receive Push Notifications from Ayran
This post is now obsolete. Please check my iOS Projects page or my most recent posts for information on the current state of Ayran.
You can now configure Ayran to send you a push notification whenever a new article is posted to the METU-CENG news server. You can choose newsgroups for which you want to be notified of new messages, and even control the frequency of notifications. For example, if you don’t want to be overwhelmed with notifications for popular groups like ‘test’ or ‘news’, you can set a limit (1/hour, 1/day, etc), and if you want to be notified the minute a new homework is posted on a course group like 140 or 213, you may choose Unlimited.
How?
Before starting receiving push notifications, you must configure Ayran to do so. It is a very simple process, which can be done less than a minute.
Allow Ayran to Send You Push Notifications

When you first launch Ayran, you will see a popup, asking for your permission to send you push notifications. You should tap on “OK” to confirm.
Login

Enter your COW username and password to login to the CENG news server. Ayran will remember your credentials -unless you don’t want it to- so that you will be logged in automatically next time you launch Ayran.
Open Settings

In the main menu, tap on the little gear icon in the top right corner of the screen. This will open the settings menu.
Configure Push Notifications

This is where it gets interesting. You will notice a red, glowing button in the middle that says “Configure push notifications”. Tap on it to see your push notification preferences.
In this screen, you will see a list of available newsgroups on the server, with the word “Never” next to each newsgroup. “Never” implies you don’t want to receive push notifications regarding that newsgroup. Scroll down to find your favorite newsgroup and tap on its name.
Using this small menu, you can choose how often you wish to receive push notifications regarding this newsgroup. You have 5 options: Never, 1/10 minutes, 1/hour, 1/day and Unlimited. If you choose Unlimited, you will be notified of every new article in that newsgroup. On the other hand, choosing 1/hour will cause you to receive at most 1 notification in an hour. If you want to turn off push notifications completely, you can go to the Settings app on your device and configure Ayran to not send you push notifications, instead of going through the list of all newsgroups one by one and mark it as Never. You can undo this action later, and Ayran will remember your preferences. Remember, though, that if you log out from Ayran, your preferences will be reset and if you wish to continue receiving notifications, you will have to do the configuration again.
Beta Testing

Ayran is a project of mine that I work on when I have free time. As of today, I would call the code alpha quality. So, expect to see some bugs. If anyone is willing to help me in beta testing, I might consider uploading Ayran to TestFlight for you to download, test and give me feedback. Just drop me an email or leave a comment under this post if you’re interested.
Happy Happy Joy Joy.
Update: Ayran (Newsreader for COW)
Yet another update for Ayran (v1.2) is live on the App Store!
What’s New in this Version:
✰ You can now enter and change your name which will be visible by others.
✰ Unread messages are now highlighted with a bold font, so it is easier to tell which messages are already read and which are new.
✰ You can now logout from Ayran.
✰ Visual enhancements & bugfixes
Please update! 🙂 You can download Ayran (Newsreader for COW) here.
Update: Ayran (Newsreader for COW)
An update for Ayran (v1.1) is live on the App Store!
What’s New in this Version:
✰ You can now enter and change your name which will be visible by others.
✰ Unread messages are now highlighted with a bold font, so it is easier to tell which messages are already read and which are new.
✰ You can now logout from Ayran.
✰ Visual enhancements & bugfixes
Please update! 🙂 You can download Ayran (Newsreader for COW) here.
Ayran (Newsreader for COW)
My new iPhone app, Ayran (Newsreader for COW) has been on the App store since May 8, 2012. It is a Usenet newsreader designed specifically for using the METU-CENG (Middle East Technical University, Dept. of Computer Engineering) news server. It is free for everyone to download, but you will need to have a METU-CENG username and password in order to be able to use it.
Motivation
Well, when I was a student at METU, I used COW (Ceng On the Web) almost every day. I didn’t have an iPhone then, but still I thought having an app for using the COW on the go would be cool. Now I’m a graduate of METU CENG, I continue to use COW and now I have my own app for reading COW. How cool is that? 🙂
Current Status
The latest version on the App Store is v1.0.1. It’s been live since May 15, 2012. You can find the app on the App Store by searching “Ayran”, or using this link.
Development
Ayran is under active development. Currently, the project is private and the only developer is yours truly. I’m thinking of releasing the source code in the future. But for now, I’d like to keep it to myself. 🙂
I received some suggestions on new features to be added to Ayran. Some of them are listed below:
- Push notifications
This is a very neat suggestion. The idea is, you will be notified via a push notification when a new article is posted in one of the newsgroups you had previously designated. Although the idea is very cool, it is not easy or straightforward to implement. There’s a lot of coding that needs to be done. So, although Ayran will probably have this functionality in the future, it might not be in the next few releases.
- Choosing newsgroups to read
Currently, when you log in to Ayran, the list of all newsgroups hosted on the server is presented to you. This is a little overwhelming, since there are a lot of newsgroups on the server and one is usually interested in only a few of them. In the near future, Ayran will provide the functionality to select the newsgroups to be shown to user, so you won’t have to go through all other newsgroups that you’re not interested in.
- Porting Ayran to Android
This, too is a neat suggestion that I received from multiple people. However, currently I do not have any plans for an Android port. I don’t have much free time to do this and I would like to focus on my iOS app first. I would love to see an Android port of Ayran, though. So, I hope somewhere out there, someone is writing the Android app right now. Even if they’re not actually writing it right now, maybe they’ll get inspired by this text. Who knows? If anyone is working or planning to work on an Android port of Ayran, you can always contact me for questions, suggestions, comments, or anything else. I’d love to help you if I can.
I will keep writing here about Ayran as it evolves. I’m always open to ideas, suggestions, questions and comments. You can email me or leave a comment to this post if you have something to say.
Happy Happy Joy Joy.
Setting up Android Emulator on Ubuntu
The following article has been adapted from the original by Çiğdem Avcı. You can find the original (Turkish) article here.
Let’s try Android on Ubuntu! For this, you must have Java environment installed. After we download the Android SDK (http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html), we unpack the archive with the following command:
tar -xzvf android-sdk_r3-linux.tgz
The archive has been extracted into android-sdk-linux
folder. Since the Android tools are under android-sdk-linux/tools
, we set the PATH
variable to include that folder.
PATH=${PATH}:~/android-sdk-linux/tools
export PATH
To see what’s inside the PATH variable, we type
echo $PATH
We make sure that the path which contains android-sdk-linux/tools
is correct. For our experiments, we have created a separate folder named android
. We will continue working in this folder. First, we navigate to this folder from the terminal.
cd android
Next, we start producing virtual phones (AVD – Android Virtual Device). Let’s create a virtual SD-Card (Secure Digital Memory Card).
mksdcard 2048M SDCARD
And now, let’s create a virtual phone.
android create avd -n CGDM_PHONE -t 2
Failed. We get an error:
Error: Target id is not valid. Use 'android list targets' to get the target ids.
We do that to see the list.
android list targets
We don’t see any lists. Maybe, we missed to install something. Let’s install if there are any updates or revisions.
android
We can’t connect to the URL shown on the UI. We check the “force https connection” under “Settings”. Under available packages
, we start downloads related to android 2.0
which we think might be necessary. After the installation is complete, we try to create our virtual phone again.
android create avd -n CGDM_PHONE -t 2
Android 1.6 is a basic Android platform.
(We press enter here)
Do you wish to create a custom hardware profile [no]
Created AVD 'CGDM_PHONE' based on Android 1.6, with the following hardware config:
hw.lcd.density=160
This time it worked. Now, let’s run the emulator.
emulator @CGDM_PHONE -sdcard SDCARD
Whoa! 🙂 There comes the virtual phone.
Up to this point, we learned to prepare the emulator environment. We’ll learn to use it later.
Happy coding!
Special thanks to my dear friend, Çiğdem Avcı for letting me publish her article here.
Tolga Naber – Cem Yılmaz
Cem Yılmaz’ın ilk sinema filmi olan 1998 yapımı ”Herşey Çok Güzel Olacak”ın unutulmaz sahnelerinden…
Porsche Carrera’sını çaldığı Tolga’ya kafa atan abisi Nuri (Mazhar Alanson) ile hemen ardından Bodrum’a tatile giden Altan, bir dinlenme tesisinde Tolga’nın gazetede hastaneye kaldırıldığını okur. Bunun üzerine içinde endişeli bir ruh hali oluşan Altan birden hayal görür.