I have got to know Kömür(COAL)  Port years ago during my first diving experiences... Do not let the name fool you, it is actually a tiny fisherman's bay. To reach this tiny fisherman's bay, you have to cross a steep mountainous terrain.

A charming, unspoiled fishing port nestled at the foot of lush hills right on the Saroz Gulf in the Aegean Sea, Kömür is visited by only a few scuba divers, campers and fishers.
It takes around 30-40 minutes from the intersection of the main road to the road to Fındıklı village.
Reaching Kömür presents good views for campers and two very pretty beaches.

While you are looking the top of the mountain on the valley, you realize that structuring is very limited in here,  only a few fisherman shelters. An important feature of this paradise is that it has a tremendous submarine life. This is why Kömür is one of the most important diving sites of Saroz. You can scuba-dive here and return home with beautiful diving experiences. For many divers, Kömür is like an old friend, one they visit every year. Because the water is clear, shallow, and diving entrance is easy. It has tremendous diversity of underwater creatures.

Unfortunately, nowadays Kömür has become highly popular. Especially in summer. Overcrowding is becoming a major issue in this tiny seacoast. So, I suggest you to visit this place during spring and fall.

Camping in this beautiful resort is a completely different experience. Especially if you catch a moment outside the season, it is possible to open your tent's door towards the sea and wake up with epic morning.

There are so many moments I went to the Kömür. But I want to talk about the camp especially in October we had in Kömür. After peak season, the port becomes silent. Only a few fisherman comes. Crowds turn back to city centers. So, Kömür turns to a perfect weekend city break. It is a privilege to be here with friends at such times. We were together, away from city mess, feeling calm and relax. After you load your camping staff, 4-5 hours trip from Istanbul to reach here, being in this atmosphere with your friends feels you lucky.

Our campfire not only provides us warmth, but also is an opportunity to know each other deeply. We enjoy talking while sitting around the fire. To develop a strong connection with nature, campfire is also important component of camping areas. To get rid of searching for wood, and having usable pieces for campfire, we prefer to buy our woods from wood shops of which a few remains in the city center. Every wood that came out of the wood bag makes the night cheerful. We become happy as the sparks scatter in the air. Our voice mixes with the sound of waves and this turns into a harmonious symphony. We feel like time goes by so fast when we were enjoying this atmosphere.

Late at night, we spend our time under the sky with millions of shining stars. At this point, because of limited construction, you are not affected by city light pollution. So, when the sky turns black, Milky Way Galaxy is nothing less than magical.

Last but not least, I advise that lie down with your sleeping bag on the beach, try to find a moment which everybody sleeps and sky is crystal clear. Enjoy the loneliness.

Here I am  with another Turkish traditional  recipe! Pumpkin Börek (pastry).  It's full with feta cheese and pumpkin mixture and garnished black cumin. You will love these crispy böreks which are made with paper thin pastry called Yufka. These cigar shaped rolls with cheese and pumpkin is very popular in my hometown. Traditionally the rolls are baked  in the oven; the result was very delicious with a bonus of being healthy.

Ingredients:

500 gr pumpkin puree


Small sugar/pie pumpkins provide the most flavorful additions to any baked dish or baked good and are great as a soup. These  are more tender and less stringy than the larger variety. Sugar pumpkins also have firm, sweet flesh compared to their big ones. Heat the olive oil, and sauté the onions and garlic until softened.
Halve the pumpkin, de-seed, place halves face down in a big pan with approx 2-3 water glass of  water but I prefer using homemade beef broth instead of water and added 1 water glass of milk. Finally add black pepper.  Cook over low heat until all the ingredients  are softened. Scrape out the pumpkin “meat” and then mash or puree as needed with mixer.

6 fresh yufka sheets

350 gr feta cheese, crumbled

1 egg
Salt and  black pepper to taste
½ glass olive oil
1 glass milk
1 teaspoon black sesame

Glaze:

1 glass milk
1/4 glass olive oil
1 egg
Mix the olive oil, milk and egg in a bowl.

Instructions

Preheat oven to 200C
Mash together the cheese and pumpkin. Season with salt and pepper.  However, if the feta cheese is already salty, you may wish not to add salt.

Layer the first layer of yufka  on flat dry surface  and brush with glaze which is  mix the olive oil, milk and egg.

Continue this for one another layers

Fold over the pastry from each side to seal in the mixture and then roll up like a cigar.

Wet the end of each pastry roll with water to seal. Grease the tray with a little olive oil. Brush the pastries with olive oil and egg mixture.

Sprinkle with black sesame seeds and bake until they are golden brown, about 25 – 30 minutes.

Zucchini with olive oil is one of my favorite dishes in Turkish cuisine. Dishes with olive oil have their own place in my mom's recipes. I am from Mersin which is a port on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey. So, my mom’s  recipes are  an authentic Mediterranean experience.

When the name of a dish ends with “with olive oil”, it means that “olive oil” is not used just for describing the type of oil in such dishes, but it is more like cooking and serving methods.
This dishes can be served cold or hot, but mostly in my hometown cold is preferred.

Ingredients

• 5 medium zucchini, finely chopped

• 2 medium onion,finely chopped, cut into 1/2" squares 
• 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

• 1 medium size carrot

• 1 medium capia pepper, finely chopped

• 4 ripe tomatoes cut in small chunks

• 3 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper 
• 5 teaspoon tomato paste
• 3 teaspoon pepper paste

• dill (in small quantities)

Instructions

Heat the olive oil, and sauté the onions and garlic until softened.

Add tomato and pepper paste over onion and garlic.

Add the carrots and continue sautéing. 

Add the zucchini, finely chopped and continue sautéing.

Add the capia pepper , finely chopped and continue sautéing.

Finally add ,tomatoes,  salt, black pepper, small amount of dill  and water if using, cook over low heat until all the vegetables are softened.

Cook over low heat until all the vegetables are softened. Take off the heat and let cool completely. 

 Serve with small amount of uncooked dill.

I am doing experiments with tweets. For each tweet or each set of tweets, several APIs need to be called trough http protocol. This takes time. I often repeat the same experiment, which means issuing the same http request over and over again. Each request takes at least half a second. Considering a million tweets, one experiment takes half million seconds which makes over 5 days. And, this is the case for only one request per tweet.

In order to overcome this, I cache requests and responses. I made a library for php. Below I will be giving the codes. The library issues curl. But before issuing curl, if cache option is set, it first check if there is a cached content for this request. If there is, it simply returns the cache content. Otherwise, it requests the content over the network, and caches it for further requests.

Caching is done by saving the response to a file named by the md5 of the request url. Since the number of files in the cache directory is too high, I applied a two level strong mechanism which gets first two chracters of the md5 hash and saves the file in the directory named with those two chracters. This reduces the number of files in one directory, enabling a two level look-up in the file system.

Below is the simple code. It, for sure, needs further improvement but, for now, it works for me.


function curl_get($url, $cache=false)
{
$md5filename=getFileName("urlcache",$url);

if($cache==true)

        {

        if(file_exists($md5filename))

                return file_get_contents($md5filename);

        }

$defaults = array();

@$defaults[CURLOPT_URL] = $url;

@$defaults[CURLOPT_HEADER] = 0;

@$defaults[CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER] = TRUE;

@$defaults[CURLOPT_TIMEOUT] = 0;

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($ch, $defaults);

if( ! $result = curl_exec($ch))

        {

        $retry = 0;

        while($retry < 10){

                sleep(10);

            $result = curl_exec($ch);

        if($result)break;

        if(!$result)

                trigger_error(curl_error($ch));

        }

curl_close($ch);

if($cache==true)

        {

        $f=fopen($md5filename,"w");

        fwrite($f,$result);

        fclose($f);

        }

return $result;

}

function getFileName($infix,$data)

{

$md=md5($data);

$st=substr($md,0,2);

$md=$st."/".$md;

@mkdir(__DIR__."/../caches/$infix/$st");

return __DIR__."/../caches/$infix/".$md;

}

Located in 6 km away from Teşvikiye village province of Yalova's Çınarcık district, the Highland Erikli, that many campers visit especially in summer.
Erikli is an ideal camping spot for meeting nature and walking on hiking trails. Our camp on the Erikli highland was held in one of the hottest weekends of June. We started from İstanbul. We passed through Gebze to Yalova with Eskihisar ferry.

During your hiking and camping on the Erikli Highlands, you should visit the waterfalls and watercourse. The atmosphere here instantly grabs you and is really beyond comparison with any other places. Flora and water resources are remarkable. There is a rich variety of plants here such as Chestnut, elm, linden, fir and apple trees. Resting under the shadows of these trees is like a dream that we always want to live in by escaping from the pain of everyday life becoming tiresome.
Starting from the highland, we stoped by the waterfall region after hiking through the pathway nearby the watercourse. The region called as twin-waterfalls because waterfalls are one just after another.

We swam in the waterfalls zone and enjoyed the time. Cooling down on a hot day in this big natural swimming pool  made us feel hungry. So, we made picnic there. Sandwiches which we prepared before for our trip is the best and fancy members of our picnic basket. After finishing our picnic it is time to walk the boundaries of our campsite to identify the best spot for our tent, cooking, and eating. We found  the most suitable point for our tent in the campground belonging to national parks.

We set our tent area near the stream edge. We were lucky because we have a picnic table near our tent area. So. we put our food and necessaries on the picnic table.

We burned our campfire which is  indispensable for our camping pleasure, and placed it around our chairs.
The sparkling golden hues of the fire, the crackles of the wood popping, the bright constellations above, gathered around a central focus… We love campfires. At this point ,We have a tip for you about campfire: In order not to be concerned about looking for wood, buy from where you live, or on the way to your camp. We have bought woods from woodchopper in the city center.
Especially, sitting around the cozy campfire in this campground and spending time in this spot, made us feel happier.

Our campfire did not only warm us up, but it also was a practical solution for us to cook our food at the same time.

At night, our campfire routine is singing songs.

The Erikli is referred as a plateau, but it is not a cold region because it is not much higher than sea level.  It is a place that your can enjoy hours without getting cold nearby a gentle fire. We have woken up for a wonderful morning after a good night sleep.

In the morning the day began in the middle of birds chirping and bright blue helicopter insects' tours over the stream. After our breakfast, it is time hike. A short wander through the woods, we follow a footpath up the lane in front of us, which brings us to the waterfalls region.

After the lunch in the waterfall district, we gathered our tent and stuff to return to the city.

Last year, we have published a very exciting research article. In this article, we have discussed if Wikipedia page titles can be used to represent topics that are talked about in Twitter and proposed an approach to do that.

In contrast to existing topic extraction methods that extracts topics from only one tweet, our approach extracts topics from multiple posts. We assume that, elements of topics that crowds talk about distribute to multiple tweets by multiple users.

Our approach also differs in representation of topics in contrast to approaches that represent topics as a set of words such as LDA, phrases, or representative tweets. Our approach represents topics using Wikipedia page titles.

We used a simple computation. We compared contents of the tweets with contents of the Wikipedia pages using cosine similarity. This computation is not easy as Wikipedia has over four million articles. You need distinguishness of words in tweets. To measure distinguishness of words, inverse document frequency (idf) of words have to be computed.

For the details on computation you can g see the published paper. But now I want to show interesting results here.

We have experimented our method on tweet sets gathered during 2012 US elections debates. Debate tweets are interesting because they span a  wide range of topics such as women issues, tax, unemployment, social services.

The following figure shows two scores of two topics over debate times. The first plot (a) is for the Wikipedia page "Big Bird", and the second plot is for "Christianity and Abortion".

Big bird received high scores around 28th minute of the first presidential debate. Mitt Romney (the former Republican party candidate for elections) said something like : I will cut subsidy to PBS even if I love big bird etc. It received a quick response from the twitter environment.

Abortion is a critical subject in the United States. Whoever the candidate is, he needs to say something about abortion. The moderator asked both vice presidential candidates about their opinion of abortion as they are Catholics. Since public is sensitive to this matter, it also received a quick response. It should be noticed that no one used "Christianity and abortion" phrase in tweets. But our approach revealed this topic by considering aggregation of what is talked about.

The following picture is a heat map of several topics over debate times.

Third debate was about foreign issues. Our approach gave high scores to related topics such as Foreign relations of china, Iran-United States relations, Israel-United States relations, and Foreign policy of the United States. It can be tracked from the darkness of the topics from the heat map that, in the second half of the third debate, in order, Israel-United states, Iran United States, Israel-United states again, Osama bin Laden, and China are talked about.

Other topics are also meaningful. For instance, obamacare (patient protection and affordable care act) was mostly the issue of the first presidential debate. This can be seen from the heat map.

We have also experimented the 2016 debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The results will be published soon.

Stay tuned!! :)

I have just compiled xdAuto 1.1.6e for the head unit NR5002 in my car. I was having an error in the cold boot that stops the radio. No problem in manually opening the radio app.

If the car is shut down while the radio is running, in the boot, it starts by the radio automatically. I often experience "Radio stopped unexpectedly" error. I have opened a bug report in here. One of the guys out there came up with a simple fix.

Just by editing the file Radio/src/com/example/radio/RadioActivity.java

by changin the following lines in protected void onPause() {

stopScan();

unbindService(this);
to
if (radioService != null) {
stopScan();
unbindService(this);
}

and compiling the android system solved my problem. 

I compiled the whole android system after the change. The compilation instructions are as follows for the ones who are interested (I am running ubuntu12.04) :

sudo apt-get install gcc

sudo apt-get install bison

sudo apt-get install g++-multilib

sudo apt-get install git

sudo apt-get install gperf

sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils

sudo apt-get install make

sudo apt-get install python-networkx

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev:i386

sudo apt-get install zip

sudo apt-get install flex

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install oracle-java6-installer

mkdir ~/Nu3001

mkdir ~/Nu3001/bin

PATH=~/Nu3001/bin:$PATH

cd ~/Nu3001

curlhttps://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > /Nu3001/bin/repo

chmod a+x ~/Nu3001/bin/repo

git config --global user.email "nu3001@nu3001.com"

git config --global user.name "nu3001"

repo init -u https://github.com/Nu3001/platform_manifest.git -b master

repo sync

cd ~/Nu3001/kernel

export ARCH=arm

exportCROSS_COMPILE=../prebuilts/gcc/linux-x86/arm/arm-eabi-4.6/bin/arm-eabi-

export UTS_RELEASE="3.0.36+"

make amplified_defconfig

make kernel.img

make modules

sudo make modules_install

cd ~/Nu3001

source build/envsetup.sh

lunch rk3188-eng

make otapackage

After these steps, a zip file is created in ~/Nu3001/out/target/product/rk3188. That zip file can be used to update the whole android system usin TWRP. In my case, I just needed BonovoRadio.apk. So I unzipped the zip file and took that file from there. I just replaced the apk in /system/app folder in my head unit and rebooted. The problem just went awayy!!

Here is a pic of my head unit: