The very latest pics of the Erelmania 2006 tour.

No, it's Erel's grandmother, 57 years ago. Erel degil, Erel'in babaannesi, bebekken.

If you liked The Big Lebowski, you'll love the F_cking Short Version. Not for the easily offended.

It's been a while, and we've had lots of demand from the family, so we've uploaded a new bunch of pictures to flickr. These are mostly taken in the past week or so, and include a trip to the park with Jonathan, Hacer, Uzay, Evrim, Olcay, and Edita. Uzay and Evrim really love their little buddy!

I've started uploading new pictures of Erel to Flickr. You can see them by clicking on that link, they are tagged with "erel". There are also lots of nifty tools you can use with Flickr, for instance I've put a feed of pictures on the side of this site.

I won't be posting any more tech stuff to this website, I've set up a new site, Azedi Tech, which will be my professional/technical site.

kief.com has always been a weird mix, there is a small but loyal audience of friends and family who check it for information about what we're up to, and then there are those people who find one of my sporadic technical posts via search engines or blog aggregators.

The frequency of my posting on any subject is hardly enough to need two blogs, but I feel more comfortable having the separate places to post. I often feel self-conscious about boring people who subscribed to my feed because they saw a technical post if I post things about my family, and most of my family would be equally bored by my ramblings on Java, Unix, and similar gearhead topics.

So if you're interested in techie stuff, you'll probably want to unsubscribe this feed. This site is probably going to become a monument to my obsession with my newborn son, which I would find painfully boring if I were in your shoes. But please consider subscribing to the feed for Azedi Tech. That site probably won't be much heavier in traffic than this one was, but that's probably a blessing.

Thanks for your patience!

We've started using skype to chat with friends and family, mainly ones in Turkey, the US, and Switzerland. I think the coolest thing is not just that it's free, but rather the open nature of the experience.

We put the call on with the PC speakers a desktop microphone, and usually a camera, and we sit around the living room. So the call isn't a person to person call, but group to group. The fact that it's free adds to the relaxed, leisurely experience of the call.

Technically it's a bit fiddly. Setting up Skype is a snap, but the production aspects of the call, especially with video, take a bit of effort to get nice. It's too easy to have echoing, since most people don't know how to position the speakers and microphone to avoid it. Lighting and positioning can be a problem for the video. The quality of the voice and video connections are also an issue, it's quite choppy.

But these don't really slow people down. The thing that strikes me is the non-techie people in my circle love it, and are enthusiastic about taking it up as a regular habit. As open-room audio/video sessions like this become more widespread, people will become more sophisticated about

I think as this type of thing becomes more popular, whether via skype or other services, people will get more sophisticated about production values. If end-to-end network capacity continues to grow, the audio and video quality will improve with it.

I wonder how long it will be before we're routinely plugging these calls into our wide-screen, HD televisions, gathering people together from multiple locations to share family events.

As of yesterday! Congratulations Brandon and Carla, welcome to the family Tyler!

My Mom and lil' brother whipped up these t-shirts last week - they may already be at the end of the curve, but check them out in any case because, well, it's my Mom!

This is already making it's way around the "blog-o-sphere", but I've got plenty of friends who are into web design but don't follow this stuff, so check it out. The Yahoo! UI Library is a collection of JavaScript widgets for things like calendars.

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a collection of design patterns for web interfaces. Design patterns are a concept from "enterprise" programming, where best practice approaches to typical problems are described in a way that can be used by programmers using different languages. These patterns from Yahoo describe typical web UI patterns, such as paging multiple lines of search results.

There's nothing ground-breaking in the patterns, but it's useful to have these spelled out. It serves as a checklist, or a specification, if you find yourself having to implement one of these things. Even better, if you're asking someone else to implement some bit of web UI, giving them one of these patterns - modifying it if necessary -is a good way to make sure you're both clear on what you want it to do.