Personally I was a bit irritated that I can’t access my files on my iPhone as easy as drag&drop. Now it is very easy to keep some files in my iPhone and even being able to access it by “Finder” (a jailbroken iPhone app).

Just download it from DiskAid Website and install the tiny DMG the Mac way! Voilla!

When you open the application it recognize your device in few seconds and shows the home folder.

Well, it is not exactly the home folder, it is ~/Media which is all you need to play with files securely.

It is also possible to copy files to you iPhone/iPod which makes it even better.

To download files it is just a simple drag&drop or choose the first item in the toolbar “Copy to folder” to select the destination folder.

Let me mention that there is a Windows version too so everybody can enjoy. It is a pitty that Linux is not supported although I’m sure Linux geeks will do (or already done) something about it.

To upload files I just created a new folder “DATA” to keep miscellaneous files separately. Then in any PC/Mac with DiskAid installed I can access to my files.

I’m not sure if Apple will reveal some new feature in the new version of iTunes for iPhone 3G but for the time being it is a nice tool.

However soaring Euro rates and growing price of the real estate shrinks the target market to the rich who are able to invest at least about a million Euro for a fine villa.

Turkey the new place for holiday investment

Turkey in the other hand, shares almost the same features and advantages without forcing the buyers to spend a lot of money feeling that it is not as valuable as the money they pay.

A nicely built villa (house) in Alanya -one of the most expensive areas- will cost you EUR200,000 to EUR400,000, although there are still apartments as cheap as EUR30,000. To make it even more attractive some developers even provide in-house mortgage to ease up the payments and skip the bank process.

Turkey, and especially its beautiful cities like Alanya, Antalya, Belek, Kemer and Bodrum give great opportunities for a holiday home. You cam still make sure that there will be a good return on investment as well.

What about Turkey?

The country is amongst the wolds fastest growing economies and strives to join EU for few years although it is being considered geographically as a part of Europe.

The overall safety and economy outlook is very good although some conflicts between the government and the Kurdish rebels happens occasionally. Fortunately it is only limited to a very small part of the country where Turkey shares border with Iraq.

In touristic cities you can hardly find other than traffic police and the daily life is safe and quiet.

Fantastic food and the famous Turkish cuisine along with nice climate where you can experience the heat of the summer at the beach and go skiing in Bursa adds to the attractions of the country. Historic importance of the land is yet another attraction in which tourists enjoy the Spartan, Roman, and Islamic civilizations remainders.

Summary

Giving best of the both worlds, Turkey offers the investors a good choice of location, and price to buy their 2nd home in one the most beautiful places in the world.

It’s been sometime that we were facing difficulties keeping our alternative property listing updated where we had the latest updates. Then we could keep the master system updated and use the local excel files for fast data transfer to partners or 3rd party property portals since our main system don’t offer such a luxury (well, security reasons as always!)

Well, it’s been almost a year that I was literally begging the top management to let us implement a tiny database (LAMP) on the net and solve the productivity issues we are facing. Every time I got rejected till recently that things got crazy! So I got the green light but not only I didn’t have time to do it by myself or supervise a development team, but also I was even to busy to order a 3rd party company to do it for us!

I was surfing back and forth that I found Creator, the wizard stick of Zoho. Creator is an extremely easy to use database development platform and it is online! Forget about struggling with Access for small database applications where you don’t even get an option to take your data online on a cheap LAMP server.

People who did it know that how frustrating it could be to deal with PHP and MySQL on small projects. It could take 10 to 30 days to make something representable and the pity is that you waste a lot of time with UI only. Even frameworks won’t help you that much and Rails will take smetime too.

After tweaking and learning Creator (took me less than hour!) I managed to create an application that met almost 80%-90% of our needs! I just couldn’t believe it.

I created an application (without even touching or seeing the actual database) that is able to store relational data in 3 different entities (let say tables) and show them in 8 different views (reports).

The UI easier than in a typical RAD and I could define basic validation constraints on the go.

I just love the views! You get a full list of the table and you can filter the resultset quickly with “filters” intelligently made based on some fields. There is a great search feature that you virtually can make some of the most sophisticated criteria sets.
It is also so easy to export data immediately to some of most common formats (Excel, PDF, RSS, CSV, …) that saves you a big deal of time transferring data between heterogeneous platforms.

I also created users for our internal staff with different authorization level that they could play as safe as possible. In the other hand I did the same for some of the 3rd party portals we work with and they could easily login to the system and see only the view was assigned to them and get the information the want without even bothering contacting us.

Isn’t it just awesome?! Yeah, many packages do that and even do it better but for how much? This application cost me $0 if you ignore 2-3 hours I put in total for developing and debugging.

This is what I can really call Web 2.0 and I am ready to even pay for it if I get a better customer support.

Zoho has many other fantastic web applications. For instance “Database and Report” is a hardcore database tool but was not suitable for my audience. CRM and Business package look powerful too although I found it not very suitable for our other requirements. They still need some fine tuning.

We are now using Zoho Creator for more than 15 days and it works very good although I have some minor limitations in developing even more features part of which is promised in the next versions.

Is that really true? We have 10+ laptops and workstations running Windows Vista Basic, Premium and Business and nobody is happy with the way Vista runs, not even after installing the gigantic SP1.

It is often said that Apple’s 37% growth sales in Macs is partly because of Vista’s failure in fulfilling customer’s expectations, not to mention the great power of Mac OS although having less than 10% of the market.

My point here is not comparing Windows and Mac OS that is discussed for thousands of times. The important matter here is that all PC manufacturers who proudly ship Vista in all new PCs and laptops are definitely aware of the flaws of the not-very-new OS. However they garnish their marketing campaigns with “recommendations” of Vista to the poor consumer.

It is getting political in here because it doesn’t make sense anymore that you allegedly advertise your product carrying an incapable but essential part, the operating system.

When I saw it today on the back cover of the Business Week that DELL “still” recommends Vista with their latest business laptop, I wondered and grumbled to my colleagues (while sarcastically showing them the advert) about the ridiculous ignorance of the public that just chews what vendors offer.

Everybody is surprised with the terrible performance of Vista in either home or office. I still can’t believe Microsoft could betray the Windows community that big and don’t even bother apologizing.

We spend at least 1 hour a day just fixing small issues like printer connections, wireless glitches, USB problems and etc. I believe even the lousiest distro of Linux would solve these before roll-out.

You might say fine, we know it all and Vista is there for almost a year now, but the question is what have we done? Did we do anything? Did we converted to another platform? Or just trying to cope with the situation quietly.

Today I converted another colleague of mine to get a Mac and I’m so proud of it! I don’t work for Apple and I’m not just a fan, but I was using Windows since version 3.0 and I got disappointed more on each version debut. This is not the way you (Microsoft) keep customers loyal unless you don’t care because you know that nobody can’t do anything about you running a info-political monopoly.

All that “security” stuff hidden behind the shiny GUI of Vista worries me that the privacy in the free world, not by armies or dictators, but by the very fruit of the freedom, is endangered.

We struggle with Windows security holes, and Norton Antivirus -The Jesus of the computers- and yet nothing is getting better. You can bring as much as rationale as you can about hackers being smarter and technology is being more advanced or even blame the poor Open Source cult! But wait a moment! This endless chain of fear and consumption, the story of good and evil, is also drifted into IT and we can officially say that we are s****ed!

I wonder how the Chinese government stopped (or slowed down) the “Red Linux” project and signed a peace agreement with Microsoft while Bill Gates is welcomed like a president in their socialist country. If it’s not political, the somebody please enlighten me! It is worth remembering how the search engines censor information for Chinese government while fellow citizens of the Earth demonstrate everywhere for the Tibet to be freed!