This is a mosque in Uskudar, in Istanbul, down the street from where we lived after we got married. I could see this mosque at the end of the tiny backroad through the window in my home office. What's cool is this same mosque is easily visible from most pictures that show the famous Kiz Kulesi. I've got a soft spot for this part of town, even though Ozlem really didn't enjoy living there.

Vodafone, a British mobile operator, has bought Telsim, the second largest Turkish mobile operator. This is interesting to me since I spent some time working for the third largest mobile operator in Turkey, and currently work on the UK mobile industry. Telsim has a rocky past, they've always been a distant second to Turkcell, and has suffered from seriously dodgy owners, the Uzan family. The Uzan brothers founded Telsim, getting a ton of credit from the likes of Nokia to build their network, then refused to pay. For a while it looked like they'd get away with it, since they had more knowledge and connections in the Turkish legal and political systems, but in the end their business empire collapsed and was taken over by the government.

The interesting thing about the Turkish mobile phone market, at least 4 years ago when I was living and working there, was that very few people used monthly contracts. Most customers use "pay as you go", where you have to prepay for the time you will use. This was mostly down to price, the Turkish companies just didn't offer the kinds of deals that UK operators do. Vodafone may change this, they may even introduce contracts whereby people can get good phones at cheap prices when they sign a contract.

Turkey is a great market for mobile phones, it's such a social culture. I remember being impressed when I first visited Istanbul in 2000 at how pervasive they were. Mobiles were already common in the UK at the time, but in the US they still had an embarassing "yuppie" stigma.

This week Cebit Eurasia
was in Istanbul, the oriental offshoot of the world's biggest trade
show of any kind, and my pal Ercan and I went Friday to check it out,
particularly the Linux track. We caught 3 seminars, of which
Donald Karl
Rosenberg's talk about the economics of Open Source had the most
international angle.

Rosenberg reviewed a lot of what's going on with various national
governments and open source, including China, Peru, Venezuela, and
others who are trying to encourage open source as an alternative
to foreign-produced black box software. He listed a number of reasons,
including the FUDish implication that nobody knows what Microsoft
might have hidden inside Windows at the CIA's behest, although not
in so many words. Open source is also seen as a way to foster local
IT industry and keep government spending at home rather than pumping
it abroad.

One of Rosenberg's assertions that I disagree with is that companies
outside the US are less concerned with brand names and more interested
in engineering quality. My experience in Turkey is the opposite, the
"nobody got fired for buying [IBM/Microsoft/Oracle/HP]" mentality
dominates. He seems to have based this idea on Germany, whose culture
of engineering excellence is at the opposite end of the scale from
Turkey's, exceeding the USA by a good bit. (My favorite example
of this train platforms, where you can see a dozen clocks whose
second hands are in lock step). Developing countries are much more
prone to buying big name brands just for the prestige factor than those
in rich, self-confident nations like Germany.

Even Linux distributions suffer this, most Turkish geeks I know run
Redhat, and are only vaguely aware
of Debian. But the later seminar
by Debian project leader Bdale Garbee impressed Ercan enough that
he wants to give it a shot, so we're going to download and burn some
CD's and give it a go. I've used Debian before, but Bdale's talk
impressed me with the sheer quantity and quality of the work that goes
into Debian and its packages.

The other talk we attended was Don Marti from
Linux Journal talking
about good security habits. The title of the talk was "Linux security in one
hour a week", the idea being that practicing a few good habits in configuring
and monitoring your systems is enough to counter 99% of security threats.
Sound, basic advice like monitoring security announcement lists and keeping
your system patched, and disabling or removing unnecessary services. He shared
plenty of practical little tips; for instance, if you remove an unneeded app
by hand, your package manager might replace it later when an upgrade comes
out, so use the package manager to remove it instead.

I also heard that a certain major hardware maker who will be producing
a Windows tablet has got Debian Linux running on it, which answered something
I had wondered about before.

Another thing we did was check
out the new Nokia 7650
camera phone. This thing is advertised all over the place here in
Turkey, and I assume everywhere else too. Here's a picture of Ercan and
me at the show taken with the phone. I'm the one with the stupid look on
my face.

The quality is not as good as a full digital camera, just 640x380, but
if the camera feature is cheap enough (I don't know how much the 7650 costs)
it could be useful for spur of the moment shots - if you own one, you'll
always have a camera handy for a quick snap. The interesting feature for
me was being able to email the picture to myself, since it avoids the
hassle of local storage. Digital camera storage is getting better, but
it would still be handy to have a quality camera with the option to dump
its memory onto the Net.

A proper digital camera with bluetooth would be just the ticket, so you
could link with your phone to upload pictures, or link with a PC or laptop,
without having to remember to bring cables and connectors and such.

I didn't post yesterday because I was sorting out my work situation. For the past year or so I've been working with a Turkish IT consultancy which has gotten me pretty decent jobs, and which spun off a new group that I've been working with. The money has been decent by Turkish standards, which in my rule-of-thumb guestimates means someone in the IT industry in Istanbul can expect to make roughly 1/3 what they would in a non-NYC/Valley market in the US, assuming you get in with the corporate market. (For non IT jobs it seems to be about 1/5). This isn't as bad as it sounds, since the cost of living is quite low - you can live very well on $30k/year in Istanbul, certainly better than you could on $90k in NYC.

But I've been bored as hell. It's hard to find the kind of work that I'm into - Internet technology stuff, in particular back-end, database-driven web stuff. While I've been able to find jobs, they haven't been particularly interesting, and it's getting to me. There are a number of reasons why this is the case.

The economy here is of course not great, which limits the kinds of jobs to be found for an IT professional. There are a handful of corporate megaliths, each of which has banks, TV channels, newspapers, insurance companies, and, these days, a mobile phone network, and everything revolves around these. 95% of the money in this country belongs to these groups, so if you don't get a job in that sphere, my guess is you're working for peanuts (a few hundred dollars a month) in a place like an internet cafe.

The technology these companies use tends strongly towards the "enterprise" school. IBM is here in force, but focusing more on big old back ends (mainframes, etc.), with some EJB, and one time I saw a Linux box from IBM being used to monitor processes on other Unices.

I wouldn't describe the technical environment here backwards, exactly - I see more people using mobile phones in Istanbul than I do in New York. But the IT industry has got that big-company gravitational thing going on, it's like working on the surface of Jupiter, the only stuff that you can get going is big, bulky, and slow.

Internet technologies offer potential for Turkish business, and the fact that they're a bit behind the curve makes an opportunity for a battle-scarred veteran of the dot-com bubble. We can avoid the missteps and red herrings, skipping the whole "push" and "vortal" crazes, for example, focusing on things that can actually cut costs and extend the marketing reach of local companies to the rest of the world.

But refighting the battles with ignorant clients is a drag, explaining that giving $100 to a kid with a copy of FrontPage to build your corporate site isn't going to get the same results as hiring us for five figures. When I left London 2 years ago the companies there had mostly gotten past the online brochure phase, in Turkey they're just entering it.

I was up for all of that, and some of the people I was working for are hip to the possibilities, but the situation around me has deteriorated lately. The spinoff company I joined has imploded for completely non-business related reasons, and I've been left adrift. This has a lot to do with language and communication.

Lack of language skills, while not crippling since most people in the industry speak reasonable English, makes life hard. The only things you know are what someone specifically decides to communicate to you, or what you can directly extract through questioning. The casual chatter and gossip that clues you in to what projects are coming up, what's on the boss's mind, who's thinking about leaving, etc. are hard to connect with.

Rather than picking up on hints of major changes ahead, you often learn about things after they happen, when you realize the guy you were working with last week isn't coming back from his vacation and start asking questions. It's probably worse for someone with an introverted bent, but this kind of thing didn't happen to me in English-speaking offices.

Ah, well, live and learn. I'm now officially between jobs, working from home, "free-lancing", yeah that's it! I have some good prospects back in London, so it's all for the better, I'm able to take this time to work on various projects that have been simmering rather than panicking.

It will be a drag to leave Turkey, I really enjoy living here, aside from not having interesting work. The weather, the food, and the people are things I'll miss if I return to London - at least I have plenty of good friends there. Returning to an English-speaking environment will be nice - the day I get back will be a very good day for Foyles' Book store, and I will probably never make it through the stack of magazines I'm going to buy!

But I fully expect to return to Turkey to work at some point in the future. In the meantime I need to work on my Turkish.

Russel Beattie tells about an incident where he told off someone in Spanish for blowing smoke in his face. He adds a PS to defend himself for what some might see as being affended at local customs (i.e. smoking). Well, when you live someplace, doing as the Romans do, telling people off for being rude is, well, it's what the Romans do.

Driving in Turkey, honking at drivers who do rude things is part of Turkish driving, so I've learned to do it. In the US and northern Europe honking is something you only do when you're really pissed off, but in Mediterranean countries, it's much more casual. Drivers honk just to let pedestrians and other cars know they're coming by, a reasonable precaution in a place where "defensive driving" is an oxymoron.

For those of us from calmer driving cultures, learning to honk freely takes a while. People cut you off *all* *the* *time*, so if you get really steamed about it you're going to lead a very stressful existence. I've learned to take it as normal. I honk and maybe flash my lights, and if the other driver does something particularly egregious, like driving through a redlight to cut me off, I might even wave my hand in exaggerated bewilderment. Just like a native.

Here are some links about Turkey that I have lying around.