Deoxyribonucleic Acid

Image via Wikipedia

I have to confess, when I first saw the news that a group of police and forensics experts will meet today in Sharjah to discuss setting up a UAE national DNA database, my first reaction was of irritation. We've just been through the laborious process of having our finger, thumb and palm prints, our photographs and our other identity details taken, so if you wanted my DNA you could have had it then.

If you consider the disastrous roll-out of the national ID card system, one can only shudder at the potential in this new move. Commented on at length by many a blogger and even held out to dry by the dailies eventually, the conflicting announcements, lack of preparedness and ill-assembled systems deployed to manage the ID card process resulted in protracted, and comic, confusion on a huge scale. Imagine a repeat performance only accompanied by men in lab coats swabbing our cheeks and pecking little hunks of us off to be labelled and then mixed up.

But my irration passed as I read the story (once again, it was The National wot had the skinny) and saw what I can only describe as eminently sensible comments from the Chairman of the Emirates DNA Working Group, Dr. Ahmed Marzooki. He talked to The National about a possible 10-year programme, with initiatives to set up a legal framework to deal with issues of individual privacy and also to look at facilities, procedures, staffing and the like.

Marzooki also pointed out that the imperative to collect the data wasn't just criminal investigation (although that surely must be the most important driver) but also to be able to identify people in cases such as natural disaster and other tragedies - in fact, just back in August, a process was started by Dubai police to try and identify the relatives of eleven men who were killed in a fire villa in Dubai's Naif area. Storing the remains, contacting relatives, taking samples and shipping them must be a laborious and immensely expensive process - the database would mean an end to that type of investigation and speed positive identification for families and friends.

So I came away impressed with this clear evidence of quality of thought and with the feeling that if Marzooki, the man who is Interpol's only Middle Eastern representative, is at the front of this one, we may just see the lessons of the ID card roll-out learned.

We may even see the data integrated with the ID card biometric data, albeit with access controls in place. We may...

Disintermediation Rules

Image via Wikipedia

Phil was a typesetter and he used to typeset the books I edited and published. I’d send him my copy, marked up by hand (point size, leading, a wiggly line for italics, underline for bold) and he’d send me back galleys, long strips of single columns of type which the graphic artist would then ‘lay out’ onto boards, creating pages of book and magazine out of strips of type glued down with ‘SprayMount’, a highly egregious sprayable glue.

We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.

Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he had to invest in it so that he could run my pages.

‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil. 'My Linotronics cost £30,000 a piece - nobody can compete with stuff like that!'

Within the year he had gone bust and I had taken all my business to David, who I didn’t really like very much but who would ‘run out’ my pages from Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers once I’d just taped the pictures to copies of the proofs. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either - I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not always have followed the rules of typography as they existed in Caxton’s day, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.

Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a Chrome cassette.

When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.

Social Media and Libel

Image by Felipe Bachomo via Flickr

I’ve talked quite a bit on the radio over the past few weeks about Internet libel. It’s an interesting area and one where I think we all are guilty of being perhaps not quite as careful as we should be - particularly on Twitter!

With the ruling by a UK high court judge that blogging is essentially ‘an act carried out in public’, we not only lose the right to anonymity (not that I’ve ever done any of this stuff anonymously), but also have a precedent that social media interactions are ‘acts carried out in public’. That means we are open to charges of libel and defamation where we make assertions regarding people and also companies over social media platforms. There are already cases lodged as a result of material posted on MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter in both the US and UK. Having said that, the world's legal systems are still struggling with the whole issue - so nothing is clear.

Which means that, fine, today’s consumer has a megaphone – but today’s consumer has also to be aware that they may be held answerable for their use of a medium that has the reach (and, let’s face it, potentially way beyond the reach) of a national daily newspaper.

Similarly, any company threatening suit against people for something they have said online has to think long and hard about the consequences to the company’s reputation in the long run. While we are now seeing an increasing number of precedents being established by litigation, they are by no means concrete and supported by a body of established law – certainly not in the US and UK, let alone somewhere like here in the UAE. And companies 'picking' on bloggers, FaceBook users and other social media users are risking disastrous loss of credibility and respect from consumers - who are enjoying the new found freedoms, increased information flow and empowerment that using the Internet is bringing them.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the removal or alteration of offensive material is often all that is required to mitigate any serious threat of legal action. So online commentary is particularly hard to legislate for in laws that depend on the presence of immutable, physical, media.

In other words, we need to perhaps take a little more care, but companies with brands to protect need to cut consumers a hell of a lot of slack and, by the way, the answer for companies feeling wronged by consumers is dialogue, not 'cease and desist'.

Billion Dollar Baby

It’s less than four years old, something like 40% of new sign-ups to it don’t last longer than a month before wandering away and it hasn’t generated a red cent in revenues. And yet last Friday, venture capitalists invested a reported $100 million into Twitter, effectively valuing the fledgeling company at $1bn – more than General Motors was worth when it went bust.

Another way of looking at it would be to value every single tweet ever tweeted at $1 - Twitter recently went past the billion tweet barrier.

With something like 54 million visitors a month and a goal, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, of netting a billion users by 2013, Twitter certainly captures a lot of eyeballs. That billion user figure isn't ridiculous, BTW - Twitter's already smashed its own growth targets. And it’s eyeballs that make all the difference in today’s Adword world – Google's annual revenues of $21bn-odd are made up in the vast majority of clicks – each netting a few cents. Those revenues, to put them into perspective, are worth something like a sixth of global annual television advertising revenue and are also equivalent to total US print advertising spending - the latter falling as fast as Internet advertising spend is rising.

With much speculation as to how Twitter is actually going to make any money, some form of advertising is top of most pundits’ agendas. The documents leaked to TechCrunch appear to show that Twitter isn’t really quite sure what to do with the goose it has found itself holding. And despite that goose never having laid an egg, some smart money is betting that when it does, it’ll be gold.

What makes Twitter neat is that its open APIs mean that lots of smart people are dreaming up new ways to use all those eyeballs – there’s a long list of things you can do with Twitter that don’t actually involve Tweeting at all. You can share files, music, pictures, video or links, even make payments - that last link is a service called TwitPay that lets you link your PayPal account with Twitter, which means you can now buy and sell stuff with a Tweet.

So Twitter is becoming a sort of central switch for people who are talking and sharing stuff, a way of flagging up the availability of news, information and content. And, in fact, that's how many of us are now using Twitter - to share information, links and stuff we find interesting.

The stuff itself isn't on Twitter - but Twitter is how we send the signal to go get it.

And that's where Google came out of absolutely nowhere to become a world-straddling colossus. Nothing we want is on Google - it's where we go to find it.

Which is why I think Twitter could be as big as Google and why I think the smart money is being, well, smart...

PS: I know, I know. To be honest, I'm not really a rabid Twitter evangelist. I just look and sound like one. It'll pass.

Windows 7 Barf

Image by Esparta via Flickr

I almost managed a week without posting, thanks to Phillipa, but now I'm blowing it.

Twitter has been a-tweet with disgusted tweets linking to a very odd thing on YouTube - Microsoft's 'Host a Windows 7 Party' video.

It's linked here. Watch it before you read on, I would. Get it over with. Content warning - it's very, very, very crap - so don't say I Rickrolled you or anything.

Done? Fine, get your breath back, there's no rush.

Now it might just be that this is a really smart, post-ironic teaser that's going to lead to a really hip Madison Avenue type 'We woz just leading you on' follow-up. If it does that, Microsoft has lost my custom, because I'm really not in the mood to be messed around with by smartarses using social media to prove they're cleverer than I am. Right now, I want brands to start behaving better because I've had enough of being fed bullshit by corporations and just want honesty, integrity and straightforward communication. You jerk me around, I'll invest time punishing you. That's the new deal, guys.

Alternatively, this could just be an unbelievably turgid dollop of woeful, mind-numbingly asinine and utterly inane idiocy of appalling proportions. It could be the most ill-conceived, zeitgeist-missing 'campaign' of all time. Comments have been disabled on YouTube, which is not a good thing as Microsoft would quickly have seen that this was the daftest idea since someone decided to design a car called 'Edsel' - whether it's a 'smart' teaser or a genuine, epically misguided, attempt to get Middle America to hold spontaneous 'fun' Tupperware party style events across the nation.

Hey! Coool! Softerware! Like Tupperware! Why didn't we think of that before? Awesome! Good jooob!

End result? I truly think Microsoft has lost the plot. Marketing was the only thing it did superlatively well.

Where do you want to go today, Google? It's your world, now...

PS: I hated Vista. I wanted to believe in Win7.0...

Guest Post - Phillipa Fioretti

Today, as a treat, you can have a guest post from Australian author Phillipa Fiorretti.

My morning routine, once I have settled and have my evil espresso next to me, is to go through my overnight emails from the Northern Hemisphere and cruise around my favourite blogs reading the latest posts. I’m always pleased to see a new post from Alexander on Fake Plastic Souks, because I know that usually I’ll have a bit of a giggle.

Alexander and I are writing pals, having ‘met’ on Authonomy last year. I helped to edit the manuscript of his book, Olives, and I have to say there is nothing more soothing after a tiresome day than to pour a drink, pick up a sharp pencil and savage his work. I’m cruel, brutal even, but I’m fair. I won’t stand for any nonsense with adverbs and deal ruthlessly with any signs of lazy expression. And I don’t smile while I do it.

But when I arrive at his blog I’m off duty and care not if he uses three adjectives in a row. I read all the posts, although I tend to skim the technology ones unless there is an interesting angle – like the Etisalat patch for Blackberries, or the intricacies of using SatNav devices. The ones I really like are usually about the new train service, taxis, and commentary on daily life in Dubai.

I live in Australia and geographically the closest I’ve ever been to Dubai would be Kashmir. Most of us here, unless we know a friend or relative living in Dubai or have business connections there, think of money, expats, finance, money, sex on the beach and Emirates Airlines. As a kid, the constant references, (as in news stories), to the Middle East really bothered me. I was on the east coast of Australia and the Far East looked pretty close to where I was, so why was it Far, and what was the East in the Middle of?

Maps of the world, in Australia, show this continent in the centre of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus the Middle East is actually the North West and the Far East is the North. America is the Far East really, according to my junior map reading skills. So had someone made a mistake and the rest of the world just went a long with it? I began to ask questions and demand some answers.

But long and involved parental explanations were lost on me and it wasn’t until I started reading history books for my own pleasure, as opposed for school history teachers, did I get it. Two of my favourite writers on the region are Edward Said and Tim Mackintosh-Smith.

But while books like these humanise countries and explain the historical intricacies, they don’t give the immediate, daily minutiae that really brings it alive in one’s imagination. Posts such as Hard Times on Mr G. the taxi driver, NufNuf coping with the Abu Dhabi traffic, Sharjah’s Number 14 bus, the Etisalat saga and the strange creature called Modhesh.

I’m sure there are other blogs about Dubai written for the visitor or armchair traveller, but Fake Plastic Souks isn’t speaking to them and that’s what makes it so fascinating to me. I see the dust and the traffic and the air conditioned towers and all of the stories a travel writer would leave out.

And there is never an overload of adverbs to jolt me out of my reverie, cause me to sigh and shake my head, or make me want to slice away the excess words.

Phillipa's most excellent blog, which mixes her respective fascinations for art and writing quite neatly, can be found here. Her first novel, The Book of Love, is to be published by Hachette Australia next year.

US Public 'No Confidence' In Media Shock Horror

Image source: Pew Research Center

A poll carried out in the USA and published this week has shown that the US public have no faith in the credibility of media. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll found that some 71% of respondents did not feel that media got the facts straight in news reports, 63% felt that information from the media was ‘often off base’. Only 26% of people surveyed believed that the press took care to avoid bias.

71% of people depended on TV as their primary news source. But, this figure really fascinated me, 42% depend on the Internet (people could pick more than one medium, so you’re not going to add up to 100). And only 33% on newspapers. That Web figure compares to the 6% that relied on the Web ten years ago, incidentally.

This all takes place in a year when Google’s Q1 revenues equated to total US print advertising spending – and where newspaper ad sales dropped by some 29% in the first half of 2009. Did the Internet drop ‘em or the recession drop ‘em? It’s academic – Internet revenues went up so, whatever you slice it, print (and, incidentally, television and radio) is being eclipsed by the Internet.

It’s been a slow erosion of confidence, not an overnight one. Back in 1985, 55% of Americans believed their media generally got things right – this year, that’s down to 29%. The report shows a general consensus emerging regardless of political belief, but also highlights an average increase of 16% in people who do not believe the press is professional.

70% of those surveyed believed that news organisations ‘try to cover up their mistakes’. 74% of people believed that the press was biased in favour of big business and powerful people.

So we have a broad and growing distrust of mainstream media that you would have to consider to be close to fundamental and a clear movement to increased reliance on online media. That’s not rocket science, but these is numbers.

It’s always nice to be able to back your beliefs with numbers.

If My Car Were Windows Vista

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t unlock without asking me if I’m really sure I want to unlock it. The door would only open once I had confirmed that yes, I do want to open the door and no, I don’t want to play with the little purple dinosaur. Once I confirmed I wanted to open the door, it would then make the sound of a door opening but not actually unlock the door until I had confirmed that opening the door is what I really, really want to do.

It would take 60 seconds to actually unlock. At least.

I would then have to go through the same routine to start it. Every time I select a gear, it would ask if I’m sure that’s the gear I wanted. If I put it into automatic, it would play calming music and its windscreen would display a lovely blue/green iridescence. It would then ask me what gear I wanted. The tiptronic gears would have a delay of between one and ten seconds, while a display would flash a moving gear symbol at me along with the text, ‘Changing gear’.

For no apparent reason and without notice, my car would not move beyond second gear for long periods of time, forcing me to crawl along the hard shoulder. Then it would announce it had finished updating itself and fixing its file system and suddenly take off at great speed.

It would occasionally switch off the engine and, when I had coasted to a halt, ask me if I wanted help to fix the problem I had with the engine. I would have to answer yes, then it would restart and tell me how much it had enjoyed helping me to find a fix. Occasionally it would break down completely and parts would fall off. It would then ask if I wanted to find a solution. When I answered in the affirmative, it would tell me which parts had fallen off. When major parts fall off, it would ask me if I wanted to tell Microsoft about the problem I had caused.

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t start on cold mornings, hot mornings or mornings when I was in a rush. It would sit in my driveway flashing ‘Not Responding’ on its windscreen. If I took out the battery and reconnected it, then it would start first time every time. Occasionally, calling someone called Task Manager would help, but by no means always and it would take a huge amount of time for him to answer the phone. It would be safer just to disconnect the battery first thing.

When I tried to sound the horn, it would go online to find the right Codec for my horn and then fail to find it. Three hours later, it would go 'parp' for no apparent reason. Refilling it with petrol would be a challenge because there isn't a petrol cap release lever. I would have to sit at the petrol pump until, finally, it would ask me if I wanted to open the petrol cap. It would then play me a 30-minute video in Malay of why petrol is dangerous and only open the cap if I had clicked YES to agree that I understood the risks of using petrol. The fuel meter and reality would be completely disassociated.

Every time I took it for a service, the service manager would tut a lot and talk about critical updates, then keep it in the shop for two weeks for what he calls a ‘service pack’. When it came back, random bits would stop working. I would get messages telling me that the indicator wasn’t working, would I like to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction? If I said no, it would report me to the police for unsafe driving. If I said yes, it would tell me that it had fixed my Optimum Advanced Traffic Directional Warning System and ask if I would like to fix it again next time automatically? If I said yes, next time I tried to use the indicator, it would ask if I wanted to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction.

If my car were Windows Vista, it would have SatNav. Every time I programmed a route, the system would tell Microsoft where I was going and why. It would only work in Xhosa and a little known dialect of deepest Mongolia unless I agreed to have a Windows Live account, in which case it would work in the language of my choice for precisely fifteen minutes or four roundabouts, after which it would default to Xhosa until I accessed my Hotmail account and agreed to play with the purple dinosaur and accept MS into my life.

If my car were Windows Vista, I’d be highly likely to upgrade to Car 7.0 out of sheer desperation. But I sure as hell am thoroughly road testing the new car this time around. Because if I’d truly appreciated how bad this car was going to be, I’d have stayed with Car XP at any cost...

A glass to Keith Floyd

Image by Katiya Rhode-Singh via Flickr

I'm raising a glass (A Fat Expat Martini as you ask) as we speak, in memory of Keith Floyd. His cookery programs inspired many a would-be cook to give it a go, making light of disaster (courting it, in fact, with his ever-present glass in hand) and bringing a casual, light-hearted and generally devil-may-care approach to cookery that was in delightful counterpoint to the stuffy and rule-bound types that preceded him.

Floyd was an early influence for me as a cooker of things - and I loved him all the more for having provided space for a young Hugh Cornwell to play guitar at his restaurant, the reason why Floyd's programs intro'd to The Stranglers' music: he was a fan.

Floyd made food fun, made it an adventure and was eccentric, slapdash and earnest in equal measure. He cared about food, but in a way that made cookery fun to try, accessible and an adventure. I suppose he must be part of the reason why we have Jamie Olivers and Nigel Slaters, presenters and writers who are free to let people just have a go rather than get all Cordon Bleu about food. And I always think of him as being a little bit similar to Rick Stein, a man for whom I have enormous regard as a cookery writer and presenter.

But Floyd was there before them all, apparently making all the wrong business decisions and creating financial disaster around him. But inspiring me and tens of thousands of others to have a go at stuff, try stuff out and not be afraid to make an awful mess of it.

I'm sad he's gone, but raising a glass seemed the right way to say 'bye...

Border Rats

Image via Wikipedia

I am fascinated by the emergence of a new border crossing between Dubai and Sharjah. As you likely know, a 20Dhs surcharge has been levied between Dubai and Sharjah and vice-versa in an attempt to cut down on the problem of cabbies refusing to take inter-Emirates fares. This is mainly because of the fact they have to return empty: Sharjah cabs can’t pick up in Dubai and vice-versa. There’s a certain wisdom in that because if you didn’t have that rule in place, and enforce it with extreme severity, every single cab in Sharjah would be spending all day in Dubai, where the pickings are far richer.

Of that Dhs20, in Sharjah at least, Dhs15 goes to the company and Dhs5 to the driver to compensate him for the inconvenience. The idea goes back to the days when the traffic in Dubai was horrendous and a return to Sharjah would easily take an hour or more. Now the traffic’s flowing, it’s almost irrelevant – but it remains in place. Alongside any small carrot offered to the drives by this surcharge comes a big stick – drivers are fined by the company for refusing fares (as well as a whole rake of other misdemeanours).

Now cost-conscious passengers are taking cabs to the Sahara Centre shopping mall, which sits on the Sharjah/Dubai border and then walking across the short sandy piece of wasteland that dips down to Dubai. There, Dubai taxis are now queuing up to take ‘em to their destination. Problem solved – no Dhs20 surcharge. And, to many people in the Emirates, saving Dhs40 on a shopping or sight-seeing trip is a big deal. The taxis don’t really mind, either – they never made much, if anything, out of the damn surcharge in the first place.

It’s like a sort of dusty Checkpoint Charlie, an exchange of prisoners across the border wastelands – at the weekends and rush-hours, a shuffling horde of surcharge escapees meet waiting cabs, like sand flowing between the marbles of the system.

Now the informal border-crossing arrangement has sprung up, we can perhaps look forward to the growth of a ‘speed bump community’ – some enterprising souls will start flogging candy floss and newspaper twists of roasted peanuts, then they’ll become semi-permanent and before you know it, we’ll have the new border township of TwentyChips.

The Inevitable Metro Post

Image copyright Hit Entertainment

The Metro has so far eluded me. I don’t mean that I haven’t managed to get a ride yet - I have been staying away precisely because I don’t want to get stranded in a crowd of 2,000 shoving, jostling punters while all the inevitable teething problems are ironed out. (Isn’t it funny that teething problems are always declared ‘inevitable’ only after they have occurred?)

Mind you, I would love to know quite who was so utterly asinine as to put a big red DO NOT TOUCH THIS button within reach of any Dubai audience.

I have pointed out before, on blog and radio alike, that I am amazed that anyone could think we needed an ‘awareness raising’ advertising campaign that poured millions down the plughole in telling us that there’s a metro there. We can see the blasted thing – we’ve spent two years queuing up to drive around the holes and pilings, watching the roller-coaster swoops and loops of track being slotted together and admiring the (beautiful, incidentally) ‘armadillo’ stations.

The lack of informational campaigns on the other hand, the absence of any concerted attempt to build awareness and understanding, has arguably contributed to the many problems experienced over the first few days of operations. Quite apart from the lack of 'traditional' media such as leaflets, Z-cards and the like, there's no dedicated website and the FAQs and so on available on the 'Rail Agency' section of the RTA website site are useless - and it doesn't look as if the rail site has been updated since early August!

Perhaps explaining the seeming lack of useful information, Gulf News today (not, for instance, six months ago) tells us the RTA is to 'launch a campaign to educate the public on how to use the Metro and the culture of train travel'. Duh.

But no, the reason it's eluded me is none of the above. It's that it doesn’t appear to start from anywhere near me or end up anywhere I’d want to go. For instance, I could see myself parking up at Deira City Centre, doing a wander around the shops and then taking the Metro up to, say, Mall of the Emirates. But then I’d likely fall foul of the time-limited parking.

My office is in Satwa, a significant distance from the nearest Metro Station – as is pretty much anyone on the coastal side of Sheikh Zayed Road. I can’t realistically get a taxi to the station as Dubai has a minimum fare of Dhs10 for a cab. So If I want to go to Dubai Internet City for a meeting, I’m taking a cab to the station, taking the train and then taking a cab to my meeting. That’s Dhs24 for the one-way journey. If I want to play feeder buses, I can. But I don't know where they operate from and to. And I'm not really into waiting around for buses when I work for a business that bills my time by the hour. Even if I can get the bus in a timely fashion and connect to a waiting train, ("Hold the train for Mr McNabb"), I'm in for at least a 40 minute journey - one that otherwise would take me 20 minutes by car.

So far I’m struggling to see quite why, ahem, it’s ‘my metro’. I’m sure with time I’ll find out a way to use it. But for now it remains a complete irrelevance to me. Except for the amusing anecdotes being shared by intrepid friends who have chosen to ride early - from two-hour waits on static trains to British security guards who've never lived here before treating locals like you'd treat a queue-jumper back in Blighty (the results were apparently quite comic), through to delayed trains, massive queues and general cluelessness.

Nobody has so far used the word debacle, incidentally. I claim the first.

PS: This week's got a sort of transport theme. Unintentional, I can assure you!

PPS: If you're interested in some good consumer feedback from the horse's mouth, take a look here on the UAE Community Blog! Fascinating stuff!

Hard Times

Image by jtyerse via Flickr

Mr G., our taxi driver, was more than usually lugubrious when he took us into Dubai this weekend. Times are hard.

I call him ‘our’ because we have his mobile and can call him to a pickup – he’s reliable and we both trust him – he’s lived here since the 1970s and was a ‘proper’ taxi driver before he was forced to sign up to drive for The Man.

He’s become something of a habit for us – given that Sharjah taxis have no call center and no ‘control’, you can’t actually book one and have to take your chances on the street. That’s not a great idea if you’re decked out in your glad rags on your way to a dinner, for instance, probably the only reason we have, apart from airport trips, to take a taxi.

The downside is that he has absolutely no road sense whatsoever. How he is still alive constantly amazes me given how many miles he must cover. Easily distracted, impossibly cautious at times that call for decisive movement and hasty when caution should prevail, his performance finding, unravelling and fitting his mobile’s hands-free when the phone rings is a comedic masterpiece that he can, on a good day, extend for aching, reaper-baiting minutes. But we like Mr G.

Business is bad right now. He has to make something like Dhs270 in fares to be in the money and finding that cash is hard work – the new Sharjah bus system, chaotic though it may seem to the occidental eye, is depriving him of customers. The Express Bus from the airport to Rolla and the Fish Market costs just Dhs5 and has cut down on airport runs, while the bus from the Fish Market into Dubai is a mere Dhs10. And for Dhs25, you can get to Abu Dhabi – apparently it’s Dhs20 on the way back, because the Sharjah government takes Dhs5 and Abu Dhabi doesn’t. That’s fair enough – Abu Dhabi’s got the money for grand gestures, after all.

You can start to see how cabbies are hurting. Making it worse, waiting for a regular bus (such as the infamous no-timetable No.14) is just as good or bad as waiting for a taxi and so many casual passengers are voting with their pockets too. Without a call centre, the more expensive cabs of today’s national taxi companies are finding it hard to compete. But the company doesn’t really have an imperative to make urgent changes because the cabbies are absorbing the pain.

How long they will continue to do so quietly and compliantly remains to be seen.

A Load of Twits

On the eve of Dubai Twestival, Dubai 92 Radio DJ and top celebrity Twitterer Catboy decided to announce on air that we would compile a list of Dubai's 100 Most Compelling Tweeters, so that newbies to the world of Twitter here in the UAE can kickstart their tweeting with some new and informative friends.

Given the grief caused by our last joint venture, the infamous list of Dubai's top bloggers, I've moved to a secret location for the next few days. This list is posted on Catboy and GeordieBird's Facebook fan page, which I do commend you join up to (It's linked here), but I've reproduced it here purely because people seem to have been having problems linking through to the Facebook page that the list is on.

If you're not already on Twitter but fancy giving it a whirl, sign up today at http://twitter.com, then click on each link below, start following and get lost in the world of Twits.

First of all, here are our Twitter 'handles'...

http://www.twitter.com/catboy_dubai
http://www.twitter.com/geordiebird_dxb
http://www.twitter.com/alexandermcnabb

This list is in no particular order. Here we go...

http://www.twitter.com/Dubai92
http://www.twitter.com/danindxb
http://www.twitter.com/dxbbushell
http://www.twitter.com/timeoutdubai
http://www.twitter.com/WildPeeta
http://www.twitter.com/DubaiSunshine
http://www.twitter.com/MissGoogle
http://www.twitter.com/zooberry
http://www.twitter.com/mnystedt
http://www.twitter.com/laradunston

http://www.twitter.com/derrickpereira
http://www.twitter.com/tomgara
http://www.twitter.com/PKGulati
http://www.twitter.com/gerald_d
http://www.twitter.com/TMHDubai
http://www.twitter.com/SamanthaDancy
http://www.twitter.com/dxbluey
http://www.twitter.com/Bakerlicious
http://www.twitter.com/Shufflegazine
http://www.twitter.com/Nagham

http://www.twitter.com/Masarat
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Numerologist

Image by 27147 via Flickr

This post is scheduled to publish at 09.09.09 09.09.09.

On the evening of the 20th, you could get away with 20.09 20.09 2009.

Next year, all the fun happens in October. After 2012, we can calm down.

Well, it beats posting about the damn Metro.

Your news is my news now...

Image via Wikipedia

An interesting piece filed by AP today on 'social netiquette', talking about the increasing problems of how we manage information in this online, socially overloaded, on demand world of ours. There are some good examples of people losing control of their news as others Tweet or Facebook it - so that other friends and family are upset to find out about important events online rather than in person. It's here.

I've posted before about the problem of journalists combing Facebook for information about you when you die (here, in fact) - just one of these new ways of behaving we're all finding out about as we all experiment with the media and its consequences. And I was talking the other day to someone whose mother found out from Facebook about his engagement being broken off - one reason he refuses to go near it now.

There are an increasing number of examples of people having reason to deeply regret something they've done on social media, with often life-changing consequences. And yet a recent Spot On Twitter poll found that many people still re-Tweet links they see on Twitter without actually checking them out. That urge to get to the story first is something most journalists will understand - and the need to stop for a second and assess what you are sharing and the potential consquences of that sharing is also something that journalists will not only appreciate, but have evolved practices to manage. Social media hasn't - yet.

It's going to take a little less haste and a little more thoughtfulness from people in general in future. I do believe we are going to see the evolution of accepted ways of using social media - that thinks like Tweeting other people's news will become unacceptable. But it's such a fast-moving environment, there are gong to be a lot of breakages on the way.

The trouble is that, even when we take care, we all make mistakes - it's just that those mistakes are now incredibly, indelibly public.

Tweet!

Just in case you didn't know, Dubai's Twestival event, one of the world-wide Twestivals being held in over 200 countries between the 10th-13th September, takes place at Jam Jar, the funky gallery space thingy in Al Qouz, this coming Saturday (the 12th September) from 8pm. There's a map to Jam Jar here, BTW.

Correcting Emirates Business 24x7's muckle-headed report yesterday citing the Abu Dhabi Twestival as being the first held in the Emirates, this will be the second Twestival event in Dubai - the first was held back on the 12th February.

Like the first Dubai Twestival, this event will have charitable fund-raising in mind, although this time the global events are being dubbed 'Twestival Local' and are raising money for local charities. In this case, funds raised from the event will go to the Dubai Autism Centre.

If your idea of fun isn't a room-full of steaming twits, I can quite sympathise. But Twestival's in a good cause, brings together a surprisingly wide and diverse audience of interesting people and is a good place to guage what's going on with this fast-growing and increasingly useful social media platform and, indeed, social media in general.

Pre-registration is a must as the event is almost certainly going to be full. Registration opens today, so I'd get in early while you can. You can get more information and register for the event on the official Twestival website here.

Tweet!

Ancient Geek V.3.0 Professional Edition

The regional manager admired my technique of making paper profits by moving computers to other stores around the country but was strongly of the opinion that selling computers to customers was preferable, from the company’s point of view, to bilking less nimble computer departments by dumping fast-depreciating inventory on them. I didn’t care – I had got rid of some real dogs from our inventory and made money – including dumping a stack of eight inch floppy disks and a Tandy Model III and Model IVP – the latter a 20lb ‘portable’ that looked like a sewing machine and performed not dissimilarly.

The Model III was an all-in-one moulding housing a green screen, two floppy drives and running the CP/M operating system (Control program for Microcomputers, if you don’t mind). CP/M gave access to 54kbytes of TPA or Transient Program Area for software and was the first ‘de facto standard’ operating system.

In fact, IBM approached the makers of CP/M, Digital Research, to create a 16-bit version of CP/M for its secret PC project. Digital Research didn’t play ball (negotiations broke down) and IBM went to Young Smartypants Bill Gates instead. Gates’ Microsoft bought a clone of CP/M called, apparently, Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS), from Seattle Computer Products and licensed it, rather than sold it outright, to IBM. Ironically, the original negotiations with DR had broken down because DR wanted to license to IBM, rather than sell outright, its 16-bit implementation of CP/M.

But back then CP/M was still the ‘daddy’ operating system and machines like the Tandy Model IV, the Apple IIe and the Commodore 96 were still roaming the earth. The IBM PC was still mainly to be found in datacentres – but the real boom came when Phoenix cloned the IBM BIOS and Microsoft changed a couple of bytes in COMMAND.COM and magically turned PC-DOS into MS-DOS. The clone was born and the PC industry took off like never before.

Tandy’s first PC-Clone was pretty successful, but the company’s attempt to beat IBM to produce an 80286 based machine, the Model 2000, was disastrous – by the time IBM brought its PC AT to the market, it was incompatible with the Tandy – and almost overnight Tandy/Radio Shack was out of the market.

That didn’t really bother me at the time – I had my own computer store in the basement of Tandy Northampton and, thanks to a contract from a local company that bought 20 machines a month from me, stripped ‘em down and used ‘em in CNC laser cutting equipment, I was the UK’s top dog computer salesman, too. This left me with valuable time to play with my toys unencumbered by any inconveniences such as customers. And oh, what toys! Because down there in my little cave of wonders in amongst things like shrink-wrapped Dbase II, Multiplan, AutoCAD 12 and a program called The Last One that claimed to be the last software package you’d ever need. Ha. I also had... wait for it...

A 10 Megabyte hard disk.

My 10Mb disk was state of the art stuff, intended for network users. It was the size of a CPU and if you looked at it too hard it would head crash. And it was mine, all mine. To win a bet I programmed a simple version of colossal caves using MS-DOS batch file language that worked by creating and deleting files in directories as you wander around, placing files in them to display objects that are there, letting you pick ‘em up and drop ‘em. It even let you do tasks if you had objects. It was an insane labour of directory-creatin’ MS-DOS batch file love.

At the same time as Tandy was paying me to mess around a lot with computers, a computer publishing company in Northampton put an ad in the paper for people to write reviews for their Middle East computer directory. I went along – it seemed like a doddle. They collected brochures from computer companies and I had to write up the brochure into a ‘review’ of the computer, something like 800 words if I remember right. They’d pay me £10 a review. That was when I discovered I can write really quickly – I would knock out 4-5 of these things a night, which was pretty decent money in the mid-1980s. I can remember getting really creative squeezing 800 words out of an ICL brochure that said little more than ‘The ICL xxxx is beige and can search the Encyclopedia Brittanica in just fifteen seconds!’

BTW, do you remember the ICL One Per Desk? What a product!

Anyway, for a number of reasons I was extremely rude to the MD of the company and so he hired me and sent me on a business trip to Saudi Arabia. The rest, as they say, has been history...

Ancient Geek V.2.11 (Service Pack 2)

I suppose I've started, so I might as well finish...

The stock controller at work’s husband was starting up a company making sound samplers based on the Apple II microcomputer – was I interested? I nearly took her arm off. A meeting in Hemel Hempstead's White Hart pub led to an offer – they were going to pay me real money to work with computer based music systems. I laughed all the way home (well, apart from the bit where my stupid BSA Bantam D7 broke down).

The Greengate DS:3 was the brainchild of a guy who worked for modem company Case, Dave Green. Green was painfully shy and brilliant, everyone’s idea of a true geek, and had worked out how to use a combination of analogue to digital and digital to analogue converter chips on an Apple expansion card to take sounds from the ‘real world’ and digitise them. The other half of the company name was supplied by uber-geek Colin Holgate, a programmer of remarkable genius. Colin used to ‘hardcode’ assembler programs. I remember going into work one day with a BASIC program that drew fractals and Colin losing patience with it (it took an hour to fill the screen with a fractal) and hand-coding the routine in opcodes on the spot to speed it up.

The genius of the DS:3 lay in the fact that it could sample and replay real-world sound, a trick made possible by using a little-known technology called Direct Memory Access. By using a DMA controller (a secret kept so closely that production units had the lettering erased from the DMAC chip using sandpaper) to bypass the processor and 'burst' data direct from memory, the DS:3 would sample and play back about 1.5 seconds of sound at something like a 24kHz sample rate (giving a 12Khz sound resolution. You’ve got to allow for yer Nyquist criteria, see?). At the time, this was revolutionary stuff that made the £2,000 DS:3 a competitor for the £20,000 Fairlight CMI, the uber-boffin’s Computer Musical Instrument of choice – used at the time by people as rich and famous as Kate Bush and based on an Australian defence computer rather than the relatively cheap and ubiquitous Apple.

Squeezing sounds out of the 8-bit, 1Mhz 6502 processor of the Apple II meant that you were pushing something like 24 kilobits per note per second through the system at the sampled rate – but changing pitch was achieved by speeding the output, effectively doubling the data rate for each octave. So replaying a sound across a keyboard from an A440 sample rate meant that you were pushing at limits like a 96 kbit data rate. The DS:3 was a four-note polyphonic system, too – which means an effective 384kbit data throughput. Not surprisingly, playing the top four keys of the keyboard not infrequently crashed early systems spectacularly.

It was all great fun. The ability to 'sample' just over 1 second of sound and replay it was a source of wonderment at the time and you'd always get oohs and aahs when you played it on a keyboard. It's one reason why computer based sound and music production today so awes me - especially software like Reason, which is a professional quality multi-track recording studio including effects, synths and samplers all on a rack stored on your PC screen. We used to have rooms full of boxes and wires and things.

We exhibited at the Apple show in London. I remember some company had hired a Scottish pipe band to 'pipe in' their product (Geddit? Mac product? Pipe band?) and I convinced the pipe major to come to our stand and be sampled. He was huge, hairy, red-faced and gruff and when he saw the Apple he laughed at me.

"Ye think ye're goana get mah payaps intae yon wee borx do ye laddie?"
"Err, yes." I stammered. And so he huffed and he puffed and he let rip and I sampled the resultant deafending skirl.
"Well? What's it sound like, laddie?"
I proudly hit the keyboard. And out came a sound not unlike "tweep".
His look of absolute, scornful triumph is etched forever on my memory.

We worked on sound to laser control systems for the Laserium in London (Kate Bush was performing and, like a fool, I turned down the chance to go) and all sorts of other geekyness. I remember a lot of playing about with binaural recording and getting a laser from Maplin to muck around with, as well as a lot of tea and soup. I ended up running the demos for new customers and so my days became a progression of oddities, from Buddhist monks to Hank Marvins, from the guy that programmed the keyboards for U2s Unforgettable Fire (he was really bitter about that: U2 got all that money and all he got was a session fee. I really couldn’t get my head around that one!) through to ‘Fingers’ – the Boomtown Rats’ keyboard player. Among many other things, the DS:3 was the engine-room for the first musical tootlings of two chaps called Bill Drummond and Jimmy Caughty who were to later become the K Foundation. The many and major copyright issues (and lawsuits) opened up by their use of the DS:3 were to define the start of a long and fraught battle to understand copyright in the digital age.

But it couldn’t last. Like so many innovative, ground-breaking British companies before and after it, Greengate died. No distribution channel and a policy of only selling direct or through hand-picked resellers meant that the company had little scale. The DS:4, a stunning machine based around the 68000 processor (Inmos’ innovative Transputer was almost the platform of choice) was late in development and American company Ensoniq had brought out a much more accessible keyboard based sampler, the Mirage. Other companies were following, including Akai. The writing was on the wall and sales volumes started to plummet. With no DS:4 in production, Greengate soon became shut gate.

Which is how I ended up selling computers for Radio Shack.

Ancient Geek V.2.0 (Beta)

Photo: IBM archives.

I remember being particularly useless in my first ever job, where it was my daily task to rapidly advance the ageing process of the already- harried production controller in a factory that produced metal housings and racks for electronics systems. The company had installed an IBM minicomputer, a System 32 which was later upgraded to S34, 36 and 38. The decision was taken to implement MAPICS – Management Accounting and Production Inventory Control System (I remembered that. Didn’t even Google it! Not bad, huh?). This was a particularly brilliant decision given than MAPICS was designed for a chemicals manufacturer and we were a sheet metal factory.

In an extraordinary process, the entire business was redesigned to fit the software. The drawing office system was completely rebuilt, job cards going out to the factory floor redesigned, the stock system completely redone and even the workflow in the factory was rebuilt to accommodate the demands of ‘the machine’.

Even back then, I remember wondering why the machine didn’t accommodate the business rather than forcing the business into the arduous and painstaking job of accommodating the machine. I've been wondering that about technology ever since.

The production office was filled with older gentlemen. They weren’t a bad bunch, but belonged to a different England, the England of Pinewood Films, tank tops and pipes. And they didn’t like the computer one bit.

I, on the other hand, loved it. It didn’t take long for me to notice that MAPICS flashed the names of its (RPGII coded) subroutines (I remember AMEM00 in particular, for some reason) on the green-text terminal screens. Logically, avoiding the awful and tortuous menu system that the program used, I used to key these in and bounce directly to the subroutine I wanted to be in. This made me a lot more efficient in the way I negotiated my way around the software but, as hindsight tells us, meant that I took no parameters with me as I went from routine to routine. The resulting massive system crash took weeks to build up to and was apparently particularly spectacular when viewed from the DP department.

The DP manager eventually found me. He wasn’t happy. In fact he was utterly distraught. After he had calmed down, he decided that as he couldn't kill me (as he had originally, apparently, intended) or even sack me (my boss deciding that training up another callow erk was more trouble than putting up with me), I would probably be better off inside the tent pissing out in future and so I became ‘Mr Computer’ for my office full of recalcitrant Luddites.

My lifelong love affair with computers had started...

(BTW, I googled it later. MAPICS has only got one 'A' it appears as the 'and' doesn't count in the acronym)

Ancient Geek

Photo: The HP Computer Museum

I thought I’d indulge myself and treat you to a short series of old geeky technology posts. Complain as much as you like, I just need to get this stuff out of my system.

I am constantly to be found staring open-mouthed at technology these days. Sometimes it is because I’m an old man and I no longer find myself in a state of instant empathy with it all, sometimes it’s because it’s stopped working or is doing something unutterably dumb. More often, though, it is because I’ve been stopped in my tracks at the wonder of it all – remembering how it used to be, I’m sometimes amazed at how it is now.


You see, the first computer I programmed was an HP mainframe, back in the mid-1970s. I rather fancy it must have been an HP 2116B. It was programmed using punched cards which we had to mark with pencil, a little like filling out lottery tickets. My first ever program?

10 Print ‘Hello’
20 goto 10

How’s that for a slice of brilliance? Move over, Gates!

I didn’t get to use the computer at school very much because I wasn’t any good at maths and only kids that were good at maths or that the maths teacher ‘liked’ were allowed to use the computer. One kid was so good he could make pictures of Snoopy on printouts. The teletype terminal for punching programs into the paper tape puncher was a later addition and then, finally, VDUs. That's what we used to call screens, kids. Visual Display Units. You can stop laughing now.

They don’t seem quite to have known how things were going to go – I remember clearly being taught a number of looney number bases, including binary, octal and duodecimal. I used to cry in rage and frustration over duodecimal, sitting up late at night struggling with it as the rest of my nightly three hours of homework sat undone. Of course, these were all totally useless and it was years after I left school that I taught myself hexadecimal – the actual number system that we all ended up using with computers.

It’s worth remembering that at the time most academic institutions outside of major universities used to ‘time share’ computer time on commercial systems. I recall the school's HP was supposed to cost the equivalent of a detached house at the time. And apart from flashing reassuring lights across its front panel, it wasn’t very good for much. History tells us that it had a magnetic core memory that could store, as standard, (*gasp*) 4096 16-bit words.

That’s a good deal less than a talking greeting card stores today...