Pissy

 

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg

It’s been like spending a week trying to pogo in molasses – the Internet is just not terribly well. And I have to confess, after a week of pages not loading, Twitter not updating and email taking an age, I’m feeling somewhat frustrated and generally pissy.

The statement from Etisalat (back on the 20th) that its services were unaffected as it had rushed to route bandwidth through other means was piffle, as usual. Du made the same statement, but I don’t use their services so can’t comment. Etisalat’s network quality most certainly has been significantly affected by the outage, but why let the facts stop you lying to you customers and treating them like morons? It never stopped ‘em before, anyway. I’ve also had a few dodgy voice circuits, which might be a result of the telco that likes to say ‘ugh’ cutting some of its voice traffic over to IP from its beloved yoghurt pots.

To be fair, it’s not their fault that some Captain Pugwash type decided to drag SEAMEWE4 on the end of his anchor ‘till it snapped (or whatever mad series of events led to the break). But I do wish they’d just tell the truth.

SEAMEWE (anoraks will know it stands for South East Asia Middle East Western Europe) and FLAG (Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe) are the two main cable systems upon which the bulk (if not all) of the UAE’s Internet traffic depends. There are four SEAMEWEs – the last time we had problems, it was a cut in SEAMEWE4, the latest most sparkly terabit capacity cable. SEAMEWE3 is also operational, but SEAMEWE1 and 2 have been phased out.

Although it is feasible to use satellite, and there are satellite circuits available, this is an expensive and limited option that most telcos will only use as a last resort – the great undersea cables are where it’s at.
There are other circuits apart from SEAMEWE 3 and 4 and FLAG, for instance (as you’ll see from the map above) there’s a circuit that goes around Africa. But the Red Sea and Suez are the most vulnerable points in the network of sub-sea cables that underpins our ability to do important stuff like play Chatroulette and listen to the Moon Song.

Until there is better diversity, we’ll continue to be highly vulnerable to breaks – and will continue to see limited bandwidth sold to us at premium prices compared to other world markets. It constantly rankles when I think that the Japanese are paying $0.27 per megabit month, with the average subscriber taking a 60 Gig line. Yes, 60Gig. In fact, much of the world gets plenty more bandwidth (with less latency) for less money than we do. A hell of a lot less money.

Hey, ho. It’s not as if Internet connectivity were critical to the development of the Middle East region and the largest single factor in its ability to be competitive moving forward, is it?

Turbulent Times

Take a look at the adword placement below the headline. Neat, huh? The Du ad is, BTW, by no means the first time that their clap-happy strapline has been at odds with the news it appears against!

The Times of India yesterday reported that Emirates' EK530, the plane that hit heavy turbulence en-route to Kochi, 'dropped 15,000 feet in a few seconds'. This, the key fact in the TOI story, seemed pretty unbelievable - 15,000 feet is nigh-on three miles and you'd have to be dropping at above the speed of sound to do that in a 'few seconds' (about 15 seconds at Mach 1), which would, incidentally, be way above the likely terminal velocity of an airliner. Wow! Do I win anorak of the year?

In fact, a short period of heavy turbulence, including a reported drop through a 200ft air pocket, meant minor injuries sustained by some 20 passengers. Things could have been a great deal worse and EK's pilot certainly deserved the round of applause he apparently got when the plane landed.

The TOI piece, obviously in error, still hasn't been corrected and a lot of people took that amazing fact at face value - you've got to admit, a 15,000 foot hellish power-dive is a great story and was likely the one fact in the piece that sent it global with amazing rapidity (Twitter was all a-Twitter, of course!). Without that attention-getting 15,000 feet, we'd just have a minor incident.

So here's the payoff. You're the TOI and you've got a story that is factually bonkers but which is driving huge traffic to your website. Do you correct it and lose your news value or do you leave it up and sit back to count the hits?

GeekFest Dubai 4.0 - GeekTalks

The GeekTalks have become a hotly anticipated element of the happy gathering of technophiles that is GeekFest Dubai and this month's clutch of chattering in the little ideas-friendly hothouse that is the cinema at GeekFest's home, Dubai's funky hangout The Shelter, is going to be, believe me, the hottest of them all.

How we're going to follow this lot, I don't know. I guess we'll just have to do what we've always done and sit back waiting to see what happens!

Don't forget, BTW, that this GeekFest is themed 'When Geeks Go Green' - Spot On resident tree-hugger Alec Harden was keen to save the planet rather than have fun at GeekFest and cajoled us into asking everyone to bring their old technology along so that it can be recycled by the nice people at recycling non-profit company EnviroServe. Alec organised that, so don't go accusing us of getting organised or anything!

We'll be collecting any unwanted technology stuff, from Tom Gara's old iPhone through to old printers, cables, phones, PCs, any old PCBs, calculators, IBM 3090s, ICL OnePerDesks, Osborne portables, magnetic core memories, Ataris, batteries, TVs - anything and everything, in fact. And then EnviroServe is going to recycle them. We're aiming to beat out Dubai Internet City's slightly sad total of 1,000 items recycled across the whole zone and we're already over 1/4 of the way there, with over 250 old bits of tech stuff already on the way in!


THE TALKS

Will, as always be over-crowded and yet remain on a first-come, first-served seating basis. The first two talks will start at 8.00pm, the second two at 9.00pm. Each talk will last for fifteen minutes. The talkers are in charge of when they start and finish, how they present and what they present. All we do is agree the slot.

A Geek in Niqab
The Niqab [face-veil] has fast become the hot-topic in the Media. Often portrayed as being either mysterious or fanatical, this simple piece of cloth has stirred huge controversy. Hamna Ahmed, a GeekFest regular and Niqabi will give a personal perspective on the media and public perceptions she has encountered. Currently finishing a two-year diploma in Quranic studies, Hamna is enthusiastic about food, good causes and is a Twitter addict!

A Gamer’s Life
Mohammad Alhuraiz is the man behind lochalarchade.com, a gaming site that specialises in underrated and underappreciated games for the Middle East – as well as running a popular and successful podcast that serves the regional gamer community. The site’s about to start pushing user created content and Mohammad’s going to be talking about the evolution of the site as well as sharing ten top tips for successful podcasting in the Middle East.
(Mohammad was nominated as a GeekTalker by Muhamad Ali J.)

Two Fat Ladies – Making Milestones
Talking about creating milestones, trekking, helping kids and never growing up – no matter what the body says. Oh yes and using technology along the way! Young at heart Mita is a PR specialist who lives and breathes technology. She is an active proponent of social media as an intricate part of everyday life – both personal and professional - and never more so than when raising money for children in Nepal.

XeroError 
Ashraf Ghori is the man behind Xpanse CGI, the studio that created XeroError. For anyone that hasn’t heard of this ground-breaking project, XeroError is the first CGI Science Fiction film produced in the UAE, hell, in all likelihood the Middle East! Ashraf will will be joined by associate producers Mohammad Mondal & Waqqas Qadir Sheikh as well as Phat Mo, an actor in the film.

Ashraf and the team will be talking informally about how they did it on a shoestring budget, coffee-laced late nights and sheer dedication to an unlikely vision – and will be showing stunning clips from the finished film.

THE SMALL PRINT

GeekFest Dubai 4.0, When Geeks Go Green, will take place on the 29th April 2010 at The Shelter in Al Quoz (this is the link to the location map). You can do the Facebook thing or follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter. GeekFest Dubai is jointly UNorganised by myself and Shelter supremo Saadia Zahid (@Saadia on Twitter) and is a not for profit event held without harming any small furry animals.

BTW, the first Jordanian GeekFest took place in Amman  last night at the Mohtaref Remal Café!

GeekFest Beirut 2.0 hasn't happened yet as they're so UNorganised they missed their own date for it to take place. GeekFest Cairo is, as Gulf News would have it, 'on the anvil' but no date has been set. And we thought WE were UNorganised! :)

Profiteering, Anyone?

As UK and much Northern European airspace remains closed, flights are being cancelled in swathes. Each new day is bringing more destroyed travel plans and now news is emerging of airlines behaving scandalously.

Not least among these are Aer Lingus, which is not only continuing to display a happy 'we sell cheap flights' website (only a one line link to a sparse volcano information page on the home page would even give away the fact that there's any problem at all), but is still not answering its phones to customers, providing any sort of telephone based information or even changing its standard messages or daytime only working hours.

Alongside this, Aer Lingus is actually still selling tickets on flights this week - flights that people whose travel has been cancelled are actually trying to rebook onto - flights that the airline is charging high prices for, too. Take a one-way from Dublin to London. Pre-crisis they asked €24.99 for that sector - now a ticket to travel
later this week (Wednesday, in fact) is being shopped out for as much as €149.99.



So people like us, stranded thousands of miles from home, can't get onto new flights following cancellations because the airline is selling our places to new travellers. What's more, if you take a look at the prices being offered, it's like a bookies' odds on the days when travel will actually go ahead!

Emirates, with a UK helpline that simply tells customers that it's not taking calls, is hardly doing better - and BA is, according to Sky News, behaving atrociously to passengers - including refusing to pay hotel costs for passengers it has stranded in Beijing, trying to charge them one-way fees for rescheduled return flights and failing to provide consular services for pax whose visas are expiring through no fault of their own.

I'm frankly amazed at the lack of fury over the cack-handed communications of the airlines, let alone the lack of media coverage at how badly airlines are communicating with their customers and managing the situation. Now they're selling out people's hopes for higher fares while restrictions still apply.

I'm quite sure fussing about it on this Middle Eastern blog backwater won't help, but at least I've got it off my chest!

Remote

It's been an eventful holiday one way and another. We spent a miserable day in Limerick Regional Hospital's A&E waiting room before being sent home for lack of a bed. By the next morning, Sarah (who was extremely ill) collapsed and had to be taken right back there by ambulance, a journey of over an hour. The paramedics were absolutely fantastic, a jovial yet highly professional crowd. All of the medical staff were truly marvellous: kind, good-natured and funny.

We owe the doctors, nurses and staff at Thurles Ambulance Service and Limerick Regional a huge thank you.

Despite that, Ireland's health service is obviously at breaking point - even from our limited experience you could see it was dangerously under-resourced and over-managed. I was infuriated by the fussy bureaucrat in admissions who insisted on calling me rather than letting me call them to check on the availability of a bed - only to find out when it came to the crunch that they actually couldn't call me as I had a UAE mobile and their lines were barred from international calls. We only found out we had a bed when I called back in desperation post-collapse. I pointed out this was perhaps an issue worth escalating in case of other international travellers being in our situation only to get a repeated response of 'that's not my issue, it's nothing to do with me, that'. I understand, I said, but perhaps you could flag it to management because as it happened it was a somewhat dangerous situation. 'That's nothing to do with me, it's not my responsibility.'

Thanks.

And of course, the one time we decide to spend a week offline in a totally remote lighthouse in the middle of nowhere (well, West of Kinsale, anyway) is the one time we needed online access - when Iceland's most unpronounceable volcano erupted and spewed ash across Europe's airspace, everyone was directed to airline websites (the airlines having worked out that websites are really cool at informing customers rather than actually talking to them). Aer Lingus are as good at not answering the phone as Limerick Regional's bureaucrats are at avoiding responsibility. In fact, we haven't managed to get through to a human once all week - despite tens of calls every day.

Our flight out of Cork got canned so we've gone north to stay with the in-laws in Dundalk - we'll be flying out of Dublin as and when we do get away. In the meantime, it's lots of following aviation sites on Twitter, watching the news and drinking Guinness.

Well, even clouds packed with volcanic dust must have their silver lining...

GeekFest Dubai 4.0 – When Geeks Go Green

We’ve got together with recycling company EnviroServe to arrange a gigantic old technology collection at GeekFest 4.0. Enviroserve is a Public Private Partnership with the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Environment and has a dedicated e-waste recovery facility in Dubai. Before anyone accuses me of organising something, this is all thanks to Spot On resident tree-hugger, Alec Harden (@alecharden).

It’s an often under-appreciated fact that our favourite geeky toys can actually be recycled usefully when we’ve upgraded to that lovely, sparkly Next-Gen device– and can often be harmful to the environment if they’re not properly recycled. Just think of all those nasty heavy metals in all those Lithium batteries, circuit boards and old toner cartridges – let alone all that recyclable plastic!

What’s more, there’s gold in them there motherboards, as well as a range of other recyclable goodies – in fact, EnviroServe attempts to offset as much of the cost of recycling as it can from recovering those goodies from your old toys.

So here’s the deal. We’re bringing our old stuff to GeekFest and collecting in at The Shelter ready for EnviroServe to pick up in one great big bag of old geekery – and if your old GeekLife is interesting, you can even share it in the display of Ancient Geeks we’ll be mounting before we junk the whole damn lot.

What counts as recyclable? Old printers, PCs, phones, toner cartridges, hard disks, speakers, hifis, iPods – anything electronic, in fact.

DIC recently announced it had managed to recycle a whole 1,000 bits of technology. We’re gonna beat that at GeekFest 4.0. See if we don't!

We've got some stunning GeekTalks as well as other stuff up our sleevies - more later!

GeekFest Dubai 4.0 will take place on the 29th April 2010 at The Shelter in Al Quoz. You can do the Facebook thing, follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter or just pop back here nearer the date for more information.

Don't forget, BTW, GeekFest Amman 1.0 taking place on the 17th April - follow @GeekFestAmman on Twitter or you can find it here on Facebook!

And GeekFest Beirut (you guessed it, @GeekFestBeirut or Facebook) might just happen on the 30th April, but they're being too UNorganised to predict just now!

We All Need A Little Love

One of my writer pals, the rather wonderful (albeit editorially brutal) Philippa Fioretti, yesterday enjoyed the official debut of her first published novel, The Book of Love, in Australia.

The Book of Love is a romantic comedy - and has already garnered rave reviews from Austrialian media.

Publishing works strangely in Australia, it would appear, so you can't just off and buy the book from Amazon.Com. You can, however, nip over to bookselling website Dymock's, who'll sell it to you quite happily. The link to that is HERE.

There is a minor, teensy-weensy issuette if you're based in the Middle East, in that Dymock's don't ship here - they'll only ship to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, the US and the UK. So you'll have to use a forwarding service or have someone you know that lives in one of these places mail it onto you.

If you can't be arsed with all that, then either wait for Jashanmals or Magrudys to stock it or fly to Australia and buy a copy from a good bookshop.

The Inevitable Blog Post

Image via Wikipedia

Dubai’s popular Barasti Bar started as a pleasant little seaside watering hole but has grown over the years to become a major venue, to the point where it now hosts gigs, last night’s double bill of Vanilla Ice and Snap! being one such case in point. The gig was free to women and ‘FaceCard’ holders (FaceCard is Emirates Airline’s staff discount card), while tickets were Dhs100 for the blokes. Which, in the cold light of day, does strike one as delightfully sexist.

However, there was a minor problemette with the concert. Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan died in a glider accident in Morocco earlier in the week. He was the brother of the UAE’s President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed and also the head of ADIA, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Although not a major seeker of the limelight, he was a greatly respected man with a major role in the national economy. His death was announced and a three day period of national mourning started yesterday – the radio stations (talk and music stations alike) cut over to classical music and flags flew at half mast. His funeral took place last night and was attended by the UAE’s rulers, their representatives and a large number of key figures in Emirati society.

There was some doubt as to whether the Vanilla Ice gig would go ahead, but that was soon cleared up when Barasti sent out a text message at around midday:

STOP! COLLABORATE & LISTEN! VANILLA ICE AT BARASTI IS GOING AHEAD TONIGHT AS PLANNED. NORMAL OPERATION. WE ARE NOT DRY! NICE, NICE BABY! 5PM-3AM C U ON THE SAND

This was sent out seemingly at random – recipients included a colleague who had never signed up to any Barasti or Le Meridien mailer programme. And it caused offence, of varying degrees depending on the recipient. Among UAE nationals, it caused grave offence and sparked an outraged reaction which was immediately communicated to a wide audience on Twitter by a furious Mishaal Gergawi, an influential newspaper columnist.

Although I wasn’t personally offended to the same degree as Gergawi, I had to agree that Barasti’s text seemed remarkably ‘off colour’ given the nation was in mourning. If it had been sent to a list of Barasti ‘regulars’, it would likely have caused little or no comment. Sent to a wider audience, shared on Twitter, it caused considerable comment.

Word spread quickly, as it does on Twitter, and something of a feeding frenzy developed. I have to confess to finding mobs ugly and it’s likely that at least some degree of the outrage being expressed wasn’t born out of truly offended sensibilities as much as it was from people finding voice in their pursuit of Renard. However, that’s just human nature and reflective of the tide of any strongly felt opinion – it’s just that on Twitter it moves very fast.

One thing I thought was interesting was that we could actually share in the reactions of the wide range of people that make up our strange multi-national community – we got to feel, for instance, the pulse of the Emiratis among us in their reaction to the whole affair. That’s not a voice we usually get to hear.

The news broke later in the afternoon that Barasti had decided to cancel the concert, with a cunningly worded story on ArabianBusiness.com, which took the smart angle of crediting Twitter with the cancellation, thereby playing to a considerable gallery. There’s nothing humanity likes more than to be confirmed in its beliefs and Twitter certainly lost no time in celebrating its seminal role in changing the world.

Judging from what we saw develop on Twitter, it’s probably safe to say that a similar reaction was making itself felt offline and that it was more likely this offline development that caused the cancellation. Twitter’s ability to share information, and reflect opinion, at blinding speed certainly meant that thousands of people were aware of this whole incident within minutes and so it’s likely that a combination of opinion shared online and action taken offline resulted in the cancellation. I don’t really see Barasti’s management saying ‘Wow, Twitter’s not happy! Better can the gig, chaps!’

But we’ll never really know.

Personally, I’m more interested in the text that sparked the whole thing. Insensitive, ill thought through and badly executed, it’s symptomatic of so much of the lazy, drab marketing that takes place in our world today. SMS spam was never a clever idea. When you combine that with the sensibility of someone that has forgotten we are actually living in a foreign, albeit highly multicultural, country and that there is some respect due to that nation, the result was always going to be disastrous.

If that text hadn’t gone out, I do tend to think the concert would likely have gone ahead. And done so largely unremarked.

April Fool

Sorry. I simply couldn't resist.