Jay Wud To Play GeekFest Dubai REUNION

Okay, so we've been conspiring merrily with the team at Red Bull and they're coming to play at GeekFest REUNION and bringing heavy rock act Jay Wud to play a free gig from 9pm. For those of you who haven't heard of Jay, his band opened for Guns And Roses last year and you can hear his music using this here handy link to Jay's website which includes downloads an' all!

It's high energy stuff and I for one am looking forward to this enormously. I've been envious of that crowd over in Beirut ever since I sat in Gemmayze's Angry Monkey quaffing 961 and listening to a live gig at GeekFest Beirut last year. Now we're quits, Beirut Geeks!

The Red Bull Wings team will be at GeekFest too. Geeks with wings! Whatever NEXT?

GEEKTALKS CONFIRMED SHOCK HORROR

From 8-9pm we have four talks and they'll be kept to a tight time schedule by a bunch of metalheads waiting to come on stage, so we've at last found an appropriate replacement to the timekeeping discipline introduced by Monsignor R. Bumfrey!

The talks are:

8pm Money For Nothing
So you've got nothing but a great idea. How are you going to raise the cash you need to make it work? Not the banks, they're useless. We all know that. From VCs? They'll take all your equity for pennies. What about crowdfunding? Or better, what about crowdfunding backed by equity participation? Eureeca.com is the first equity crowdfunding platform offering a global solution. People give you money, you give them equity. Eureeca's speaker explains how it works - and how it's already worked for young UAE startups who needed cash to make that idea a reality.

8.15pm How Google broke search. And what that means to you.
Getting ranked by search engine Google is about the right keywords and building lots of links, right? Wrong. That used to work, but now it's last year's thing - because Google just broke search - the giant's new hummingbird search algorithm changes the game and means engagement and quality content matter more than links from loads of sites. Lee Mancini is CEO of search consultancy Sekari and he'll be explaining what's going on and how you can fix your broken search results.

8.30pm Social change and sameness
The [sameness] project is a Dubai-based social initiative that facilitates moments of sameness. The "sameness" is in understanding that we are all worth the same amount in our humanity, and the "project" comes through the on-the-ground initiatives like Water for Workers, The Conversation Chair, and We've Got Your Back, that bring the sameness to life. Jonny and Fiona from the sameness project will be explaining what it is, how it works and why diversity backwards is the way forwards.

8.45pm Make money at home doing what you like
It's the perennial promise of freelancing, isn't it? And while there's undoubtedly opportunity and need out there, we've also got unprofessional clients, rip-off merchants and the like. So how can you promote a freelance community of talented people willing to exchange skills with employers who need resources and talent now - and keep that community protected and the wheels of commerce in smooth motion? It's a big ask and Nabbesh.com CEO LouLou Khazen is doing the asking - backed by winning du's The Entrepreneur and a $100,000 investment round using none other than eureeca.

THERE'S MORE! This linked post details everything, today's post is just an update!

Here's the PDF map or you can use Google Maps like so. GeekFest will start, as usual, when you get there (if you come!) but about 7pmish is a guideline if you want to know what time to arrive late after. The talks will start around 8ish.

There's no registration, no age limit, no height restriction or any other form of organisation. If you'd like to come along, you're splendidly welcome. If you'd like to perform a plate spinning act or share your collection of left-handed Manga comics or old Adobe Acrobat SKUs get in touch with @alexandermcnabb or @saadia and we'll give you some space and power or whatever you need.

This may well be fun, people...

Beirut An Explosive Thriller. The Unloved Easter Egg.

Early on in that most thrilling of Middle Eastern action-packed spy thrillers, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, we find that the possible future president of Lebanon, a somewhat Mephistophelean chap by the name of Michel Freij, is involved in some very hooky transactions indeed, transferring some $80 million using bursts of micro-transactions to a German shopping website, kaufsmartz.com.

Because I'm slightly sad, I thought it would be amusing to buy the domain, www.kaufsmartz.com and redirect it to the Beirut book website in case anyone thought of looking it up. At one stage I even considered putting up an ecommerce lookalike front page before common sense took over.

Of course, nobody's ever bothered - there's never once been a click to the Beirut site redirected from www.kaufsmartz.com.

Consequently, it's come up for renewal and I'm not bothering. Watch it become the most popular ecommerce site in the world now...

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.

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 baleful contempt 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...

Geekdom

For such a smart company, Google can be incredibly daft at times. Do you ever get an Arabic interface on www.google.com because you've been redirected to www.google.ae which automatically decides you're an Arabic speaker?

Yes?

Then prepare to wire me Dhs 100 for I have the answer to your woes. Go here. Now click on the third link down (Google: no country redirect) and click OK. A plug-in will be installed that fixes the Google "I assume you're an Arabic speaker because you're browsing from the Middle East's biggest international jet-set hot spot, tourist hub and international community" tomfoolery.

No, no, don't thank me. Just wire the cash or go to Authonomy and read Space. Did I mention it was now at number 9? Oh, OK. Sorry...

Lifeless

Google has a new 3D 'immersive world' offering called Lively. It allows you to move around as an avatar in 3D spaces called 'rooms', where you can interact with people, chat and generally be three dimensional and immersive.

Where Lively possibly gets interesting is that it combines streams of Google-related stuff: you can watch YouTube videos or view Picasa images within the Lively environment, as well as embed desktop gadgets and post Lively rooms to your blog. The 3D immersive experience, in short, crosses a number of boundaries with reality and gives some possibly interesting new ways for people to access and use content - including music.

It's currently in Beta, but there's a long way to go. Lively crashes Firefox repeatedly, suffers from awful lag and appears to be, well, lacking a point. You'll need to download the (free, of course) Lively client browser plug-in.

And there endeth the Geek post...