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 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...

Basterds

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Thanks to my decision to start using some of the more advanced features of the *ahem* Nokia Platform, I'd sort of made up my mind that NufNuf would be my SatNav of choice in the UK. She actually works quite well, too. Even in solving questions like the best way to get to Pelcombe from Wolfscastle via Camrose.

But there's a fly in every ointment. I kept wondering about the cost of Internet access whilst roaming. When your mobile keeps telling you that this might be expensive, you start to wonder whether or not there's something to be truly concerned about here.

Five days into our UK sojourn, I get a text from everyone's favourite telco, Etisalat (ah, you use your own version of their name - Itisalot, Itsashite, whatever) that gleefully tells me I can call +9718002300 and ask all those questions not answered by their damn website - like what cost Internet roaming?

The answer, in the UK, is Dhs2.5 per 30kb.

Yup. 30 kilobytes. 30,000 bytes. An average screen of mobile data costs Dhs 2.5 or about £0.50.

When NufNuf gets heavy with the terrain maps, we're looking at chunks of 750Kb and more. When we manage data going into GIGS, let alone megs, 30kb is sort of anachronistic at best. If you want to be less than charitable, 30kb is totally useless.

Yet more circuit-switched thinking from stupid telcos that is helping to strangle advanced technology adoption at birth. Out with the (haha) 'Mubashir' SIM, in with Virgin UK's. Roaming in the Internet age?

Stuff it! Telcos are, yet again, thinking the 'two yoghurt-pot and a piece of string' business model. And it's going to kill 'em.

At least, I fervently hope so...

(BTW, when you DO call the damn number, expect to be stuck holding for 20 mins in a foreign country listening to how important your call is but we're busy helping other customers and then get connected to a total moron. Just in case you thought something had changed around here...)

Victorian

Image by King Dumb via Flickr

As the recession bit hard around the world, timed somewhat propitiously for Dubai’s already-tanking real-estate market, a new trend appeared to emerge in the world’s favourite ‘laissez-faire’ economy.

Takeaway sandwiches appeared to be getting thinner. Spot On’s eagle-eyed lunchers caught a definite thinning of Zaater ‘w Zeit’s turkey-cheese furn’s, a more niggardly hand at work in Byblos’ daily specials and a certain lack of care in Circle’s salads. All has not been well in lunch-land. At the same time, prices went up – that Olive House Rosto Sandwich (a culinary treat by any standards) not only seemed to consist of less Rosto and more sorndweech, but also kicked up Dhs10 somewhere along the way, too.

This is the way that a truly ‘laissez faire’ economy reacts to inflation plus recession. First we get less for our money, then less for more money. Without pissy regulators to intervene, annoying ombudsmen or consumer-centric media snooping around, you can systemically ride some of the worst belly-punches that a recession is going to deal out by sharing the shock to the system around the system.

Neat, huh? It’s Victorian England all over again – if the price of flour goes up, cut the flour with chalk dust and charge more for the bread. Well, why not? Nobody’s looking, are they?

We resisted Sharjah’s cunningly worded invitation to enjoy piped gas (“You take gas, pay Dhs1,000 for yellow tube, after install, you our bitch too much!”) and stayed with the bottled stuff. But FastFastGas used to get a call from us every six months. Then it seemed to be more frequent. For a while we’ve wondered whether they’re not quite, well, ‘filling’ the cylinders. Now we know. Last night, our gas gave out after a month’s usage. One month. We have changed no habits at all – what used to take 6 months to consume now takes a single month to burn through. And, worse, what used to cost us Dhs40 now costs Dhs85.

1/12 the gas for double the price. In a country where the stuff comes out of the ground.

Grief.

If anyone has noticed a grumpier tone creeping into the blog, be assured that normal cheery service will be resumed when I return from my impending leave. I thank you. Posting might be a little erratic for the coming couple of weeks. No marmosets were harmed in the composition of this public service announcement.

Hotel Internet Charges Are Iniquitous

Image by Moha' Al-Bastaki via Flickr

One thing that has long annoyed me is the widespread practice of charging hotel guests for Internet access. Apparently European hotels are starting to realise that this is not actually funny, clever or mature but here in the Middle East, every hotel I have visited so far has charged guests - typically Dhs100 per day or the equivalent. In Europe it's typically 20 Euro, in the UK £20 and even in the US up to $20.

And this despite the fact that access to the Internet is equivalent to the provision of a utility - some 47% of guests in surveys confirming that free Internet access was an influencer on their choice of hotel.

But it's not just the fact that they charge. It's how MUCH they charge.

At hotel rates, you're paying the equivalent of Dhs3,100 ($850) per month for Internet access. If you apply the common hotel markup of five times cost, you're still looking at Dhs620 ($169) a month.

To put that into perspective, Etisalat's most expensive BusinessOne Internet package, a 4Mbps access speed and unlimited usage, comes in cheaper at Dhs2795. And for one sixth of a hotel's charges for a month's worth of Internet, Etisalat will give you 4Mbps domestic Internet, telephone and television.

So here's a friendly hint for the UAE's hoteliers and, in fact, hoteliers the world over. Chaps, when Etisalat looks good in comparison to your business, it's time to rethink your business.

GeekFest 2.0

The Fear Rides Out Again

Well, GeekFest seems to have been judged pretty much a success by everyone, although by what benchmark it's hard to say as we didn't set out to achieve anything at all with the event!

That was quite refreshing - having NOT organised an event and therefore not having anything whatsoever to worry about was quite cool, given that I am often involved in organising events with objectives, benchmarks, big budgets and high expectations.

There seems to be a genuine desire for us to do it again. So why not?

Although we set out to have a totally un-organised event, something of a Montessori-style do what you want when you want to gig, there has been a general feeling of 'that was nice, but let's make it more worthwhile next time' from people. So we're adding a little bit more to GeekFest 2.0 - including a fashionably funky 2.0 tag which will excite everyone in the corporate world and make us seem 'edgy' and 'relevant'.

So what are we going to do? Well here are the main changes so far in Version 2.0. The upgrade from V 1.0 is free for registered users, BTW.

First and foremost, what will not change (now or ever if we do more) is that GeekFest is a space for people to meet and chat in a relaxed, no-hassle and resolutely un-organised and un-corporate environment. No PR, no pushing, no advertising or promotion. We have introduced technology showcases (see below) but if they result in anyone being hassled, that's it - they go. Let's see how things go this time around.

Secondly, GeekFest is a not for profit gig. If it raises revenue, then that revenue will be put back into the event or spent in some other silly way that benefits participants. We're not pocketing any cash or planning to. If the stakes get high, of course, you can expect to see this noble princple slowly slipping into 'we never said that' obscurity.

From 8-12pm
Due to popular demand, we're running later - and because it's Ramadan, GeekFest will run through from 8 till late so people can drop by, swing through or stay all night depending on what they want to get up to.

GeekTalks
The Shelter has got a really funky private cinema, ideal for talks to small groups, sharing video and other coolness. So we've split the evening up into 15 minute slots for talks, vids, slideshows or whatever people want to grandstand, showcase, share or discuss. DM @GeekFestDubai or email me or Saadia at The Shelter - both our emails are on the GeekFestDubai Twitter page. Please note that at no stage will anyone be asked to, required to or badgered in any way to attend any of these sessions - you have to bring your own crowd if you want to fill the room.

We're rather hoping that people will want to share new technologies, services, sites, approaches, case studies and that sort of thing. And no, it's not meant to be a TEDalike, it's much smaller scale than that and probably better suited to stuff like 'how to do HDR photography' or 'How we're moving our business online'. Make sense?

TechnoCases
We've opened up GeekFest to two technology leaders to showcase product and new stuff. We're talking to two respected players who have agreed to play it our way and not go promo bonkers but have a more passive, user-focused presence that lets GeekFest visitors have access to expertise and knowledge rather than being harried by corporate stuff. We're obviously wary about this element but can see the good of it if we can approach it well. We'd appreciate your feedback on this more than anything!

F&B
Thanks to the above, we're able to open up F&B at no cost to visitors, so snacks, drinks and so on throughout the evening will be free of charge. Neat, huh?

Any other ideas, approaches or feedback would be gratefully received. Given that this whole thing has spiralled out of control (I mean, media coverage? WTF?), we might as well see where it takes us - and all get something useful out of it in the process.

Cheers!