Extempore

Hi all,
Just got back from the second Dubai Twestival that took place today at 8 PM. Organized by a wonderful team (PK, Woo, esperanca, Stephanie and Baher and Abhamalpani – please let me know who I missed), it was a success.

Thanks all,
Michael

Gulfnews tells us that those who are willing to start a business (LLC, Limited liability company), do not have to cough op the 150.000 AED (40.000 USD). With the current economic situation, this is not a bad step at all.

More than 80 % of businesses in the UAE are LLC’s, so it’s a good step. Often, entrepreneurs were put off by setting up a business in the UAE, because of it’s rules and monetary requirements.

I hope this will result in a growth of entrepreneurship in the UAE.

Catboy, a radio DJ at Dubai 92, released a funny video on Etisalat’s spyware patch for Blackberries. (more here, here and here)

Simply awesome.

As places.ae is maturing to it’s 500 days being online and growing… It’s also awfully painstaking how cumbersome a framework (it’s written in Ruby on Rails) can be. Agreed, I am not the most seasoned rails programmer, and my ruby code sometimes makes people cry, but still. Note that this rant is about web based frameworks, though it might apply in other environments also.

Web developments Frameworks have one main advantage: it’s a framework. You don’t have to write 90% of your code anymore. If you want user-login-forgot-password functionality, or a nice captcha, you often only has to enable one module, et voila, you’re rolling. Great to advocate so-called agile development. I wrote a audit tracking tool (points raised in a systems audit and outlining their risks) at work in Rails in a few hours, needless to say, it was impressive.

The downside of a framework is that it is a framework, you are bound by it’s rules and bend yourself often to make it work.

The first 90% of your applications gets done in 10% of the time, and you’ll be debugging for the remaining 90%. As said, it’s my personal opinion as a non full fledged rails guy, but a project that matures over time seems to give problems with frameworks. (Database migrations tend not to work well in the/my real world)

Sorry just a rant. It’s 3 AM, and these migrations are driving me up the wall, to an extend that I downloaded MDB2 and smarty, and am assessing how long a rewrite would take.

Good night,
Michael

In Nakheel we have a maximum email quota which gets filled up pretty quickly if you receive large attachements, such as presentations, manuals and silly movies. I wanted to build a macro that imitates Gmail awesome archiving method.

Based on the lifehackers’s article, my version had to move the my selected mails to a PST file on my disk, freeing up space on my “online mailbox”.

I won’t repeat how to make the macro and all, the lifehacker’s article does a very good job in that. I just made a few changes to the code, and that is below:

Sub Archive()
  pst_file = "C:\Backup\archived.pst"
  Set ns = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
  ns.AddStore (pst_file)
  Set ArchiveFolder = ns.Folders("archived")

  For Each Msg In ActiveExplorer.Selection
    Msg.Move ArchiveFolder
  Next Msg
End Sub

Health Warning - Gasoline

If you read it, you’ll notice that 15 degrees Fahrenheit is 6 degrees Celcius or 60 degrees Celcius. In reality, 15 degrees Fahrenheit is -9 degrees Celcius. I guess this memo wasn’t really talking about Abu Dhabi’s sunshine.

Let’s assume that you don’t want to open the windows for a while when driving in -9 degrees. And that the gasoline fumes you get while filling up at a petrol station are bit more dangerous (or more fun?) then your average plastic seat covers.

I love SSH. SSH is the de-facto service for remote server management, especially in a CLI environment.

Being a avid Linux user, and spending quite a bit of time on OSX lately, I often SSH into several servers remotely. Being subject to “username conventions”, you don’t always share the same username across machines. And I always wondered how one could just type ssh hostname instead of providing the username.

Seems that, by creating a .ssh/config file with following contents:


Host server.example.com server
  User username


WIll make life easier, as you can in the future only do a “ssh hostname”. I didn’t know this.

When I joined Dubaiworld three years ago as a information architect, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) was the buzzword. All major vendors, IBM, Microsoft, SUN, had ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) solutions, and SOA’s were going to save the world, but instead it was a big failure.

While the business side of IT was too busy making definitions, and spending numerous hours (and hey, budgets) wondering if one would use REST versus it’s WS- counterpart; a open community namely the Internet, provided the world with home brewed services.

Big players such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, provided a simple new way to interact with what they were providing all along; services. You could use a certain service in another context. Without overwhelming the corporate ignorant world with buzzwords.

I believe corporates will often follow, it takes another caliber with a more innovative way of thinking to move things forward.

Dear all,

Happy new year to all, I wish 2009 will bring you good health, prosperity and success. In these times, many would hope for economical stability, so we should add that to this also.

2008 was a good year, we launched places.ae, and were approached by some very interesting companies for partnerships, and have a few possibilities to get funding. It’s rowing for sure, but I will explain this on the places blog itself in eight days from now when places.ae celebrates it’s first year of operation.

Twitter was the tool in 2008, and sub 400 dollar laptops, became normal. My sister is currently cruising in Australia with her Asus EEE PC “netbook” and it will only grow to be this way. I believe many websites will rather become web services consumed on “portals” (igoogle, yahoo, live.com), or in widgets on your favorite phone or netbook. Bigger laptops are good, but I less usable. I have a 17inch Macbook pro, which I hardly use because of it’s size. (Plus, my other laptop runs ubuntu and I like it far more than OSX).

Anyhow, As a resident of Dubai currently, I would like to see the following being built, or rather announced;
Continue reading…

This post is not necessarily about the current credit crunch, and how Dubai is affected. Although it leans onto it.

I just had a coffee with a good friend of mine, and we were speaking about the status of Dubai, and the entire region actually and it’s corporate profiles. And what is lacking is transparency. Ironically enough, a new body is being setup to provide transparency, accountability and governance.

Anyhow, I refer to corporate transparency, what’s happening in the companies itself. I refer to blogging.

Current modern copanies, such as Sun microsystems, Facebook, Google, etc all have corporate blogs, where employees; both executive management as any other layer, talk about their strategies, challenges and outcomes.

In Dubai, very few companies do this, and especially none of the top 20 companies.

In times such as the ones we are in now, many people are unsure about what is going to happen. I don’t expect any of the Dubai top companies’ CEO’s, or other key people, to have a crystal ball and foresee the future, yet any news insights would be welcome. Rather directly instead of usual channels such as news papers.

Even prior to these less than perfect times, from an economical point of view. I am not sure about any UAE based top exec, giving in their own words how he/she is going to move the company forward, or just voice an opinion about global events.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it’s sad, nevertheless. We’re 2009 already (ok, almost), we should follow the global trends and get away from communication means and marketing techniques that are so 90’s.