All Abroad!

Should young children go to boarding school?

2011-06-13T03:55:00.008+03:00

My boy is seven years old. He'll be eight in October, but either way he's still just a young lad. His mum and I have been debating whether we should send him to boarding school.

Most parents would balk at sending their child to live with strangers. I would have too, until I started to look at the benefits for the kids. Now, I'm coming round to the idea.

We've now been living as expats for five years. My boy was born in England and spent most of his first three years living in leafy Surrey, with a regular routine of tramps in the woods, village playgroups, and cuddles from the Waitrose old ladies. I'd given up work to become a thoroughly modern home dad and, apart from not seeing much of his mum during the week, I thought we led a pretty idyllic life.

When I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in a small town in North-West England, people didn't move round much. You studied at the local schools; you worked in a local office or factory; you drank in a local pub; you bought a house down the road from your parents. This was accepted behaviour, and those who moved away, for education or work, were viewed with a slight suspicion when they returned. If you're not familiar with the culture, then Richard Hoggart described it superbly in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. All terribly interesting social history, but I thought it was necessary too, because there is a purpose to this blog post. The purpose is to justify to my Northern family why I believe boarding school might be a rational choice, and that family still retains many of those social norms of my youth.

Anyway, back to Surrey. In the South-East of England, careers are fast-moving and jobs come and go. My wife was made redundant, hired by a competitor, then offered a role with her old firm running an office in Doha, Qatar. The decision to move was easy: it was a career jump and a great adventure. We stayed there for four years, which is just about enough time for anyone to become jaded with the Arabian Peninsula.

Next was Singapore. We thought we'd spend three or four years in the city, before settling down somewhere for the boy's secondary schooling. Unfortunately, there was a bump in the road, which came in the form of job unpredictability. It's the nature of worldwide business that firms restructure whenever a new leadership team is appointed, and predicting when this will happen is impossible. We now realise that making plans for where we'll be living is futile. If we thought that Singapore, Delhi or Brussels were the perfect place to raise a couple of kids, we'd be disappointed: the world of work just isn't built that way. We may spend a year here, a couple of years there.

A year ago, our boy said goodbye to his friends in Doha, and this week he will bid farewell to his Singaporean pals before the summer holidays. It's comforting to believe that children cope well with change, but the fact is that it takes time for children to make friends, and swapping schools at irregular intervals isn't pleasant for them or good for their education. This is why we began to look at boarding preparatory schools.

Reason 1. Stability. Boarding schools offer the stability that is often lacking for children whose parents move a lot. Many boys thrive with consistent routines, set meal times and clearly defined rules and schedules.

There is another way to gain stability, and that would be for us to move back to the UK and reduce our standard of living. This sounds plausible, until you start to weigh up the costs and benefits. The UK economy is flat, and many economists believe there will be a "lost decade" of stagflation and unemployment. State-sector education in England is poor, and is getting worse, and this has lead to the lowest social mobility since the second world war.

In 2006/7 Cambridge took 55% of its home students from state schools and 45% from the private sector. Only around 6.5% of schoolchildren in the UK are educated privately. To be clear: you are seven times more likely to enter Cambridge if your parents paid for your education. If you want your kids to succeed in Britain, you'd better be rich, and the well-paid jobs are disappearing.

Reason 2. Maximising Opportunity. All universities are not equal. Some provide wider opportunities to their graduates than others. English boarding preparatory schools are at the start of a conveyor belt carrying pupils toward the top independent schools and onward to Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College. It's not fair, but blame the politicians for the system. One of a parent's duties is to maximise their child's chances in life, by whatever method, and boarding schools fit the bill.

Of course, not all boarding schools are equal either, but it's easy enough to check the destinations of their pupils and their results in the Common Entrance Exam. The good schools flaunt this information on their websites, along with any scholarships they've won. The school we've been considering for our boy sent kids last year to Eton, Harrow, Stowe, Winchester, Sherborne, Shrewsbury and Monkton Combe. Out of those, I'd have my own preferences, but they're all great senior schools, which is reassuring.

There are people I know and love for whom the names Oxford, Cambridge, Eton and Harrow would leave a sour taste in the mouth. I'm afraid that's an inverse snobbery I can't begin to understand. A core purpose of education is to free the person who is educated, and those who believe you shouldn't mix with a different social class have built a prison for their children.

Reason 3. Facilities. When I was my son's age, my school had a classroom, a playground, an assembly hall (which doubled as a dining room), and that was it. If we wanted some excitement, we might sneak into the boiler room during breaktime. Recreation was running round in circles. Sport was some balls, beanbags, hoops and cones. Music was the recorder.

Listen, I know that UK primary schools have improved over the past 30 years, and my boy's international school in Singapore has an impressive gymnasium and swimming pool. However, the facilities and range of activities for the kids at boarding school are simply outstanding. At our preferred prep, there are three major sports: soccer, rugby and cricket. Fair enough, but the boys can also choose any activities out of tennis, swimming, squash, Eton fives, golf (on the school's 7-hole course), table tennis, athletics, cross country, basketball, indoor hockey, fencing, judo, air rifle shooting, horse riding, polo, water polo, chess, a model railway, cooking, model making, snooker, board games, clay pigeon shooting and bushcraft survival.

I could also list the music, drama and art facilities, but will instead just say that you can't fault them. The academic staff all have degrees from good universities, and there are fewer than 15 boys in each class. Oh, and the school has a house in Normandy where the boys go to practise their French. Really, it's quite unbelievable.

Reason 4. It DOESN'T damage the kids. If you listen to young boarding-school pupils, they don't come across as damaged misfits, but as confident, well-mannered, and independent. When they talk about their lives, they admit home-sickness and crying for their mummies, but they also say that it is a phase that lasts for a few days at the start of term, and then it is mostly forgotten about. Honestly, if you want to see a well-adjusted eight-year-old who is in touch with his emotions, go and watch some interviews with boarding-school pupils talking about separation from their parents. Of course, these boys could have been coached to give the right replies, or might be protecting their parents from uncomfortable truths, but isn't it more likely that they have adapted to their lives without serious trauma?

All boarding schools are inspected by Ofsted, the UK's national schools inspectorate, and also the ISI (Independent Schools Inspectorate). Again, any decent school will be proud of these inspection reports. Here's a representative snippet from Ofsted about the school we prefer: "Boarders benefit from excellent levels of individual support resulting in exceptional outcomes. This factor, coupled with the strong nurturing relationships that exist between staff and boarders, fosters a real sense of family living."

If I were to engage in cod psychology, many of the parental fears about boarding schools could be explained by a projection of their separation anxieties onto their children. They believe, with no evidence, that their children will be psychologically scarred by the absence of their mother.

Before we started looking into boarding schools, I believed that children spent 10 weeks at the schools without a break. In fact, the schools close for a week at half term. In the middle of each half term, the kids are sent home for a weekend. Living away from your mum and dad for two or three weeks at a time is going to be unusual for a young boy. However, it isn't the 10-week detatchment of popular imagination.

I'm not going to change any minds with a blog post about child-rearing. All I hope to do is justify my belief that boarding school is a rational choice. We haven't yet made a decision about where our boy will be schooled but, for an expat family who can't say where they'll be living next year, the stability of an excellent English boarding school has many advantages.

How to Proxy a Website to HTTPS with nginx, Start to Finish

2009-09-07T19:43:00.008+03:00

Setting up a secure website is a trivial task often overlooked by site owners, possibly because they believe it is costly or technically challenging. Anyone who has set up their own HTTP webserver can easily proxy that site to HTTPS using free software. SSL certificates cost around £10 a year, a similar cost to registering a domain name.

I'm going to describe the steps I took to proxy QatarLiving to a secure site at F1a.me. QatarLiving is one of the most popular websites in Qatar, a small Middle Eastern state.

Step 0. Prerequisites

You'll need administrator (root) privileges to your own server to run an HTTPS site on port 443. I'm happy with my virtualized Linux box, hosted by Media Temple. It costs $50 a month, which is not the cheapest deal out there nor is the server particularly powerful, but I'm happy with the company's service and the box is sufficient to host all my websites and twitter feeds. If you sign up with Media Temple, you should install compilers and development tools.

Step 1. Buy your SSL certificate

Purchase an SSL certificate for your secure site. I bought mine from 123-reg. It is possible to run a secure site without buying a certificate, which is known as "self signing"; however, users of your site will be presented with scary warnings by their browser. It's best just to splash out on the SSL certificate: they're cheap.

Step 2. Downloads

If you've never come across nginx (pronounced Engine-X), don't feel too down-heartened. This tiny webserver fits into a niche of specialized webservers (including boa, lighttpd and thttpd) that compete on speed and small memory footprint. Many large sites have chosen nginx as their front-line server, including one of the very largest blogging sites, WordPress.com. I chose to use nginx because its small footprint is crucial on my limited-memory server.

Download the latest development release of nginx, currently version 8.1.14 [homepage | nginx-0.8.14.tar.gz]

Step 3. Installation

Unpack the nginx source, compile and install. The following commands work for me, on my fairly standard centos Linux box, but some of the paths may require tweaking on other systems.


$ tar zxvf nginx-0.8.14.tar.gz
$ cd nginx-0.8.14
$ ./configure \
--prefix=/usr \
--sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx-ssl               \
--conf-path=/etc/nginx-ssl/nginx.conf         \
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx_ssl_access_log \
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx_ssl_error_log \
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx-ssl.pid             \
--http-client-body-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx_ssl_client  \
--http-proxy-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx_ssl_proxy \
--http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/tmp/nginx_ssl_fastcgi \
\
--with-http_ssl_module         \
--with-http_stub_status_module \
\
--without-http_charset_module \
--without-http_gzip_module    \
--without-http_userid_module  \
--without-http_auth_basic_module \
--without-http_autoindex_module \
--without-http_geo_module     \
--without-http_map_module     \
--without-http_referer_module \
--without-http_fastcgi_module \
--without-http_limit_zone_module \
--without-http_browser_module \
--without-http_upstream_ip_hash_module
$ make
$ su
# make install

If any errors appear with the above commands, it probably means you need to install some required library. In most cases, using Google on an error message will provide the fastest solutions. Options may vary slightly between versions. Always check ./configure --help for the current list.

Step 4. Server Configuration

Download your server SSL certificate and private key, rename them to server.crt and server.key, and move them to your nginx config directory (/etc/nginx-ssl/). If you've bought a cheap SSL certificate like I did, the certificating authority probably won't be built into your users' browsers by default. You'll need to find the certificate of your CA and concatinate it with your server's SSL certificate. Your server.crt will then look something like this:


-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[your certificate here]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
[your CA's certificate here]
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Now, all that's left is to edit your config file /etc/nginx-ssl/nginx.conf. You'll want to play around with some of these setting, but they provide a good starting point.


# the number of worker processes should be 
# equal to the number of processor cores in your server
worker_processes  4;

# disable error logging by uncommenting the next line
# error_log /dev/null crit;


events {
    # max connections - 2048 is reasonable
    worker_connections  2048;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    # TCP tuning
    sendfile        on;
    tcp_nopush     on;
    tcp_nodelay     off;

    # keepalive is highly beneficial for SSL
    keepalive_timeout  10;

    # disable logging
    access_log off;

    server {
        listen       443;

 # change this to your own website hostname
        server_name  f1a.me;

 # these SSL options have been chosen to maximize
        # throughput on small servers
        ssl                  on;
        ssl_certificate      server.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key  server.key;
        ssl_session_cache  shared:SSL:10m;
        ssl_session_timeout  5m;
        ssl_protocols  SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
        ssl_ciphers RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP;
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers   on;

        location / {
            proxy_pass   http://www.qatarliving.com;
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
 }

 # don't proxy static content, redirect instead
 location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|js)$ {
     rewrite ^/(.*?)$ http://www.qatarliving.com/$1 permanent;
        }
    }
}

Start up your server by running nginx-ssl as root:


$ su
# /usr/sbin/nginx-ssl

Tail the error log (/var/log/nginx_ssl_error_log) if the server fails to start.

Further Reading

Nginx English documentation

Useful changes to default nginx configuration file

O3 Magazine - Open-Source SSL Acceleration

SSL optimization and security

HTTPS performance tuning

Installing an intermediate authority certificate under nginx

Why SSL?

Outstanding issues

Cookies that contain the original site's domain will not be stored by the user's browser. Most websites don't set a domain within the cookie, so this isn't usually a problem. However, if your site is affected, it can be fixed by filtering the headers from the insecure site and removing domains. I'll post a blog entry in a few days about this, as it affects most Drupal sites including QatarLiving.

Navigation within a proxied site will only be successful if most links do not include the original hostname.

News site rankings

2008-06-19T17:47:00.003+03:00

Before I started QatarJournal in April last year, I took a snapshot of the Alexa page views from local news providers. Looking at the changes over the past year, it's obvious that QatarLiving is now serving more pages than any of the other news sites, and Watan's website is declining in relative terms against the other papers. Permalink here. A similar decline can be seen in terms of Watan's market share, with only QL showing a noticeable increase.

When we look at only visitors from Qatar, the ranking of sites providing news becomes clearer:
* Qatar Living
* BBC
* Al Raya
* Al Jazeera
* Al Sharq
* India Times
* The Rest.

QatarJournal.com sold

2008-06-05T12:26:00.003+03:00

Today I sold QatarJournal.com to a local businessman. I probably wouldn't have sold the site in January - I was quite upset about it. Now, it just seems like someone has given me a surprise gift. I'm going to have a good holiday this summer.

Back!

2008-03-05T08:08:00.002+03:00

Qatar Journal is finished, so I'm back blogging here.

At the moment, I'm working on a CGI-IRC gateway, a cleanup of another codebase. It's mostly just a matter of replacing bits of code with CPAN modules, but after it's fairly tidy I'm going to replace the guts of the code with POE::Component::IRC by Chris Williams. That's mainly because I don't trust the IRC code I'm working with, and the POE code looks like it's well maintained.

The idea is that eventually, I'll authenticate web users with OpenID and some sort of NickServ. I haven't quite worked it out yet. Should be a fun bit of work, and very, very web 2.0 ;)

This blog has moved

2007-06-18T08:26:00.000+03:00

There's an idiom in the software industry: "eating your own dog-food". If you've built some software, it's not right to ask other people to use if you don't. Hence, I've moved my blog to Qatar Journal.

Every user of Qatar Journal can have a blog on the site, so if you'd like one, you need to visit the signup page, choose a username, enter your email address (twice) and click 'Create Account'. Users can also choose to receive a nightly summary of all the local news headlines.

Is Qtel a bit simple?

2007-06-17T13:10:00.000+03:00

I've been banned from QatarLiving. I'm sure the ban wasn't intentional, but I've been banned nonetheless. This morning, it was obvious that QatarLiving discussions were being attacked by someone with the intent of disruption. There was some speculation about who was responsible. Eventually, someone at the website banned the IP address of the attacker.

Unfortunately, Qtel employs a few Internet filters, and everyone behind a particular filter has the same public IP address. Thus, a system which is meant to make the web safer for Qatar's surfers has rendered one of the most popular discussion sites in Qatar completely inaccessible. This has happened before, of course. At the beginning of the year, Wikipedia saw a fair amount of abuse coming from a single IP address, and blocked the entire country from anonymous posting. It's not as if people don't know a solution to these problems - it's just that no one at Qtel is willing to make the fix.

Setting up a decent filtering proxy should be trivial, but Qtel's implementation masks users' true IP addresses from the sites they visit, and restricts the ability of site operators to punish abusers. How simple is Qtel? I'd say it's plain stupid.

Best blogs in Qatar

2007-05-27T14:57:00.000+03:00

<BLUSH> This blog has been chosen as one of the best blogs in Qatar. I'm choking back the tears, but will still manage to give a 10-minute acceptance speech, given half a chance.

Qatar Journal - The Online Newspaper for Qatar

2007-05-24T09:52:00.000+03:00

At the end of its first week, I'd say the launch of Qatar Journal has been a success. It's taken less than two months from the initial idea through to launching the site. I had hoped to launch a couple of weeks earlier, but I wanted to be in Qatar when it happened.

The response has been good from journalists and PR companies. I'm now getting a steady stream of stories, which is easing the administration of the site.

The technology has had some teething problems, with my server running out of memory on the first night, but it's now settled down. I've got a very long bug-list, which I'll start fixing in a couple of weeks. None of the bugs are serious, just annoying. Ben Figgis has pointed out a bug in the Qatar Journal feed that doesn't seem to be affecting slashdot, so I'll need to investigate. It's nice when people point out a problem, because noticing the bug is the difficult bit. Fixing is usually easy. Thanks Ben.

Still in the UK

2007-05-10T11:31:00.000+03:00

Sorry, I've been away from a PC for the past two weeks. I'm still in the UK because Sara has had surgery. She's OK, and is getting out of hospital today, but we can't return to Doha until at least May 20.

Qatar Journal

2007-04-18T17:49:00.000+03:00

I had a leisurely coffee with Qatari from QL last Thursday. We were talking about the state of the IT sector in Qatar, and generally solving the world's problems. Anyway, he was hassling me saying I should have some sort of commercial project, because there was money to be made.

I'm a bit skeptical about making money from websites. There were a lot of good ideas during the dot-com boom that produced no cash. He started quoting some figures about google ads, and how little you need to spend on hosting. Anyway, I went home that night and had a chat with Sara about it.

There's a gap at the moment for serious local news. QL and others serve the demand for informal chat, but the local papers have abysmal websites and mainstream news sites don't cover Qatar. Thus, I'm going to start up a news site, named Qatar Journal. The official launch will be on 12 May 2007 (exactly one month after my chat with Qatari) - it will be rough around the edges, but it's better to launch quickly and fix things as we go along.

Basically, there's going to be no editorial. The easiest way to scare advertisers is to start getting cynical about press releases, so I'm going to leave all discussion to the readers. Obviously, there's going to be an editorial element in choosing stories, and here I have an advantage over the newspapers' sites: I only need to pick around 10 stories a day, whereas they are publishing (almost) everything.

Anyhow, I just wanted to blog this before anyone starts asking - "why are you trying to compete with QL?". I'm not. I'm a regular QL reader, and it's great. Qatar Journal is an online local newspaper, and when it generates its own community, it will have a very different tone to QL. Hopefully, some readers will visit both sites, but I would guess that most QL regulars will stick with what they know - I'm not trying to poach anyone.

Let me know what you think about the site, and keep an eye on progress. Everything should be working very soon, but it'll take a couple of weeks to get the site looking professional.

Also, discovered Alexa today. Here is an image snapshot of Qatar websites (April 2007), and a permalink for future comparison.

First TC meeting

2007-04-15T18:36:00.000+03:00

So, Gord and I are at the security conference for a few days. Here's a few things I've learned:

The current malware products are sophisticated - the HackDoor client looks a well-designed piece of software engineering. I'd always assumed they would be fairly naive. The server side looks simpler, but then server programming is simple ;)

Phishing scams have avoided those banks which have implemented two-way authentication on their websites.

Firewire ports and PCMCIA slots have direct memory access, so can be used to copy an image of your computer's RAM even if no one is logged in. This can recover useful forensic material even after a reboot cycle, as modern BIOS's don't clear RAM. Eek.

Vista has an option for encrypting the filesystem. However, files are cached in RAM in an unencrypted state. Eek.

There are no data, from anyone, on the scale of the IT security problem that exists in the gulf. Honestly.

There aren't many delegates from Qatar at the conference beyond the staff of Q-CERT. That's a shame, and I can't work out whether it's down to a lack of interest or poor advertising. I'm sure if they'd mentioned the free Ritz lunches, the attendance would have been much higher.

iGov ictQatar IT Forum

2007-04-09T08:36:00.000+03:00

TOO MANY ACRONYMS! The Gulf Times (and probably every other paper) today announced there's going to be a meeting at the Ritz tomorrow to talk about developing government IT services so they can be accessed through the web. I could probably make some useful suggestions, if I were invited. But I'm not, and neither are you.

Why bother advertising a meeting if it's not open to the public? That's like me issuing a press release saying "Family meeting, 7.30, around the dinner table. We're going to talk about the state of the bathroom." Of course, Wednesday's papers will follow up the story with photos of Hessa al-Jaber shaking some guy's hand. There won't be any details of what was discussed - just a photo and a repeat of the purposes of the meeting. Grr.

Given that I'm not invited, here are my suggestions. The important ones are non-technical.

Scatter the money around. Don't spend millions on a single project to do everything - it will fail, and all your money will have been wasted.

All initial projects should be finished within three months. A two-year project will fail, and you will be two years behind schedule.

After three months, see who's got something working - give them more money and more responsibility. Stop funding the projects that haven't achieved anything; look for new small projects instead.

Replace the leaders of failed projects. Publicise the successful projects.

Insist on compliance to internet standards. If someone is using an ActiveX control, Macromedia Flash, or non-validating HTML, take away their money. They don't understand the web, and eventually you will be embarrassed if people believe their solution is representative of the State of Qatar.

Insist that people use a free database in their solutions. It saves on costly licenses for still-born projects, and the database code will be cleaner if programmers believe they need to swap from MySQL to Oracle at a later date.

Apart from following internet standards, and using free databases, don't enforce any other standards. In particular, enforcing Microsoft products will halve your pool of talented programmers; enforcing project management and system analysis methodologies will double the bureaucratic overhead. Both of these will encourage failure.

Natashia

2007-03-15T08:48:00.000+03:00

Today, I saw a photo of my niece, Natashia. She looks like a happy little kid, and I'll get to meet her at the end of April when we take a trip to the UK. Because I've never seen her, I sometimes forget that I have a niece, so it was a nice surprise to get an email this morning full of photos.

Interview hell

2007-03-11T14:33:00.000+03:00

I've had a few interviews recently. Well, no one is prepared to call them interviews: they're just quick chats; a get-together over a coffee; an informal introduction. If you're not offered a job, then you can't be disappointed because it's never made clear whether there was any job to be offered. You're just left asking yourself - 'was that an interview?'

When Sara was looking around for jobs, she'd come back from interviews and say "I thought it went really well - like we agreed about a lot of things", but I've never had an interview like that: it's always excruciating. I leave the interviewer to do a lot of the digging and I'm pitiful when it comes to selling my CV. It's not that I have low self-esteem. In fact, quite the opposite - I have a very-high opinion of myself. It's just that, in front of strangers, I'm incapable of talking in glowing terms about why I'm so wonderful. At the back of my mind is a voice shouting 'come off it, big-head'.

On Wednesday, I had my worst interview to date. I'm never too hot on introductions - I speak too fast and never know what to do with my non-shaking hand, but in this instance I also managed to criticise the interviewer's choice of school for his child. We were chatting (the awkward bit after shaking hands, but before sitting down) and it just came out. He asked - 'I hear you have a son - have you got him settled into a school yet?' I replied, rambling, that we'd been applying to schools, and there were basically three that were any good, and hopefully we'd got into the one that was within easy driving distance of the compound. Inevitably, his child's school was not among the three. I dug myself deeper - 'well, not to worry' I said.

It went from bad to worse. The first interviewer was American, but his Aussie boss arrived after about 10 minutes and asked me about what I could do. "Well - I'm basically a coder. I'm not bad at Perl, but I can get by in most languages. Most of my work has been on Unix, but I hear that there's no jobs for Unix coders in Doha, so I'll do anything really." He gave me a look that said 'no way, mate' and then asked "when you say you're a 'coder', do you mean that you're a computer programmer". He then did a mental calculation of how long he'd have to talk to me before leaving. I got another 15 minutes, during which time I told him that I hadn't done any real work in three years, and didn't have any salary expectations. At one point I said "really, most of my skills are outdated, and it's difficult to match my CV with any current job". The most embarrassing part was that we both knew how awful it was, and I'm sure he was trying to avoid laughing until I'd left the room.

When I met up with Sara afterwards, she asked how it went. 'Not too bad,' I said. The horror was still sinking in.

Are sites ever unblocked?

2007-03-06T19:06:00.000+03:00

To: censor@qatar.net.qa

Sir

The following website has been blocked by the filter run by Internet Qatar:
  http://taipei.pm.org/
I feel that this blocking is in error. As far as I am aware, this site
is devoted to discussing the merits of the Perl programming language,
and supporting users who live in the Taipei area.

I assume the site was blocked because your filtering software was
designed for use by the Chinese government, and a simple rule has been
enforced that blocks all Taipei sites.

Many thanks

Nigel Gourlay

Creating PDFs for the Sony Reader

2007-02-26T09:22:00.000+03:00

Chris sent me a few pretty pictures. He also reminded me about the ebook reader from Sony, which takes a (closed) format known as BBeB as well as a 600x800 PDF. Finally, sourceforge's shell service has been repaired, so I can now upload again to readng.com.

Tomorrow, there's the first meeting of QISF - the Qatar Information Security Forum. Although it's going to be an introductory talk, with a very general topic, it'll be interesting to see how many people turn up for a get-together.

Slow progress

2007-02-23T20:29:00.000+03:00

I spent some of last week with a potential employer; they're into packet radio and need someone to look after a bunch of computers - some of which were familiar and some of which were new to me. Interesting stuff, but they haven't made me an offer, so I won't be counting my chickens just yet.

Sara's been out of the country most of the week, but I managed to get along to the first QSTP tech-talk. It was an entrepreneur who talked about Arab start-ups, venture capital and incubators. There wasn't much talk about the IT side of things, but the audience was full of technologists from the new universities. It was a good place to chat, and I met a couple of people who I'll try to keep in touch with.

Not much has happened with readng. I've been wrestling with font issues on my SuSe system, which are now solved, and I've been trying to put together some sample pages for the site. Unfortunately, mocking up a single page with groff is proving almost as difficult as typesetting a whole book. I keep telling myself that the second book will be easy.

QSTP tech-talks

2007-02-15T07:39:00.000+03:00

Ben Figgis has invited Qatar Perl Mongers to the QSTP tech talks. RSVP to info@qstp.org.qa.

Unix text processing

2007-02-12T13:28:00.000+03:00

My new task is to read the relevent chapters of UTP (1.7MB; source available here) and TUM. In particular, I need to get my head around troff, the Unix typesetting system (now, mostly known as groff). I'm convinced that I can secure groff and use it in the typesetting chain for readng.

Here's what I think will be the sequence: (1) ASCII or HTML; (2) groff mm or mom format; (3) postscript/PDF; (4) PNG image.

I know it's a little nasty, using an image format to display pages of text, but that's just tough. HTML in any flavour doesn't give the necessary control for pretty typesetting, and readers want books to look pretty.

ReadNG - it's like reading, but without the 'i'

2007-02-11T15:47:00.000+03:00

So, out of the much nonsense that was spoken over the past week, the silliest is probably this. After several beers with the camel gang, we decided that readng was the next flickr, and that all we needed to succeed in the web 2.0 world was poor spelling. I've registered the domain name readng.com, and written a blurb - let the flood of offers begin. It was Sara who was the first to note that maybe avid book readers might find intentional illiteracy rather annoying. What does she know. Pah.

Camel soup

2007-02-11T15:29:00.000+03:00

Chris and Paul have now left. We spent a time in the desert, where we survived on our wits and wild berries. It was touch and go, but when we returned to civilization, we were changed. I was reborn, and dedicated the rest of my life to small-to-medium-sized animals. I salute you, my furry compatriots! Chris and Paul have decided to travel the world as nomadic programmers. And then we went for a chicken biryani, with milky tea, but the smell of the camels remained with us, forever...

Java, Perl and toy planes

2007-02-02T11:53:00.000+03:00

Got a few hours work done this morning. Managed to update my java geolocation code for the first time in 18 months. I haven't really done much java in the past few years, so I'm always a bit frightened about changing my old code. I'm not convinced about my abilities to spot bugs any more.

I updated the perl geolocation code at the same time, and fixed a bug that had been hanging around for 6 months. I might have a bash at update instructions - since I became a dad updates haven't been particularly regular.

I was disappointed to receive this email responding to a lecture invitation. What an idiot.

Chris and Paul arrive tonight. Paul emailed yesterday to say he's flying the first leg of the journey in a Fokker 50. I suggested he might have to make plane noises on takeoff. Chris is bringing me a slug, which I'm going to turn into a cheap fileserver.

Friends from UK

2007-01-31T14:06:00.000+03:00

Robin and Claire were visiting over the past few days, so no coding has been done. I promised Paul Hastings that I'd update the InetAddressLocator, but as yet, I haven't even installed a Java SDK. Oops. The weather's been great for pottering about Doha (Corniche, Souks and Sports City). On Friday night, Chris and Paul arrive, which means either I get to see the sights all over again, or I give them a map and directions.

RDF::Core and Perl mongers

2007-01-07T11:04:00.000+03:00

This morning, I finished tidying up the work I did before Christmas on memory usage in RDF::Core. I've posted the bug reports here. One of the problems with having a holiday is that when you return to work, it takes you days to catch up on projects. I should really make better notes, or keep a TODO list, or something.

Sent an email to CMU about Qatar Perl Mongers, asking them to publicise the society amongst staff and students; received a reply from Chuck Thorpe. Hopefully, there might be some munging soon in Qatar. Once there are a few people signed up to the mailing list, I'll start begging sponsorship to fly an open-source guru out to speak, but that depends on finding enthusiastic members, of which there are currently none.

Warned gutenberg to move their catalog to a mirrored position, as I don't want to gobble up their bandwidth when I release my search code (maybe this week).

Qatar's Internet security

2007-01-04T08:38:00.000+03:00

The Gulf Times announced today that OISSG is holding free security training seminars in Doha over the next couple of weeks. OISSG is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to information security. Sounds tempting, until you realise it's a sales opportunity. Expect to be frightened by cyber-criminals; baffled by the complexity of the problem; and have doubts raised about your ability to protect your systems. "Don't worry, for a small fee, you can have peace of mind by buying our stuff."

If only there was a local IT security organisation looking out for the best interests of Qatar. Well, there might be soon. Q-CERT is being set up and is recuiting. From the job specs and application procedures, you could be forgiven for thinking the jobs are limited to US academics. However, Q-CERT is undeniably a good thing - I just wonder whether its main focus will be to protect the new universities and financial centre, or whether it will also try to fix some existing problems.

The recent wikipedia silliness has exposed a security vulnerability that is politically charged. Resident web-surfers know their requests are funneled through an automated filter, which occasionally protects them from their own seedy surfing habits (or just blocks sites at random). It is also well known that there is no censorship in Qatar. Bafflingly contradictory? Nope. The local ISP does the filtering, and it is operationally independent from the government.

The filter is now a well-publicised single point of failure, which any technologist will tell you is a tempting target for an american teenager. Knock out the filter, and you knock out web access for an entire country. Will Q-CERT recommend removing the filter? If so, it might be tough to find the decision-maker responsible for censorship when the role was abolished in 1996.

Encoding PSP-compatible MP4 files on Linux

2006-12-31T18:00:00.000+03:00

I bought a PSP at the beginning of the summer, so that Jamie could watch his favourite movies on the long plane ride to Qatar. It's a fairly straight-forward (and well-documented) task to convert DVDs on Windows, but I'd never tried on Linux.

There's a Perl copying suite called dvd::rip, which has many prerequisites. After installation, it isn't obvious how to encode a movie so that it will work on a PSP. I gave up on dvd::rip, and looked at ffmpeg, a command-line utility.

Artfahrt gives useful information about a couple of Windows conversion tools (PSP video 9 and 3GP converter), and how they both use ffmpeg to encode movies. Unfortunately, the example given doesn't work with recent versions of ffmpeg on Linux. It's clear that both tools use a specially modified version of ffmpeg, which will not compile on Linux. Another dead-end.

Finally, after much wailing and tearing of clothes, I came across this post, which provides all the information necessary to encode movies.

Christmas photos

2006-12-27T14:23:00.000+03:00

Sandy arrived just before Christmas - he's staying for a week. We had a walk around Khalifa Stadium, which is ghostly quiet. Here's the Sports Tower (by Sandy), and here's Jamie and the Sports Tower. Jamie had a great time opening presents on Christmas Day - he got a remote-controlled car, a scooter, and two helicopters.

While I was sorting through photos, I found one of chillis I grew before leaving the UK, and one of Jamie and Orry at the Ramada, just after we arrived in Doha.

Vista launch today

2006-12-19T11:30:00.000+03:00

Was invited to the vista launch at the Marriott by Vinod, the local Dell guy. I won't be attending. I thought I might go along and ask about pricing, but it's not worth the effort. They'd just take my contact details then spam me for the next year.

Vista looks nice, but I can't see why anyone would upgrade from XP. Whatever the marketing department may say, Vista is bound to have stability and compatibility problems for the first year (like every previous version). Better to let others take the plunge first. Or use a proper operating system ;)

Sara now has Microsoft as a client, so I shouldn't really complain about the press hype.

Dangerous vechicle

2006-12-18T11:45:00.000+03:00

Jeff Garzik emailed me asking for comments on his DNS geolocation project. I had some spare time this morning, so released IP::Country::DNSBL.

Free time and gutenberg

2006-12-06T11:16:00.000+03:00

Jamie's now at nursery five mornings a week, so I've got some time on my hands. A while ago, I started working on some Gutenberg-related code. I'd heard from various people that it was difficult to find books in Qatar. Personally, I've found Amazon to be fairly reliable if you're willing to wait a couple of weeks for delivery. However, there aren't many local sources of English books. The supermarkets stock a very strange selection, and the Jarir bookshop in Doha is similar to the UK outlet WHSmith - good for stationery and bestsellers, but not for bibliophiles.

Anyway, my plan is to take the 19,000 texts from the Gutenberg project and typeset them into a more friendly format. I don't know anyone who's prepared to read a whole book in plain-text format (try it if you're not convinced). A couple of friends have volunteered to review my efforts and suggest improvements.

At the moment, I'm working on improvements to a pretty obscure piece of code, known as RDF::Core. The Gutenberg catalog is published in RDF/XML format, which should be easily manipulated. However, the RDF::Core code is memory-hungry and slow, so I've been forced into fixing someone else's software before I can continue on the main project. These things happen all the time when you're writing software - either you work around the problems or fix them.

Ping!

2006-11-07T20:55:00.000+03:00

I've finally got a home ADSL connection, and will start to reply soon to my backlog of email.

Writing letters is obviously a worthy pursuit, but it's not really my cup of tea. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

We're here.

2006-09-06T16:35:00.000+03:00

I've been offline for a week, and blogging will be sporadic at best until we get Internet access at home. Everything out here requires a residents permit, including web access, and how long residency will take is a big unknown.

Should have a car within a week, but timescales are flexible ;)

Still, we're having fun exploring by taxi.

bye bye England

2006-08-30T13:38:00.000+03:00

So long Witley.

We went shopping for the final time today - bacon butties for supper tonight. Jamie was given lots of presents from his fan-base around the deli-counter. Two hats, building blocks, a book about trains and a colouring book with crayons. It was very touching saying goodbye - Jamie got lots of hugs and kisses. I didn't, but I'm not bitter. He's got that cute, toddler thing going on, which won't last forever. It's all downhill from the age of three, I can tell you.

Waiting for Thursday...

2006-08-29T23:33:00.000+03:00

I haven't posted in a few days. I've been painting the house, and cleaning. Not particularly worthy of a post.

Two and a half years ago, I moved out from London to Surrey. It was a lifestyle decision - Jamie had just been born and we didn't want him to grow up in London.

Making friends was a slow process (I consoled myself by building a shed). My reception at mother-and-baby groups was frosty, but one mother introduced herself and it turned out that we lived on the same road. She's become a great friend and her kids are Jamie's best buddies.

I shop for food every day. Excessive, I know, but once I became stuck in the routine, it was impossible to stop. I'm going to miss people from the shop, and so will Jamie. Here's a few people who have become the regular fixtures of our days: Paul, Antoinette, Mr George, and Jane. On many days, my only adult conversations have been with these nice folks.

Two more days to go, and more cleaning. I've hired a carpet cleaner for tomorrow.

Visas and dinosaurs

2006-08-23T19:05:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, we travelled into London to buy our visas (£72 each for six months). The Qatari embassy was less impressive than I'd expected, with nothing apart from the flag to identify the building. Anyway, we paid our money and were told to come back today. This turned into a bit of a bonus because, after picking up our passports today, we went to the Natural History Museum. I've been telling Jamie about the museum for weeks, so I knew I'd have to take him before we left.

Here's some photos from yesterday:
Street Artist
London Underground
Escalator
Heaven is *two* trains
Fugue state

and today:
Natural History Museum
Lots of Buttons
Did you see it move?
RAAAAH!

Missing you.

2006-08-21T21:23:00.000+03:00

Ten days to go.

Qatar Perl Mongers

2006-08-19T19:58:00.000+03:00

I spent a bit of time today putting together a Perl Mongers web page. I hope it will be a good way of meeting other programmers and making a few friends.

Most Perl Monger groups use the camel as a logo, but I've decided the Arabian Oryx is more apt for qatar.pm.org.

Paul's birthday

2006-08-19T10:07:00.000+03:00

We were invited to a surprise party! I worked with Paul a few years ago at ITV Digital and, together with Chris, we've kept in touch through regular band nights and pub visits.

Everyone had a great meal, and Jamie spent the night making new friends. Here's Jamie before and after the party.

There'll always be a spare bed or two in Doha for friends.

family visits

2006-08-15T20:05:00.000+03:00

We're spending a couple of days with Grandma and Grandad Rauf, saying our goodbyes to my side of the family. Tonight we visited my sister, who's *very* pregnant and Jamie renewed his friendship with cousin Kieren. Tomorrow, we're visiting great-grandad.

UPDATE: mum just sent two photos of Kieren and Jamie.

bye bye stuff

2006-08-14T13:09:00.000+03:00

So the container has gone - will it ever be seen again? I was helped this morning by Terry, a chemical engineering student from Manchester. Very nice chap.

The driver, just before closing the doors, said very seriously "I hope nothing's going to move about in here - it's going on a ship you know." I guess this was his attempt at a disclaimer.

The lorry ploughed up the lawn. Not that it was looking particularly good beforehand.

This is the first (and probably last) time I'll get the car in the garage. It's good to know it fits!

Packing complete

2006-08-13T14:13:00.000+03:00

Apart from the TV and the vacuum cleaner, everything is now in the garage.

Tomorrow morning, Jamie is going to spend a little time with Grandad Sandy while I load the sea container. I hope it all fits, otherwise I'll have some quick decisions to make about what to ditch.

We have tenants

2006-08-09T16:04:00.001+03:00

Despite the house looking awful, a family who looked at the place yesterday have decided they liked it. They move in on the day we leave, and are signing a lease for two years. BINGO!

ahlan wa sahlan!

2006-08-08T16:20:00.000+03:00

The lounge is looking like we've been raided by the dancing elephants. I keep telling myself that it has to get worse before it gets better.

The 50 boxes already stacked in the garage had to be re-stacked and numbered because I failed to read the shipping instructions. I'm now writing a list so that customs know which boxes contain CDs and DVDs. Apparently, this might speed progress through Doha port. We'll see.

I've now learned six arabic letters (roughly eh, b, t, th, ooo, eee) and three short vowels (roughly e, u, i). Fun stuff, and tricky at the same time. I'm following this course, which took forever to arrive in the UK.

Sara's having fun in the Ramada ;)

Busy busy bees

2006-08-05T11:59:00.000+03:00

Panic! The estate agent is coming round at 2.00pm with a potential tenant for our house. The house is still a tip, and I have four hours to transform it into a desirable residence.

Cleaning the dining room, I found a card from Kate that arrived two days ago. Jamie had filed it under a box.

Bye Bye Mummy

2006-08-04T12:57:00.000+03:00

Jamie's been to the haunted house this morning - a play area in our local garden centre.

Sara is flying on the 9.30pm flight from Heathrow, which arrives early tomorrow morning in Doha. She starts work on Sunday. There's a three-hour check-in at Heathrow, so Jamie and I will be waving her off at about 6.30. I feel a bit deflated at the moment. It's difficult to know what to say apart from "I'll miss you".

Sara's just been asking Qatar Airways about the cabin baggage allowance, which isn't mentioned anywhere on their website. The maximum dimensions for a carry-on bag is 50 x 30 x 25cm and her luggage allowance is 20kg, which doesn't seem a lot for all her stuff.

Yesterday, we had Matt and Bridget around in the afternoon with their two kids (Lizzie and newborn Ari). Sara's dad (Sandy) came for dinner last night and said his goodbyes to Sara. Then we got drunk and watched Big Brother.

Skip Time

2006-07-31T10:17:00.000+03:00

Just ordered our second skip, which will arrive later today. Jamie is obviously very excited - he likes the skip lorry a lot!

Yesterday, we got a lot of packing done. I'm starting to worry about how much stuff we're taking, and whether it will fit into one 20-foot sea container.

Packing

2006-07-29T11:52:00.000+03:00

Today, I'm packing boxes. Tomorrow, I'll be packing boxes too. Jamie is helping with the sticky tape. Sara has caught a cold and has been up all night talking to Jamie, so she's now trying to sleep.

The shipping container arrives on Monday 14 August, and after that we're not going to see any of our belongings until the end of September.

We're not going to put anything into storage. I guess that if we could store something for three years, we wouldn't want to see it again, so why pay for the privilege.

We've given the cat to my mum and a few risquée prints to Sara's dad for safekeeping. I'm not sure how strict are the customs controls, but it's probably not right to take the chance with Sara's Frink (over-rated) or my Eric Gill (genius).

Jamie doesn't know what's going to happen. I think he now knows we're going to a place called Qatar, where it's hot, and that a lot of our furniture has gone to the council tip. I don't think he understands that Sara and the cat are going away soon. Best not to read him Goodbye Mog, lest he get the wrong idea.

Here are some photos:
Witley house.
Garage almost empty for the first time in two years.
Garden and shed are nearly finished.
Helpful Jamie.
Inside, the house is chaotic.

Doha pics

2006-07-28T19:20:00.000+03:00

View from our InterCon window during our visit in mid June. In the distance is Aladdin's Kingdom, which I'm sure Jamie will investigate soon.

Doha on Google Earth

2006-07-28T18:43:00.000+03:00

Here's a post containing some handy Doha placemarks for Google Earth. At least I found them handy when I was trying to work out where I was going to be living.

Ugly mug

2006-07-28T16:53:00.000+03:00

In case you've stumbled across my blog and have created an alternative vision of me in your head, I'm sorry, but this is me. And here's a little one for my profile.

First post!

2006-07-28T16:32:00.000+03:00

Well. This is going to be my diary of moving to Qatar with my two-year-old son Jamie, and my thirty-mumble-year-old wife Sara.

Sara is flying to Doha next Friday, leaving me and Jamie to pack up the house over the next few weeks.