Friends from UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.