Answer… pretty damn hard.

If you are not a resident or national you can only get into Saudi under one of three circumstances, first option - you’re going on business, second - you’re going on pilgrimage to Mecca and thirdly a family visit. I’m plumping for the latter, Hanans Mum, Dad and little sister Amanda live in Jeddah which is the major trading city in Saudi positoned on the Red Sea.

So it turns out to prove I’m family I have to jump through a number of hoops in what seems to be a good ole 1800’s style system. Recipe as follows…

1. Request copy of marriage certificate

2. Send Take marriage certificate to Foreign office in London to be “legalised” (sending was taking too long). I don’t see why it needs approving seeing as the government issued it in the first place. Anway good to know that we have an extra seal of approval on our marriage now…

3. Take Copy to Saudi Embassy in London to be double “legalised”.

…..wait 1 day ……

4. go back to London and pick up certificate. Send via snail mail copy of certificate to Saudi Arabia.

……wait……..

5. Hanans Dad does some more foreign office visits over in Saudi to get visa issued.

…..wait …….

5. Send visa back to UK

6. stick in passport.

Phew done… although we’re actually just up to step 4, sigh… The most amusing part of the day though was the 1 hour delay in the Foreign office, whilst delays aren’t normally a source of amusement the cause was explained to be “the computer system is down”, however Alex the announcer unwittingly left on his microphone and all the back office talk was relayed into the waiting room, the culprit it turned out was a paper jam in the printer which effectively brought the foreign office to a standstill, who needs terrorist attacks when you’ve got paper jams.

The opening hours of the Saudi embassy are obviously designed with the normal citizen in mind !?! a very convenient 10am to 11.30am opening slot, which made my journey from the Foreign office on Pall Mall a somewhat hurried one as I tried to get there before it closed. Luckily it wasnt very busy when i got there.

The Saudi Embassy had its own quirks as well, It very much resembled the inside of a bank or a post office. The general processing method there seemed to be everyone stand in a queue at the first window, as each person got to the front the guy would show a general disinterest in their reason for being there and direct them to a hidden window at the end of the counter. Upon being directed here and standing in line again I was served by a guy who some how was somehow managing to talk on his mobile and serve people. Though the limit of this service seemed to be taking whatever you gave him, handing out a ticket and telling you to come back tomorrow. Not very convenient when you live an hour and half by train away.

Hmm, mental note to go places where they actually want you to visit in future.

Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University has moved to podcast only lectures for his students in an aim to free up more time for smaller group sessions with his students.

[source article from the BBC]

I have a very minor fear that this will exclude a few students who might not have internet access, though in this day and age that is very unlikely as universities have excellent computing facilities. In addition I am assuming that Dr Ashraf is providing text transcripts for deaf students, perhaps if the method of podcasting becomes more popular among lecturers then we will see the universities offering transcription services to their faculty.

Despite this minor fear I think that podcast lectures are an excellent idea. As a student at Nottingham University my Computer Science lecture groups were often in the 100+ audience size range and were most often very much a one way experience. Any questions from the audience were usually generated from the same select group and more often than not only served as a distraction from the main message of the lecture. This sort of questioning can easily be moved into internet based class discussion groups or the small group sessions that could be enabled by saving on lecture time.

The possibility for opening up education across geographic bounds is also immense, one of the habits i have got into in the last few months is listening to podcasts on the way into work. I have found that the University Channel provided by Princeton offers many excellent guest lectures. Another great source if you’re interested in business in anyway is the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders lecture series. Guest lecturers are typically CEOs of large corporations or experienced startup leaders, more often than not in the technology field.

Hopefully other university professors will begin to publish their lecture material externally, frequently Professors are only known for being great researchers. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if they could be world renown for being great teachers too…

We frequently have discussions here in Hursley about what the next ‘big thing’ in computing technology will be, Darren in particular is always on the search but hasn’t come across anything groundbreaking in the last few months ( and he doesnt count Second Life as ground breaking either )

Quantum computing is one of those technologies that has been teetering on the brink of my vision for quite a while, but has always seemed far enough off that i haven’t paid it too much attention, it seems now that a Canadian company called D-wave has made what they claim to be the worlds first practical quantum computer. (as reported by ABC news)

Still when we do get our hands on this scifi level of technology I wonder how long it will take us to adjust to it?

I don’t know about you but I’m not sure i want to try and debug one of these critters.

Following the odd laws of quantum mechanics, the digital “bits” that race through its circuits will be able to stand for 0 or 1 at the same time, allowing the machine, eventually, to do work that is orders of magnitude more complex than what today’s computers can do.

Maybe I’ll go half way and try some programming for the Cell processor first.

Hanan has frequently mentioned the cartoons that she watched as a kid growing up in Syria, in particular one that involved a guy named ‘Duc Feed’ and his robot ‘Klandaser’ who battle against other evil robots trying to take over the universe.

I’ve never been sat at my machine before when they’ve been mentioned, but this time I was and what better way to test out the power of t’internet than finding details of obscure Japanese Anime dubbed into Arabic

Searching on google didn’t result in any hits for ‘Klandaser’ or ‘Duc Feed’, but then i wasn’t sure that these would be accurate translations of the actual names. A quick search later for ‘arabic cartoons’ resulted in this page which listed a whole bunch of old cartoons dubbed into Arabic. A lot of these are Japanese anime and include Hanans old favourite which turns out to be called ‘Grendizer‘ (and the main character is Duke Fleet). A bit more searching and look what we found… yes that’s right Grendizer on Youtube, dubbed into Arabic.

I’m impressed by the power of the Longtail.

Excuse me now while I go and try and calm Hanan down, she’s running round the flat pretending to be a giant robot.

The hot new thing for today seems to be Yahoo pipes which Andy pointed out to me. Roo has already had a quick go.

I’ve had a little play around and it looks very promising, the interface is nice especially the little bendy pipe connections. I’d say it’s pretty much pushing the bounds of what DHTML is capable of and it just goes to show how far browser technology has come in the last 5 years. I remember only 3 or 4 years ago the professional mantra coming from senior web architects was to use as little client side script as possible, I used to have a hard time convincing them that it was ok to use a bit of javascript and could make sites more useable.

I can’t go on without linking it to the QEDWiki project, which is also aimed at providing a platform for creating Mashups. However the difference is that QEDWiki is aimed more at being a Mashup technology for the enterprise, you can download it install it within the company firewall. Then just hook it into your internal company feeds pull in any external sources you need and quickly create situational applications that can be used for specific projects or situations that arise in day to day business.

Back on the Yahoo Pipes theme though, here’s the result of my quick play around. It’s basically a filter on a bunch of secondlife feeds to return any the mention IBM in the content.

Here’s the feed

A great little video showing the evolution of the Web and our awakening to its uses. From Michael Wesch of Kansas State University.

A nice little article over at FoxNews on the official response from the Linden Labs lawyer to the blogger Darren Barefoot. Darren put up the Second Life parody website Get a First Life and received an official Un-Cease and desist reply from Linden. Good to see Linden labs leading the way in legal policy regarding humour

A company called GMJ Design have done a 3D model of London based on 10 cm-resolution aerial photography coupled with full ground surveys, the model currently covers 35 square kilometres and is increasing day by day.

They’ve been targeting this model at Architecture firms to start with but it can’t be long until games companies want to start using models as accurate as this…

I’ve spent a bit more time on my arabic to english transliteration, it now does English to Arabic as well. So put your name into the text area below hit the “To Arabic” button and see what your name looks like in Arabic characters. Also have a go at pasting some Arabic text in to find out how those characters are pronounced (well…roughly pronounced ) you have to be a bit creative and imagine that there are a few more vowels between the letters when doing the Arabic to English (see my lower transliteration post below for an explanation why).

So as part of my ongoing self education I’m attempting to learn the Arabic language, for good reason as Hanan my wife is half Syrian, half English and speaks fluent Arabic. I’m also going to be visiting both Saudi and Syria hopefully this year so I now have the kick up the back side I need to try and learn Arabic a little bit more formally.

An important part of learning Arabic and something I’ve avoided so far is learning the alphabet and writing system. I’m still in the early stages of this at the moment and any exposure to the alphabet helps.

As a little excercise i’ve decided to write a bit of PHP script that takes a string of arabic characters and transliterates them into the latin alphabet. Now what this basically equates to is a big ole switch statement checking the double byte value for each arabic character and then outputing the appropriate latin characters.

Sounds pretty easy ? Well it is really, but it has some drawbacks. It’s not really possible to get an end result that’s deadly accurate using standard internet typed Arabic. The reason for this is that the short vowels in Arabic are represented by using diacritics such as ´ above and below the characters these denote respectively whether there is to be an “a” sound or an “i” sound after the particular letter. (Oh and there are also 2 or 3 sounds that don’t exist in English but that’s another problem )

This is all fine, but the problem is these diacritics are usually left out of typed Arabic except to distinguish between two ambiguous words. So if the information is not there to start with we can’t 100% accurately work out the sound. However we can do an approximation and for most of the time this is good enough

Here’s a little sample sentence before and after transliteration.

قالت مجموعة الشركات “دبي انترناشيونال كابيتال” انها لم تعد مهتمة بشراء حصة الاغلبية في نادي لفربول الانجليزي لكرة القدم.

comes out as …

qalt mjmoAa alshrkat ‘dbi antrnashional kabital’ anha lm tAd mhtma bshraa HSa alaghlbia fi nadi lfrbol alanjlizi lkra alqdm.

you can even start to spot some familiar words in there ‘dbi antrnashional kabital’ = Dubai International Capital (there is no p sound in arabic so they come out as b’s )

I’ll have more of a play and see if i can improve it, but the output is good enough for Hanan to figure out the output without seeing the original (given a bit of head scratching admittedly). However its a good way for me to get a quick gist of how some arabic script should sound while i’m learning the alphabet.