• Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw
  From Forbes, no less: "In 2009, 30 million people sit unemployed in America. Yet, the speculators have managed to lift the stock market up, and the media pretends that we're having a recovery." -- As I have said in every keynote for many years, when you create a system, you create the game that plays it and if the system remains unchanged it becomes the game.
  (tags: Economy Capitalism AynRand Philosophy Speculation)
• Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse
  "It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry ... as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system. ... What isn't in there? Anything about stimulating the actual digital economy." -- Awful, shameful stuff. And the fact the Tories aren't speaking against it means we can expect no better from them.
  (tags: UK Law Rights Freedom Digital Internet Economy)
• Alcohol 'protects men's hearts'
  As if Europe's men needed more encouragement.
  (tags: Health Heart Alcohol Medicine research BBC)

By Shanti Subramanyam

I attended the Bay Area Startup Weekend in Mountain View this previous week-end. This was the first such event I attended and it was an amazing experience – so I thought I’d share it.

The idea behind the event was that a bunch of folks would show up, some of them would pitch ideas for new startups and the others would join them if they liked the idea and/or had the necessary skills to build it. The goal was to build a working prototype over the course of the week-end. Read more.

When you officially launch your startup and send out a flurry of press releases, the silence can be deafening while you wait for the phone to ring and reporters to call you. Here are some tips to improve your chances of getting noticed by the media.

1) Make sure your press release stands out, but don't overdo it. A clear, concise, and brief press release that gets your message across without a lot of excess verbiage is far more preferable than a long release filled with flowery adjectives and an overabundance of information. It's not necessary to fill a press release with every detail of your company and staff history -- save those for your interview.

2) Make sure your Web site has a press kit and plenty of contact information. Nothing tells a reporter you're serious about media coverage more than giving them easy access to the tools they need to research your company. Here's the place to discuss the history of your company, patents you hold, future goals, and groups you're affiliated with. If you're a technology startup, make sure to include details about about any software licenses you use, especially if you develop software in-house. Feel free to add as much information as you wish, because you never know what information will strike a reporter's fancy.

3) When you land an interview, respect the reporter's time and they'll respect yours. A good journalist won't expect you to drop everything to talk to them, but if you commit to a meeting or conference all, keep the appointment. The reporter is probably working on a deadline and their time is just as valuable as yours. If you're really pressed for time, offer to conduct the interview via email and many reporters will be happy to comply.

4) Offer prep materials ahead of the meeting. Point the journalist to a press kit, create a slide deck to illustrate important points, or offer access to your product so the writer can be as familiar as possible with what your company does. It's fine to offer revocable access to a Web-based service or request a review product be returned -- in fact, an ethical journalist will insist upon it.

5) If you want your PR person to sit in on the meeting or conference call, that's fine -- but don't let them run it. It's only natural for your marketing guru to want to make sure you highlight all the important points of your company, but make sure the reporter has a chance to get the information he needs for his story. Nothing turns a writer off faster than sitting in a rehearsed sales call where there's little chance to glean any unique insight into the company.

6) Relax. It's easy to get nervous when faced with the prospect of seeing every word you say in print for everyone to see. It's also tempting to worry that the journalist will try and dig up dirt or portray your company in an unfavorable light to draw attention to themselves. The reality is, most reporters are very down-to-earth and are typically reporting on industries and niches they find fascinating. A good reporter's job is to educate readers about your company and why they should want to know more about it. That said, don't hesitate to research a reporter ahead of time to get a feel for their tone. If a journalist seems overly negative, or historically paints the companies they cover in a bad light, you may want to consult with your PR person for advice before your interview.

7) If you notice any issues or discrepancies once the story appears, politely contact the writer and point it out. Honest errors can be fixed and, since the reporter's integrity and credibility are also at stake, they will be just as concerned as you are about correcting the situation.

It's not easy to get your startup noticed above the din of all the other companies vying for the media's attention. Handled correctly, though, it's easy to develop an ongoing relationship with the journalists who cover your industry by establishing mutual trust and respect right from the start.

This is a post from Tweetmeme's Blog on Twitter Advertising by Nick Halstead

It always amazes me how things converge onto a point in what seems to be complete coincidence, but when it happens time and again you see that it is just a natural convergence of multiple minds pushing forward ideas towards a natural conclusion.

And so when I arrived at the Techcrunch Crunchup I was not surprised to find that a number of companies (including Twitter themselves ) would be talking about Twitter based advertising.

I was also at the Crunchup to announce our own new Twitter advertising model called Adtweets – which is a new ad-platform that allows established ad-networks to leverage the power of the retweet (something we feel we have extensive knowledge within.) by allowing current display adverts to gain a retweetable element. If you want to read the full details we have a separate post.

Retweet Analytics

I wanted to share some fascinating numbers on how content gets disseminated across twitter via Retweets, we recently launched our own Analytics package that allows individual stories to be analysed in great detail.

An interesting fact that has an immense impact for anyone trying to advertise on Twitter is that when I analysed 20 of the top tier Twitter accounts (e.g. with followers of more than 500,000) I found that on average only 35% of the retweets that a link gained were directly originated from their own Twitter account.

So as an example a recent Mashable story with 1598 retweets I found that only 586 were a direct result of their pushing it out to the@mashable Twitter account (which has 1,751,213 followers) and the largest proportion (825 of them) was in fact from originating retweets (e.g. clicking our retweet button).

The second interesting set of numbers is the click data that then results from all those retweets – again from the same story we find that it was clicked 12558 times (split across 5 different shortener services) of that total 8196 were direct (e.g. mostly from Twitter clients such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck) 2896 were from the Twitter.com and the 1539 were from 80+ other Twitter web based clients.

What do I draw from these facts? The first is that any model must be inclusive of external clients. So in the instance of Robert Scoble’s ‘SuperTweets‘ the Twitter clients will need a big incentive to display those adverts – e.g. a revenue share. My gut feeling is that in-tweet advertising is still the only effective route forward – just because it applies to the KISS principle.

My second conclusion is that distribution into the mainstream Twitter user-base is absolutely crucial to getting the message heard by the greatest number of users.

Lastly I would like to show you the kind of advertising that I think is the future – and that works perfectly with a model of retweeting. [disclosure: Sun Microsystems is a partner of TweetMeme]

Tweetmeme is a member of Sun's Startup Essentials programme and was one of the first startups in the UK to join

Following on from the Twitter theme of my previous posts, Sheikh Mohammed's feed tells us that he met with Gordon Brown today, as well as the Queen.

I wonder which meeting was more productive and enjoyable?

I can imagine Gordon waffling and fawning inappropriately, whilst the Queen enjoyed meeting an old acquaintance.

Le mercredi 2 décembre à 11h00 - heure de Paris - Sun Starup Essentials vous invite à découvrir l'offre de Planet-Work, notre partenaire hébergement.

Frédéric Vannière, Directeur Technique, vous expliquera comment il a mis en oeuvre les fonctionnalités de virtualisation de Solaris et de ZFS pour proposer des packages d'hébergement souples, évolutifs et économiques. En route pour le Cloud Computing !
Inscrivez-vous !

My last post mentioned that I had just learnt, via Twitter, that Sheikh Mohammed met recently with David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary.

I would love to be a fly on the wall in these kinds of meetings. Britain has a long and close association with the UAE, something that I clearly have a personal interest in. Let's hope Mr Miliband did a good job. British foreign policy clearly needs to have close relations with Gulf states as a high priority. Seeing Sarkozy marching around promising co-operation on nuclear power and muscling in on military relations should be a motivating factor here :)

I would like to see Gulf nationals studying in the UK as a preference over the US, for example. The US seems easier, as well as culturally more attractive a place to go. We need to address that as best we can.

I would love to hear Sheikh Mo's feelings when it comes to the British statesmen he has spoken to over the years. They have come and gone over the years and he will have met many leading figures.

What would he think? Are the current bunch better than previous incumbents of power? Does he see a general decline? Where things better way back when, or better now? Or are things very much the same, with a fair sprinkling of outstanding candidates amongst the general dross?

I don't know if it's because I am simply getting older or because more transparency in government reveals the foibles and farces that used to stay hidden, but the current bunch of British 'leaders' do very little for me.

I would also love to hear Sheikh Mo's feelings on the various Brits he has known who have played a role in the development of the UAE - those who have helped build the armed forces and police, for example. He should be able to provide some fascinating insight on the calibre of individuals who have come to work in the UAE and Dubai in various capacities over the years.

As noted here, I have been reading two books for a couple of months and not made much progress in recent times. My progress through books under consideration tend to be directly proportional to the amount of time spent traveling on trains or plains and I have not been doing that much of either for the last few month, hence the slow progress. A bit more focus and a train trip means I finished one of them last week.

Beautiful Security is a collection of 16 chapters written by 16 different people(s) with 16 different perspectives on 16 different aspects of security. This means there is no common thread other than it is about computer security. In my view this is no bad thing.

I think my favorite chapter was "The evolution of PGP's web of trust" by Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas. The history and insight into the design decisions was really interesting. I also enjoyed the 1st chapter by Peiter Zatko on "Psychological Security Traps".

My interest in Computer Security got triggered about 6 months ago when I got cornered into helping 2 farmers run their PC and laptop. The virus and malware problems were just stunning. Work also had a few triggers (if you work for Sun ask me about the "find" incident) and this book has been very good at giving a informed view on 16 different areas of computer security.

After a couple of months off races, I am really looking forward to the Cardington Cracker in a couple of weeks.

I am late following up on a question we got during the Webinar last Wednesday on High Availability for Web applications. The question was about whether MySQL Cluster is using disks for persistency.

In previous releases of MySQL, the NDB cluster engine (a.k.a. MySQL Cluster) would log on disk but would store all the data in memory. Eventually asynchronous checkpoints would flush data to disks. Reliability was also ensured through intra-cluster replication on different nodes.

Sun Startup Essentials - How can Sun Microsystems help you ? from stewart townsend on Vimeo.

Learn how Sun Startup Essentials can help you if you are a company less than 6 years old, with 150 employees or less.

Following on from my previous job posting here I'm happy to announce some more startup vacancies:

• Worldeka hiring an intern for community development Click
• Huddle hiring an intern for Commercial experience Click 
• Jess Ratcliffe is looking for a web designer/coder to join her startup Click 
• Fabio has a friend looking for a Facebook coder with Flash skills Click
• Fabio is looking for PHP Developer with front end skills Click 

Let me know @scoobeesnac if you have other startup opportunities 

X4150 Server for Startups - Roll up, Roll up now - Clearance Remanufactured stock for you.

If you are a startup, and a member of Sun's Startup Essentials programme you can get this and X2200 now as well, the price list is being sent to you as I write this, if you are not a member then sign up now at http://sun.com/startups and get these servers whilst stock lasts....

X4150 with E5450 CPU & 4GB RAM   £1,200.00/ €1400

2 Quad Core CPUS (8Cores) 4 Gig memory, 4 Hard Discs

 X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM    2xQuad-Core Intel Xeon E5450 CPUs (2x6MB L2, 3.0 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 80W), 4GB memory (2x2GB PC2 5300 FB-DIMM), 4x 146GB 10K RPM 2.5 SAS drives, internal SAS RAID PCI Exp. HBA, DVD+/-RW drive, 2x PSU, embedded LOM, 4x Ethernet ports, 5x USB 2.0 ports, 3x 8-lane PCIslots,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM  £1,050.00/ €1200

2 Quad Core CPUS (8Cores) 4 Gig memory, 4 Hard Discs

X4150 with E5345 CPU & 4GB RAM    D    2xQuad-Core Intel Xeon E5345 CPUs (2x4MB L2, 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB, 80W), 4GB mem. (2x2GB PC2 5300 FB-DIMM), 4x146GB 10K RPM 2.5 SAS drives, internal SAS RAID PCI Exp. HBA, DVD+/-RW drive, 2x PSU, embedded LOM, 4x Ethernet ports, 5x USB 2.0 ports, 2x 8-lane PCI slots, no power cord, order Geo-specific x-option. RoHS-5.

I'm really starting to enjoy using Twitter. After a year and a half of being 'on it', its appeal and possibilities are starting to shine through.

It's been interesting to see its effect on my blogging. A great deal of the appeal of blogging, for me at least, is getting things off my chest. Expressing things quickly and easily that annoy me, interest me, or that I think might interest others, all written for noone in particular. A vast Letter to the Editor, that always gets printed.

Twitter lets me get things off my chest very efficiently. If I've twittered about the nincompoop crashing headlong into another car after he jumped the light, by the time I get to my laptop the desire to blog at length about the incident has faded. Coupled with less travel, which is when I blog the most, Twittering has definitely affected my blogging mojo. I'm hoping that blogging frequency will improve over the coming weeks - I know I have some regular readers and I know I enjoy a good blog post, so I will be trying to up my game a bit.

The immediacy and intimacy of Twitter is also great fun. I subscribed to Paris Hilton's feed for a while whilst I wrote my article on her visit to the UAE. It was bizarre knowing when Paris was going to bed, whilst not really knowing what lots of my friends back home were up to - something I would be much more interested in.

On the other hand, it's great fun seeing what my twittering friends are up to, both those I know well and those I never met but would like to meet one day. Sometimes it'll be a laugh out loud moment, as someone tweets about a Cairo cab journey, for example. Other times it's just nice to know what people are up to - people I would like to see more of, but simply aren't able to.

I've particularly enjoyed seeing Sheikh Mohammed embrace Twitter. Just now I learnt that he has just been chatting to David Miliband about relations between the UK and the UAE, as well as other weightier matters. I hope Mr Miliband did a good job impressing Sheikh Mo. I also hope Sheikh Mo enjoyed the art exhibition he visited last night.

There's an art to a good tweet, just as there is to writing a good novel, essay, email, blog entry or other written missive. I am not interested in 'I've just eaten a croissant for breakfast', but I can skip past that sort of thing when viewing my 'feed' of people I follow. A good tweet should, in my opinion, contain something mildly interesting or entertaining. Rather than 'I've just eaten a croissant for breakfast', 'Emirates' limp, soggy croissants don't do French cuisine justice' might be more fun. But who cares? I don't have to read what other people write, just as they don't have to read what I write.

The whole thing is fascinating - a brand new way of communicating, with an immense following, but noone can quite put a finger on what its appeal really is. Equally fascinating will be whether anyone can make money out of millions of people burbling their nonsense to all and sundry. I would miss Twitter if it went away, but I wouldn't pay for the service.

If you are interested in following my rantings and burblings in 140 characters or less, you can do so here.

• EU delays Sun/Oracle decision
  Until the end of January instead of the middle. At this point it's all just more blows to a bruised body.
  (tags: Sun Oracle Europe)
• Questions for Lord Mandelson
  These are great questions which deserve (but won't receive) honest answers. By the way, I hate the name of this party and will not join or support it until it chooses a name which does not demean the victims of crimes at sea and give the pro-big-media lobby a perfect talking point with which to discredit these great arguments.
  (tags: UK Politics Media Internet Broadband eGovernment Law)

• Apple's Mistake
  Paul Graham gets it spot on again. Apple's attitude is Google's biggest asset in the battle for the mobile market.
  (tags: Apple Google Zeitgeist iPhone Developer AppStore mobile philosophy future)
• Java Warehouse Developer Center - Supported Locations
  Looks like non-US developers can now submit software for the Java Store, although they can't charge for it. Glacial, but the destination is worth heading for I think.
  (tags: Java Sun JavaStore Developers AppStore)
• Gawd Help Us!
  This fits in with the populism-over-wisdom approach characterise by UK politics at the moment. Sugar is not the worst possible role model for today's connected society, but he has to come close. Another Mandelson decision, I am sure.
  (tags: UK Politics Business)
• Parenting in the age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto
  I agree with (the ever remarkable) Quinn here. My children are now old enough to tell me if I lived up to this ideal, which is a bit scary.
  (tags: Children Parenting Freedom Paranoia Zeitgeist)

• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Goodbye Letter To European Customers
  A bit of apocalyptic sci-fi, but no less plausible than the other scenarios.
  (tags: Sun Oracle Europe)
• Closures after all?
  Closures still causing debate after all these years. As I understand it (and I'm not close to the situation so I may be wrong), work continues on JDK7 in OpenJDK. When the JCP gets unstuck, JSRs will get submitted, and the expert group will then be able to decide what to keep/add. Pragmatism, community, open source.
  (tags: Java JCP JDL Closures JDK7 Standards OpenSource Community)
• The strange death of illegal downloading
  "While the government and the music industry posture about illegal filesharing, smaller, smarter companies are simply out-competing it" -- Copyright abuse of most kinds is just a message to the market saying "business model available". We don't need new laws to protect the incumbents, we need entrepreneurs to outpace them.
  (tags: Music Download P2P RIAA Copyright)

Désolé, il ne reste plus de place pour cette matinée dédiée à l'optimisation des performances MySQL.

Date : 24 novembre 2009
Prix : Cette matinée est gratuite !

Session 1 : 9h30-10h45

• Architecture MySQL : Parsing, exécution, optimizer, query cache, binlog…etc
• Architecture Innodb : Clustered index, bufferpool, hash index, insert buffer, locking model, MVCC, recovery log, checkpoint…etc. Comparaison avec les autres moteurs de stockage (PBXT, MySQL Cluster) et bases de données (PostgreSQL, Oracle ..).

Pause/Café : 10h45-11h00.

Session 2 : 11h00-12h30

• Évolutions récentes : Google SMP patches,  XtraDB, Oracle innodb plugin 1.0.4
• Apports de MySQL 5.4
• Améliorations à venir :  Ahead flushing / Adaptive checkpoint,  Purge lag / Purge thread, Splitted locks, etc…Explication technique des améliorations et des gains de performance obtenus.

Nous parlerons aussi de MySQL Enterprise et du MySQL Query analyzer qui vous permet d’optimiser un environnement MySQL.

Cette matinée se veut conviviale et interactive avec Q&A.

• Inventing a Better Patent System
  While these proposed reforms of the US system are to be welcomed, they fail to address - or even acknowledge - the real issues, which are to do with the way patents are used to support demands for injunctive relief and demands from non-practicing patent holders. Both allow extortion of the "nice business you have there, shame if anything happened to it" kind and need urgent attention, especially in the ICT industry.
  (tags: US Patents Law Reform)
• World Wide Web Foundation
  Very worthy and very broad.
  (tags: Internet Web TimBernersLee foundation activism accessibility standards www)
• Has Ordnance Survey Managed to Find a Clue?
  Excellent news here - I hope they follow through fully and don't find a way to make it closed at the 11th hour.
  (tags: UK Politics Open Transparency OrdnanceSurvey Maps Data)
• Me and Belle de Jour – ‘Could it be Brooke?’
  Great story about using a Googlewhack to monitor for researchers pursing a secret.
  (tags: Google Internet Search Googlewhack privacy identity journalism)

Gregynog is a Country house near Newtown which was left to the University of Wales. For the last 13 years it has hosted a weekend of interview skills for 2nd Year Computer Science students from Aberystwyth University, of which I have managed to miss 2.

This year Paul Humphreys and myself ran objective setting sessions. A bit like life coaching, but without the 100 quid an hour overhead.

So good luck to those who's objectives included

• Propose to his girl friends (maybe I should have pointed him to the Kepner Tregoe process for decision analysis)
• Eat a baby dolphin
• Stop smoking (not sure what, best not to ask)
• Get an industrial year which involves Android
• Finish their assignment by an appropriate date
• Write code to do xxxxx in C,C++, Haskal, Perl, Python, etc and put to on their blog.

it takes all sorts to make a world. Many of the outcomes could have been tighter and better clarified, but it was an exercise in "How"

Both Paul and I also set out our list of 10 each, so I am off to finish my 2 books I have been reading since March and Paul will have dug manure into his allotment if it ever stops raining.

There's been a lot of fuss about a recent edition of Oprah that featured an Emirati lady speaking about her life. You can watch is here.

Here are a couple of articles covering people's reactions.

I don't really see what the issue is. A very eloquent lady gave a very positive picture about Dubai. Great PR. I do feel she should have made more of an emphasis on the fact that a lot of the benefits she mentioned were for Emiratis and that expats make up 85% or so of Dubai's residents. She also got her facts a little wrong - I believe local Emiratis get subsidised utilities, rather than getting them for free.*

As usual, the topic of women's clothing came up and that is what seems to have annoyed people the most. It's probably dangerous for me to dip my toe into the water here, but she mentioned that her style of dressing was cultural rather than specifically mandated by her religion. I think this point is well illustrated by the fact that we see her mother-in-law wearing the metal burka, something that you do not see younger Emirati ladies wearing. Does that not prove her point?

I like Dr Lamees' husband's comments on his clothing. He has a simple, comfy way of dressing that fits every occasion. Noone's complained about what he said.

* If I understand correctly, everyone's utilities are subsidised, just to different levels depending on whether you are a local or an expat.

One of our customers used a great phrase the other day - 'small big bosses'.

The context was that the Big Boss would decide something, but then the Small Big Bosses would try to delay or avoid implementing the decision in their own sub-fiefdoms.

The customer is not a native English speaker and, I for example, would never use the phrase 'small big bosses'. In this case however, a phrase which might not be perfect idiomatic English summed up the situation absolutely perfectly. I immediately imagined an office full of people rushing around inefficiently spending their time fighting each other and ignoring the more important tasks at hand.

I will be using 'Small Big Bosses' in future!

Congrats Joyent team for the fantastic announcement today!! 

Intel has just announced a strategic investment in Joyent. More on the Press Release.

Joyent, both a long-time Sun Startup Essentials member and hosting partner - has been profitable for years, and boasts some really impressive customers (e.g. ABC.com, LinkedIn, and more). More recently Gilt Groupe, an online luxury goods retailer with over $200M, publicly stated that they spend less than 1% of their revenue on IT infrastructure (all on Joyent), which is 70% savings over Gartner industry averages. That saves them at least $10M a year!

Check out this great video!

Le prochain OpenCoffee de Rennes se tiendra demain, mercredi 18 novembre à 19h00, au St Melaine rue St Melaine.

Réunion de l'OpenCoffee de Sophia le jeudi 19 novembre de 18 à 21h00, aux Terrasses d'Antipolis, 300 route des Crêtes.

All the details can be found in this article.

We're all on the road again. After four months with some restrictions, business travel in my region is hotting up again for those of us covering SEE (Southern and Eastern EMEA).

I enjoy my job and I enjoy the travel I do, in general. I always say that I enjoy being in the places I go to, but getting there is not something I typically enjoy.

Having four months with no work-related trips has been fantastic, at least on a personal level. Chatting with colleagues who've been in a similar situation, we all had the same comments -

- Losing weight and getting fitter.

- Enjoying time at home with family.

- A healthy rhythm of being in one place, seeing friends, doing the same stuff on a regular basis and enjoying it.

I've been going to circuit training two to three times a week and am the fittest I've been for years. I also fit nicely into all my clothes and feel great. Actually, that's not strictly true - the Levi 501s I still have from when I was 21 are still too tight round the waist, but there you go.

I've really started to appreciate living where I do. Yes, the soundproofing issue is raising its head again now that we're all leaving our AC off during the day, but I am absolutely loving the Old Town and its ever improving environs.

Mrs Saul and I have spent more time together over the last four months than we ever have since we got married in 2005 - and we enjoyed it! Mrs Saul has always been completely supportive of my needing to go away for work- fortunately she enjoys having me home as well.

Not travelling has been interesting in terms of my own personal finance. You start to notice having to pay for your weekly existence yourself. Car mileage and wear and tear goes up and precious airmiles balances go down or stay static, supermarket bills increase, that sort of thing.

The travel pause and my getting back on the economy class whirlwind has made me think about how much things have changed over the last five years - yes, five! - of whizzing around my region, with occasional US and European trips.

One obvious sign is smoking bans creeping across the world. Even Turkey and Athens now have a smoking ban, with most of the airports I go through restricting smoking more and more. A good thing and a real indication of social change.

Lots of regional airports have gone through some serious improvements. Dubai's new Terminal 3 is superb. Amman airport, from where I type this, has a fantastic new lounge and more and more cafes and restaurants, sadly most of the junk food variety. Algiers and Ankara have new terminals, as do a fair number of other places. Emirates' dedicated lounges are often situated right next to the gate.

Even Riyadh airport has a new Costa Coffee - an island of mauve modernity in the middle of a sea of beige.

Technology is improving life.

E-tickets are now standard, it seems. No more worrying about a stupid piece of paper to prove that all the information already in the airlines' computers is correct.

Every airport I've been to recently has a choice of ATMs. No more worrying whether I'd be able to get cash for a cab, or stocking up with wads of $5 bills, just in case.

How did I survive the long hours of idleness when I started out? During my early trips I didn't even have an iPod - no music and certainly no TV to watch. I had to rely on books and the inflight entertainment. My first trip to San Francisco? Seven hours on Lufthansa to Frankfurt, layover and 10 hours or so to San Fran without even a TV screen in the seat in front of me. I didn't even have a blog at the time, so couldn't even pass the time by formulating a rant about the rude way the staff treated those of us in cattle class.

Wifi is now ubiquitous - almost - meaning I can work and be entertained during layovers in the airport. My BlackBerry also keeps me efficient and make better use of my time. In the old days, I'd have to wait till I got to my hotel before I could (hopefully) get to email - and that meant being forced to sit at an uncomfy hotel desk. Now, more often than not, I've cleared most of my work email in the taxi on the way to the hotel, thanks to my good old Bold. When I do get to my room I can relax on the bed to finish things off, before watching TV on the laptop or generally surfing whilst safely tucked up in bed.

Spotify, when connected in the hotel, gives me instant access to all sorts of great music that I don't already own - much as I love the stuff I have on iTunes, Spotify keeps me entertained with any kind of music I might fancy listening to, for free, legally. It's like having a great radio station always to hand.

All of this makes for travel time being easier, much more productive and a lot less lonely. Just five years' advances have made life for the business traveller a lot less wearisome. I wonder how my father managed, particularly in the 90s, when he was going to former Soviet and Eastern bloc countries? I remember he used to carry a small can of insect repellent with him. That would have been handy during a flight on a certain North African airline I took last year, but isn't something I've needed on any other occasion.

Let's see what the future brings. Whilst there are still lots of places that I would like to visit, both for personal and business reasons, a slightly more static existence wouldn't be too upsetting. Given what I do - and what I need to do to keep being able to do what I do - I think airports will continue to play the same role the 65 bus stop used to when I was younger. I'd also rather be doing this than, say, driving around the UK all week.

Time to get to the gate for my connection...

• Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?
  Answer: Yes. So why do the labels want to kill it off? Because they don't. Translation: All this toxic law to cut people off the internet is all about protecting big businesses with tired business models and not about protecting music artists, art or culture. Shame on you, Lord Mandelson.
  (tags: Music Business P2P Internet MP3 filesharing)

GreenBeat 2009 will bring together the nation’s 500 leading entrepreneurs, investors, utilities, technology executives, and policymakers to accelerate the development of a leaner, more efficient electrical grid. GreenBeat 2009 will map out the hottest business and technology opportunities the Smart Grid has to offer. Renovating the power grid requires big ideas from start-ups!

The program will feature participation by Al Gore, former Vice President and Nobel Prize Winner; John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins; Eric Schmitt of Google and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures.  The program also features executives from Cisco, Tendril, Oracle, and more. Expect lively discussion and power networking. The program also includes an innovation competition that will highlight new technologies and will explore the financial and investment opportunities afforded by the stimulus package.  More details can be found at www.greenbeat2009.com.

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I spoke this morning at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano, Italy. My subject was the idea of a "software freedom scorecard", a list of indicators for the strength of software freedom in an open source project or product, about which I wrote recently. The slides are available for download.

I also refer to reptiles, and that's a reference to another blog post.

If you share a file system using the CIFS server (not SAMBA) and create a file in that file system using Windows XP the file ends up with these strange permissions and an ACL like this:

: pearson FSS 12 $; ls -vd Bad
d---------+  2 cjg      staff          2 Nov 13 17:11 Bad
     0:user:cjg:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data/add_subdirectory
         /append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute/delete_child
         /read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl/write_acl
         /write_owner/synchronize:allow
     1:group:2147483648:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data

         /add_subdirectory/append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute

         /delete_child/read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl

         /write_acl/write_owner/synchronize:allow

: pearson FSS 13 $; 

The first thing that riles UNIX some users is the lack of any file permissions, although things seem to work fine. The strange group ACL is for the local WINDOWS SYSTEM group. However the odd thing is for me it renders iTunes on the Windows system unable to see the files that it has created.

The solution is to add a default ACL to the root of the file system (well to every object in the file system if the file system is not new) that looks like this:

A+owner@:full_set:fd:allow,everyone@:read_set/execute:fd:allow

So this has the rather pleasant side effect of setting the UNIX permissions to something more recognisable:

: pearson FSS 20 $; ls -vd Good
drwxr-xr-x+  2 cjg      staff          2 Nov 13 18:16 Good
     0:owner@:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data/add_subdirectory
         /append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute/delete_child
         /read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl/write_acl
         /write_owner/synchronize:file_inherit/dir_inherit/inherited:allow
     1:everyone@:list_directory/read_data/read_xattr/execute/read_attributes
         /read_acl:file_inherit/dir_inherit/inherited:allow
: pearson FSS 21 $; 

and the even more pleasant side effect of making iTunes works again!