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Read on at Wired’s Danger Room. Putting me in the mood for the last book I bought – Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

and yes, I know it’s just Budweiser.

10 years in the city I decided it was time to have a look around me. The Belfast Festival at Queen’s is quite high profile in the media but outside of the fanfair I knew little of the content. Turns out they put on a pretty electic show. I went for the Bateman play National Anthem, a Floodlit Belfast photo opportunity, a discussion about Carson, retro gaming exhibition and book talks from both Keith Jeffery on MI6 & Lord Ashdown.

Gaming started in the Catalyst Arts centre down in BT1 and I went there on the 2nd day they were still kind of setting up for a big night of it on the Thursday. I took a few shots and scooted back up the road. A word about Catalyst first – an arts organisation completely volunteer run. Not the ‘voluntary’ sector. Just people putting in their spare time. That’s big society right there. So well done on that.

Lord Ashdown

Paddy Ashdown had his chat in a packed out Elmwood Hall – first time I’d been in the place – and as you can imagine he’s a very comfortable, yet concise speaker. Kicked off with an excerpt from his new book about his time in Bosnia – on the one hand containing his best achievement in life and the worst the very next day. His time in Bosnia obviously deeply affected and influences him.

I’m happy to report the Donaghadee man’s greatest smile of the night came as he recounted his days as a young officer in the Royal Marines and then again when he moved on to his time as an operator in the SBS. But what was insightful in all this, as the audience watched a man who it is assumed is now away from the frontline of world affairs, was his responses to questioning. They were not the answers you associate with someone looking back at the end of their career, which while sometimes humorous – “In your time at Westminster who do you think would make the best MP?” “ME!” – also struck me as being sincerely looking to the future, the next challenge.

And I reckon that for Lord Ashdown the next challenge is in Kabul. He turned down a UN role there before, but tellingly only after Karzai himself appeared unwilling to have a ‘corruption buster’ on board – and after his ‘wife told Paddy he couldn’t stand idly by while young men put their lives on the line for their country’. That sounded like a speech to go to war on. And if it didn’t, the retelling of a tale about the 1879 retreat from Kabul debacle in which the army endured it’s worst military defeat showed the audience just where Ashdown’s mind is.

Will be watching his next move with interest.

Keith Jeffery – MI6

Next up was Keith Jeffery who is a Queen’s academic and recently wrote a book on the history of MI6 up to the end of WWII. It’s interesting that in the early years funding wasn’t what it is today and the top spy had to fund activities out of his own pocket! Undoubtedly there was a lot of characters discussed, for such an apparently discreet profession spying appears to attract it’s fair share of extroverts.

Also amusing was the bureaucracy surrounding getting some of the info ‘released’ – details on the cracking of US coded telegrams was apparently not allowed out into the public domain – until the professor pointed out they’ve been sitting on public view in the National Archives for years! I’d have liked to hear some gossip on more current activities, or thinking now in hindsight some tails from the Great Game period would have sufficed. But an interesting tale nonetheless of how ad hoc military spies grew into a specialised independent government department.

Enjoyable too for the fact Malachi O’Doherty was the compere for the evening. First time I seen him away from the opinion pages of the local rags, and he seemed engaged in what Jeffery had to say.

When Jeffery was first commissioned to write the book – under Crown copyright – he commented “This is a contract that could have been given to any number of universities, and it came to Belfast and not to Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) or London. It is nice to bring something to the university – something a little bit out of the ordinary”

Fair play to him.

Gaming

And after a quick call into the flat for some pasta I headed down to Catalyst’s gaming night. It was pretty impressive to see FIFA up on a 9ft wall – along with Tekken 2 and Bomberman. Lots of littel TVs dotted around had Time Crisis with gun (should have been on the wall), 4-player Goldeneye 007, Sega Smash Pack on the Dreamcast and a great find – 3D Space Invaders on the PSOne.

Flicked on Sega Smash Pack to find out was Altered Beast really as bad as it looked. Affirmative. The intro screen on Smash Pack looked weird, more like a classic demo intro than a game. Turns out it was a well known ROM loader released by warez group Echelon, pretty cool because they must have used it to burn the original Smash Pack. Kind of a recursive piracy there. Then the guy running the show came over and switched me over to a MAME CD that was divided into 8-bit, arcade and 16-bit sections. Tons of top notch game time here – Toki, Midnight Resistance, Cabal, Snow Bros, Twinbee, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Rodland ffs! Could have played all night but in fairness it was due to end at 11 and I stumbled down the stairs – with the aid of a healthy supply of Corona to hand over the course of the night – well after midnight.

Chief gamesmaster said he’s trying to do something like it, with more consoles, down in Uni of Ulster @ York St so here’s hoping for more retro action in future. Keep tabs at the Catalyst FB group.

Carson

Professors Graham Walker, Paul Bew and Dr Eamonn Phoenix sat in on a packed Elmwood Hall discussion in the 75th anniversary year of Carson’s death. Interesting factoids were shared throughout the evening – Carson’s family background, his maternal family from the West, the Presbyterianism of his Father, his own romance at the height of the Home Rule crisis, etc – but I found the two apparent ‘heavyweights’ of the evening hard going. I have always thought that godfather of academic politics Bew to be overrated as a narrator and media personality: while his analysis is undoubtedly incredibly exacting and trustworthy, it is often difficult to follow and at times rather unfocused in term’s of a narrative.

Phoenix on the other hand comes across as just another nationalist historian incapable of espousing anything other than his own political dogma on matters of history. Struggling to maintain interest while Phoenix speculated Carson was a ‘complete failure’ to himself and that he would also have to accept responsibility encouraging later Irish republican violence with the formation of the 1912 UVF. I can only conclude that poor Eamon has not yet read up on the history of Irish republicanism pre-1900 and is therefore unfortunately ignorant of a couple of centuries of Irish ‘political’ violence and the fact that the 1912 paramilitaries – both nationalist and unionist – remained untried in terms of violent effect. If Phoenix felt Carson was a failure for delivering partition I wonder what he thought of the republicans of the time.

No matter – Prof Walker came across as a hidden diamond in the discussion. I had not heard of him before, but frequently he tied up disjointed and rambling efforts from the other two contributors with succinct and interesting analysis – I’d like to hear more from him in future or at least give the other has-beens a lesson or two in how to raconteur successfully.

Undoubtedly Carson was on the inside a brilliant manifestation of contradictory thought and influences – no better a question then that from within – that delivered to an external audience perhaps the most professional articulation of Irish Unionist thought and argument in the perennial battle for understanding at the mother of all parliaments. Certainly among his contemporaries he was unrivalled and as Walker noted the leader of Ulster Unionism Craig with his worldly acumen recognised this at an early stage. The result was to elevate this personality to pop history’s saviour of a people while in comparison his courthouse contemporary on the other side of the divide John Redmond barely gets a look-in ahead of the more violent personalities of the age.

It’s true about who writes the history books.

And that concluded the talk bit of the Festival for myself. Would have loved to have got a ticket for Palin before he sold out but for those I did see I was on the whole impressed with the variety and general interestingness of the characters involved. If anything could be improved I’d like the question time with the audience to be extended or at least open ended – Lord Ashdown for example was quite happy to remain on for as long as anyone wished to interrogate.

I agree with the enthusiasts – form factor is all-important

For this reason I believe a netbook is superior when veging out in front of the tele – after all, I don’t hold the remote continuously while watching a programme so why should I have to hold a computer to surf the web?

Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.

I get over the former as SO is a lightning quick method of accessing really knowledgeable people on demand – but I had to endure a case of the later a while back when someone obviously thought the answer to the question I asked was too blase and proceded to provide a solution for a completely separate issue. And this despite me explaining exactly why I didn’t want his solution in the preamble. So I went and got a workable answer myself, posted it and accepted it as the solution. Job done.

Except this caused numbnuts to vote down my answer without explanation. So I voted his down, and told him why. Despite this, he questioned why I’d want to know what I wanted to know in the first place and voted down the question. It was at that moment that I realised SO, while largely self-moderating, is still missing the last 20%^TM required to remove the clinically insane from the process. It gives me no pleasure to disclose the most efficient solution currently is to multiply your web leverage in traditional fashion; create multiple accounts and hit back with a bewildering array of counter-comments and down votes…

It is embarrassing though when apparently throwaway questions asked on your secondary accounts are rated higher than your allegedly thought-provoking and succinct real persona *whistles*

In true Bileblog style, programmers appear to be sarky contemptible bastards who like nothing more than jumping on the inaccuracies of accepted thought; hence phrasing a question along the lines of ‘My colleague says x is no longer a good way to do things…’ will likely stir the hornet’s nest of pedantry as each contributor seeks to provide a more arcane answer as to why x sucks than the previous response. Recurse until someone mentions lambda.

First the good one. I didn’t really know what to expect from Barcamp Derry and from the spiel delivered online was hoping that was the correct way to approach it. Half hour sessions organised in 3 concurrent ‘streams’ meant the first 5 minutes of each was largely spent loitering in the doorway of each until one grabbed enough attention take a pew.

Although I missed the morning sessions the later half still produced a nice variety of topics – web media, drupal, startup and a few more. It was refreshing to see stuff happening locally that you usually only read about in front of a screen. Effectively it takes the form of a ‘show & tell’ so you get to see stuff that is happening right now in NI. It is accessible and because of that you get an urge to participate and interact in a way you don’t get from say a lecture for example. You get the sense when people are talking they are thinking aloud and the wide variety of topics really gets you thinking.

The whole experience just seems more realtime.

I’m no expert on the philosophy of BarCamp but maybe it’d be an idea to have stream themes so less frantic checking of the timetable matrix would ensue between show & tells. So I could sit down in a room for the day and know I’d be learning about e.g. bootstrapping, but without necessarily needing to know who is going to speak on it until they begin. It’d make for a more open minded audience I reckon since they would have little time to research a speakers angle.

Anyway I found the whole thing an engaging and unique experience and am very much looking forward to the next one on 6th November.

Now the bad one. Facebook Dev Garages are as I understand them a chance for people using/thinking about using the platform to tap into the phenomenol viral power of FB’s network. If you’re not into developing apps solely for the Facebook platform, you’re looking to shoehorn the power of the ‘tell your friends’ social tsunami into your existing application.

The first point is it works. My 1st FB app was a simple little gamer gimic that reached 2k MAU (Monthly Active Users – the standard metric for FB app popularity) within a month, just by adding ‘invite your friends’ and ‘publish to stream’ components. This would not happen via say Google Gadget directory or dare I say it any of the current appstores. On Facebook, your app is actively pushed through your network by its users. Virality.

It’s a relatively new paradigm but unfortunately Facebook Inc has turned themselves into another M$, another cathedral: What we got at yesterday’s Garage was a staid marketing promo. It was a great disappointment – there is a rich dev ecosystem surrounding the FB platform – fbFund, the f8 conference and the Dev Garages elsewhere seem to have got the backing they deserved.

So the conversation began at a bird’s eye view and never really returned to earth.

It could have been so different: At the last minute James Leszczenski, one of the platform dev guys, was roped in. He provided an overview of FB’s crowdsourced translate app and how it could be used by developers to localise their own FB content. Good talk but again he skipped over the FBML and coding (aka the useful bits) I’m guessing to avoid glazing half the audience’s eyes over.

Also maybe it was the travel or whatever but I was expecting him to at least stand for some q’s at the end of his presentation. He just slunked into his seat. So with the other guys demo not coming off this was basically the end of the Belfast Dev Garage. Some marketing guy and a dev who didn’t really talk shop & wasn’t too interested in engaging the audience.

[I asked the InvestNI girl afterwards if there'd be another one in future, maybe with a bit more to it and the response didn't sound too promising. Maybe there isn't the demand currently but surely it's up to the marketing people to get engaging content. Not come here to give a talk on the history of the company and how to create a FB page for your business. There's a tendency for tech firms opening up in Dublin to adopt the shrinkwrapped M$ model of dev engagement. There is very little understanding of what makes a dev ecosystem tick.]

Anyways fair play to the audience at this point, questions were inevitably pointed in his direction and although a percentage of them were irrelevant in a dev context at least it was interaction.

Not of much value though. His answer to the unreliability of the MAU stat availability was publicly “I’m sure there’s a thread on it on the forum” and privately “There’s no reason why you can’t do your own”. Which is a load of balls: I could invent the Rutherford Active User tomorrow and you know who would be interested? Nobody that’s who. Why would they take the time to discover this brand new metric when MAU exists as a platform standard in every app out there? Just fix your own buggy stats thankyouverymuch.

I’ll admit to getting it wrong on the photos api not being open. Since 2007 to make things worse. But I’m also going to shift the blame on platform dev docs being an absolute maze to work through. I’ll stop digging right there. And I was more just pissed off at all the marketing chatter of open this connected that. hmph.

Although Leszczenski did seem a nice guy in person and at least laughed & agreed with my take on Google Wave still being ‘the app Google released the day Microsoft launched Bing’. Not the first time that’s happened he said, in his best FB disciple knowing look of indignation.

Cathedrals are everywhere.

All cool little diversions. And none requiring you’re friends to install any 3rd party contraption for the network dimension to be of use. And I’ve come up with my own – seeing how many of the rich and famous I can add to my network. I’m thinking start off with the Z listers then gradually build up my friend of the stars rep with a self-fulfilling trust network of media whores savvy celebs who crave a platform with the right connections. Why could that platform not be my friend network? ‘Any friend of Putin is a friend of mine’, etc, etc. Once your fellow average joe friends are in on the act facebook network top trumps could ensue: ‘I see your Matt Damon and I raise you Kevin Costner…’ or whatever.

Network Wars.

Surely beats the arse out of the ‘network’ features of Mafia Wars (amounting to nothing more than an endless time-restricted & turn-based cycle of ‘send x, receive y’). I’ve had a shot at two people already. Although not famous outside of their domains, I’ve never met either personally and they’re well known to enough to kick this off. For now Putin will just have to wait.

No 1: Frank DeLise Creator, Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942
Let me tell you. DC for BF1942 was a great, great game. Basrah’s Edge, Nights, Al Nas, Bridge, Lost Village, Berlin… sigh. And this man is the man. And I told him as much in my friend request. ‘long time fan, big respect for what you did with DC’. Result? First celebrity (in my head anyway) in the clutches of the Rutherford network. Mhuahaha. Ha.

No 2: Pamela Ballantine Presenter @ UTV
Went local for my 2nd. At under 2million we’re a small (if sometimes stupidly violent) nation, but it’s still pretty impressive to get your bake on our TVs night after night. Again, playing the loyal fan card appears to do the job ‘long time fan of RPM and it’s great presenter!’ Although she did make me wait a week before accepting. Treat ‘em mean keep ‘em keen I guess.

So it’s onto celeb no 3 and I feel like going for a more adventurous target this time. Will keep you posted in the comments.

While I’m on the subject of Facebook, anyone else find it disappointing they removed the friend network info feature? You know – the breakdown of what networks people’s friends are from? Seeing the recent Friends Analysis app reminded me of it and now when I went hunting for it apparently it’s been dumped without reason. Shame, kind of liked seeing the at a glance cultural backgrounds of my own and others networks.

But.

Laptops still consume too much energy. For those of us who refuse to drop our netbooks in favour of phones, this presents a problem. Happily though there are free wifi hotspots that whether unwittingly or not also supply publicly accessible plugpoints.

Here is my attempt to map them out – everyone is free to contribute. Only add locations that have both free wifi & power points. Insert a green placemark if wifi is unfettered, red if there are restrictions such as site blockers or excessive time limits (instant arbitrary decision: anything under 12 hours). Give a description of wifi provider & location of plug point.

You’ll find FreeMap here.

Here’s my personal Webbys in no particular order and in no particular year – these are among my favourite sites on the web period:

finance – minyanville.com
sport – ourweecountry.co.uk
tech – slashdot.org
user content – flickr.com
hack – hackaday.com
gaming – escapistmagazine.com
tees – splitreason.com
books – amazon.co.uk

And to be frank, it’s total shite.

Dart board dates, non-existant routes & towns that are in a different country are all heavily featured. I should point out that when we originally planned this out there was no planning, nor was the future need for it planned either. This seems to us contrary to the ethics of the Mongol Rally and so having to actually think through such concepts as ‘routes’ beyond anything more detailed than country level just seems like rallying heresy.

So we haven’t really done it.

But whatever, we’re almost done writing words in boxes and inserting random numbers in correctly formatted date spaces. We’ll be sending them all off sometime this week and then biting our nails and ringing up the Adventurists every so often for progress reports I’m sure. Mostly though we’re just going to sit back and with the help of a few cold beers reminisce about all the old adventures we’ve had and discuss all the new ones we’re going to have.

To get me in the mood I’m going to repost something that showed up on the Rally forums tonight, from the 2nd year of the Rally back in 2005:

These interesting tidbits are from the first (proper) year of the Mongol Rally, 2005. Yes, they are all true.

43 cars left London.
27 cars reached Mongolia.
14 cars reached the finish in Ulan Bator.
2 teams were robbed at knife point.
1 car snapped in half.
3 engines fell completely out of the cars.
1 team was held for five days in no-mans land.
1 team cycled almost 100 miles to get to the finish when their car gave in.
100’s of tires were blown.
1 team got engaged.
3 teams attended weddings.
1 team found a 10 foot deep pot hole.
1 team found a 25 ton crane rolled by a pot hole.
1 team had to reverse up a mountain after losing all but one forward gear.
1 person spent 24 hours in a Kazakh jail charged with five crimes against the state.
1 person was stoned by a Mongolian nomad, who then shot at him with a gun (and missed).
1 team was rammed off the road after an argument over water melons.
1 person spent a day in a Turkish hospital.
3 people were banned from Turkmenistan for a year.
As a result of an incident with a cow, one person was detained by police in Azerbaijan and threatened with a beating from a dwarf.
2 cars flipped over in Mongolia.
3 teams were chased by armed bandits.
0 team members died.

We’ll be visiting at least one active warzone while we’re away so kind of hoping the last statistic isn’t bettered…