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Wired:

That’s about half of what you need to know. Robots, designed in Switzerland, riding camels in the Arabian desert. Camel jockey robots, about 2 feet high, with a right hand to bear the whip and a left hand to pull the reins. Thirty-five pounds of aluminum and plastic, a 400-MHz processor running Linux and communicating at 2.4 GHz; GPS-enabled, heart rate-monitoring (the camel’s heart, that is) robots. Mounted on tall, gangly blond animals, bouncing along in the sandy wastelands outside Doha, Qatar, in the 112-degree heat, with dozens of follow-cars behind them. I have seen them with my own eyes. And the other half of the story: Every robot camel jockey bopping along on its improbable mount means one Sudanese boy freed from slavery and sent home.

For thousands of years, camel racing has been the sport of kings throughout the Arab peninsula - Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and United Arab Emirates. A fast camel can cost several hundred thousand dollars, and an owner may house and feed scores of them. The closest American equivalent is not Thoroughbred racing but polo. There is no gambling, though there are various prizes for the winners, and the sport is not the people’s choice (soccer is). There are few live spectators and no television cameras, just a narrow sandy track about 10 miles long, looping through the desert outside Doha, where every year from October to April, wealthy men gather to run camels against one another.

It is not, for all that, an entirely benign diversion. A camel will not run without someone riding it and egging it on. The lighter the jockey, the faster the camel. For as long as anyone can remember, the solution was to use child jockeys - not adolescents, but little boys as young as 4, hustled in from poorer countries like Sudan and kept in hovels in the desert where they did nothing but ride camels. They were denied even rudimentary schooling, they were starved to keep their weight down, and their injuries were often left untreated. In Qatar there were a few hundred such children; in neighboring UAE, which used Pakistani and Bangladeshi boys as well as Sudanese, there were as many as 3,000. Trainers would choose whoever was handy and ready, stick him up on a saddle behind the camel’s hump, and when the race started, bark orders through walkie-talkies the boys wore strapped to their chests.

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Don’t forget to set your clock back an hour, unless you live you the UAE.� � :-)� � All of our families in the USA and in Sweden will be changing their clocks, but the UAE never goes on day light savings time so we do not change.� � That means that instead of 8 hours different from the USA we will be 9 hours until next spring, and we instead of 2 hours different from Sweden we will be 3 hours.� � So there you go, just something else to worry about.� � Just when we were all getting use to the time difference.

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We went for our first Iftar dinner Wednesday night. You may ask yourself what is a Iftar dinner, well let me tell you… This is the dinner during Ramanda that you break the feast with. People fast all day and at sunset they can eat, so this food is rich and has a lot of carbs. We went to the dinner at 6pm at the Intercontianal Hotel here in Abu Dhabi, and we thought we would be really early and that they would not be busy, but we were wrong. We should have known better, because wouldn’t you like to get to dinner as soon as possible after sunset to get your first bite of food?!?!? The dinner was very nice, and it was nice to see everyone laughing, talking, eating, and just enjoying themselves.

Ramanda is almost over, but we do not know just when it will end. Since the holiday goes by the lunar month (and not the calendar month) the exact dates change every year. We will have a couple of days off at the end of Ramanda which is called Eid ul-Fitr… So after that things will go back to normal, or some kind of normal

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iView MediaPro 3 is out in a beta version.

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CreativePro did an interview with the Product Manager of Apple’s Aperture pro-photography software:

Aperture was developed with photographers looking over our shoulders, literally. They picked apart our workflow, and we analyzed what they really do and touch. We found out overwhelmingly that they all use Photoshop, but only a fraction of it. It became easy for us to develop our list of adjustments. We focused on an essential set. With that essential list, we covered well over 90 percent of what photographers do in Photoshop.

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Apparently, USA Today managed to photoshop Condoleeza Rice quite badly.

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Marina Mall

Originally uploaded by mnystedt.

Ramadan is almost over, this is the last week. Many official buildings are all dressed up for Ramadan, and so are many shops and shopping malls. We were outside the Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi a few days ago and they have big camels lined up outside.

You can see all our Marina Mall photos here.

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NeoWin:

The Beta for the new Hotmail, aptly titled mail, has been released to a select few testers. Those who have been selected will be given the option to test the service when they next login to hotmail. Along with the striking new design changes come some fantastic usability features that make browsing hotmail far easier.

The new look will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used Outlook, with message information on the left, and the body of the email being displayed on the right in the reading pane. Along with this new setup, you have the ability to drag and drop emails into different folders, just as you would do in Outlook. You can also right click on emails in the information pane and choose to reply, delete, forward or print. To accompany the fresh new look Microsoft have upped the storage allowance to 2gigabytes.

Judging (only!) from the posted screenshots it does look very much like Outlook. I have great reservations about trying to adapt a regular application interface to the web. It seems in my experience it doesn’t turn out very well since they are very different beasts. Although I certainly don’t think it’s perfect, I think a simple interface like FastMail’s is much better suited for the web.

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I just came back to work from a quick trip to the apartment because they came to install broadband - finally. It only took the technician a few minutes, then we plugged in the DSL modem and it worked. Now we have to configure the wireless network and change a few things around but basically we should be online from home now (I don’t count dialup!). We subscribe at the 2Mbps speed but we’ll see what the actual speed will be

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The Mac4Arabs conference (unfortunately all in Arabic it seems), taking place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, May 17-18, 2006. Reports MacWorld:

“The event will be a chance for companies interested in introducing their products to the Arab world to do so,” say Mac4Arabs’ coordinators. It will include press conferences, a roundtable discussion, lectures and classes to help inform attendees about Apple and Mac products.

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