The Dubai and Abu Dhabi property markets are starting to correct themselves.

I thought everyone said that this market was impervious to the global credit crunch? They said that none of the slowdowns would reach the UAE, as there was such a strong economy here. Of course, what they forgot was that most of the buyers for property in the UAE aren’t UAE nationals – they are foreign investors trying to make a profit, many of whom have never been to the UAE. As their liquidity dries up, and as they try to move into more stable investments (t-bills, precious metals), they will take their money out of the market here. Which means no more flipping of properties here, and in turn means that the crazy monthly gains are going to go away.

I’m not saying that things here are going to crash, or even correct hard. What it does mean, though, is that rent should stop it’s ever-upward climb. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to find a studio in Dubai for less than 100,000 AED per annum.

I’m leaving for the UAE forever. Again.

It’s weird to think that I’m heading back to the US for the last time (again), soon. I’ve already done this – I got the t-shirt and all that – and now, I’m doing it again. I hope this time around I won’t irritate my friends and neighbors as much with all my “wow it’s so green here” talk that I know rankled them last time. For anyone who’s missed the news, Charlotte and I are going to be parents soon! That was the motivator for moving, and then everything else seemed to fall right in line.

We should be back in the US right after Thanksgiving – I’m starting a new job on December 1st – but from some fairly silly complications in life, I’ll be headed back to the UAE in late December for a short visit to finalize the last paperwork and job details.

Who knows, I may be back again.

It may be gathered that I’m a fan of Sun’s filesystem ZFS, and that I really like DropBox. I’d love for the two to go hand in hand, but according to the forums, the Dropbox team hasn’t found a suitable Solaris interface for file updates – like the ones provided by fseventsd in OSX or inotify in Linux. I think with the snapshots available to ZFS, my one real concern of using Dropbox would go away: if a file is deleted from the Dropbox folder, it’s deleted from all clients. Sure there’s a version on the web that may be restorable, but if Dropbox doesn’t hang around long term or if there are network problems in the cloud, you can’t get stuff back. I think I’ve found a way to do all of this, and it’s really pretty simple.

All of the following assumes you have a file server running Solaris and ZFS, as well as a Mac or a Linux client that is associated with Dropbox. It also assumes your LAN connection is secure. (Yes, with NFS4 it becomes easier to set up IPSEC, but that’s an exercise left to the reader.) It also assumes you are either running a current build of Nevada or you have installed the zfs-auto-snapshot service. Here’s what I suggest you do:

1. solaris# zfs create -o sharenfw=rw tank/dropbox_client_sync
2. solaris# zfs set mountpoint=/dropbox_client_sync tank/dropbox_client_sync
3. osx-client# mkdir /dropbox_client_sync
4. osx-client# mount -t nfs _fileserverip:/dropbox_client_sync /dropbox_client_sync
5. solaris# zfs set com.sun:auto-snapshot:hourly=true tank/dropbox_client_sync
6. solaris# zfs set com.sun:auto-snapshot:daily=true tank/dropbox_client_sync
7. osx-client# rsync -a -c /Users/username/Dropbox /dropbox_client_sync

All that’s left is to write a crontab entry or a launchd job for osx-client to rsync a few minutes after the hour, every hour. This way, the Solaris server will take a snapshot just before every rsync event, and you’ll have a safe copy of all your data – including major revisions – in case of disaster.

Of course, this doesn’t allow for the fine grained file recovery that the Dropbox web interface has – if you save 10 copies of a file between 9 AM and 10 AM, you only get one of those back on the ZFS side. However, this is a step in the right direction to make sure you have control of your data (and backups of your data) in multiple places!

For the last two months, I’ve been working with a cloud sync tool, called Dropbox. They have a very unfortunate URL (http://www.getdropbox.com), but the service they provide is pretty amazing. For the free account, you get 2GB of file space to link to your computer. The installer sets up a folder on your machine, appropriately called Dropbox, and anything you put into that folder gets synced up to the Dropbox’s servers. There’s a very handy web interface that goes along with the account, allowing you to look at files, share folders with other users or the internet at large – and restore previous versions of a file. Dropbox can do this previous versions magic because it saves changes to files, not just new versions.

The wicked part of Dropbox, that makes it so useful to me, is that you can sync with an unlimited number of client machines. And it’s cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux). So, the contents of your Dropbox are saved on each of the computers, providing you with a mirror of your data across multiple machines. And, like it does with the multiple versions, it only sends the changes down to the other clients. For example, if you have a word document that has grown to many many MB in size, and you change a single line of text, Dropbox won’t re-send the whole file. It just sends the change to the clients. This makes it very handy, and very unobtrusive, and fast, even over slow connections.

They have a wicked screencast as well, that really makes the whole thing make more sense, and shows of the power and simplicity of the service.

This is great, because even if Dropbox goes offline, or closes up shop, all your data is still on your computers. You don’t lose it into the cloud. Further, if you have client machines seperated by decent distances (like a home and an office computer, both linked to Dropbox), if your house burns down, all the files in Dropbox are still around. This thought got me to start putting lots of my important files into Dropbox – especially the encrypted ones. This way, I’ve got a nice, handy backup of my system keychains, home folder settings, web browser home pages, and other critical data. I’m working on a set of shell scripts (to sync between OSX desktops) that will set things the way I like – for example, turning off the 3D dock in Leopard.

Today I installed a new build of DropBox on my home computer, and noticed they’ve put in a link for account upgrades, which is the reason I’m writing this post at all. Before, we Dropbox users were limited to 2GB of space in the cloud. Now, for $9.99/month (or $99.00/year) we get 50 GB of space, which makes Dropbox a large enough bucket to backup nearly all of my work-related documents. I can’t pretend to try to put my pictures in Dropbox (my Aperture library alone is over 200 GB), but I can do a decent job with my home folder. As soon as I find a way to encrypt the data I want to sync seamlessly, I’l going to put the hammer down and get the 50GB account.

Sometimes you come across a photoblog that just needs to be shared – and not just by Google Reader. I was checking my photoblog feeds in Reader this morning, and I came across this shot, which is amazing. The photographer in question has an excellent sense of clarity and cleanliness in his images – I highly recommend adding http://www.batailley.net to your feed reader of choice.

Out in Jumeriah today, I ran across a little camera repair store that had a number of old and battered 35mm film cameras. Pentax, Minolta, Canon, Nikon – and those were just the brands I recognized. Being a Nikon guy, I was most interested in the Nikon camera bodies, but as I’ve never owned a film camera in my life, I wasn’t looking seriously. Until I saw the aperture label on the side of one of the 50mm lenses. f/1.2

Until today, I didn’t know that Nikon made a 50mm f/1.2.

So, I didn’t buy it. Decided to come home and try to figure out what it was. It’s a Nikkor 50mm Ai-S f/1.2 prime lens. There are differing opinions on how good the lens is – but it seems to be the general consensus that it’s damn hard to use, as it’s got a depth of field that is measured in inches when you’ve got it stopped down. And it’s manual focus, and art that is seemingly lost on myself and many of my photographer friends. When looking through a proper pentaprism on a full frame body, with the split focus dot, yeah, I can focus on anything that’s in the center of the image. But I’m lazy and rely on the excellent software that drives modern camera bodies. Until today, I’d been lusting after the new 50mm AF-S f/1.4 that Nikon announced at Photokina 2008, as it has the silent wave motor and extra non-reflective coatings to make it a ‘modern’ lens. $440 list, as far as I can tell. And now, this. The guy in the shop was asking about $120 USD for the f/1.2. Which, according to a 20 minute perusal of the internet, sounds low. So I’m going to have to go back to the shop and see if the lens is in good condition. From what I can tell, it will work just fine on my D200.

All of this has left me wondering something. What is it with 50mm prime lenses? I already have two 50mm prime lenses. An f/2.8 Sigma Macro, that gets very little use, as it’s slow to focus and very loud, and the front of the lens extends a crazy distance when you’re out at 1:1 territory. However, it does get used from time to time, mostly when I’m doing object photography. It’s very crisp, but I can’t stand it for moving subjects. Second – I’ve got my prized 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor AF lens, that I tend to slap on my camera when it gets dark. There are now two more 50mm prime lenses that I want very badly (the afore mentioned Nikkor AFS f/1.4 and the Ai-S f/1.2). I’ve also heard very nice things about the Ziess 50mm f/1.4, but I don’t really need it, already having a f/1.4 that gets high marks for sharpness and clarity. So what is it with me and 50mm primes? There is no other class of lens that I seem drawn to like this. I also, almost always, find it just a little bit to narrow for what I want. Maybe I need to move to full-frame?

“While recording massive annual increase in property values, Colliers’ eagerly anticipated House Price Index for Dubai claimed house price growth slowed from 42 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 16 percent in the second quarter of the year, fuelling fears the market is heading for a slowdown.”

So, let me get this straight – there’s a fear that housing prices are slowing down in Dubai – in terms of investors and real-estate speculators not being able to make silly, unregulated profit. This is for a market, that according to that article, has gone up %76 in the last year.