So the other day a friend was visiting Lebanon in vacation mode, despite all our efforts not to discuss anything techy we ended up having a small talk about hackerspaces: how they got started, how they are run, the culture and how to solve conflicts between members etc

As she was telling me about some memories and stories – i had some “deja vu” moments – the same stuff used to happen with “us” in the local net cafes.

The thing is before internet penetration was high in Lebanon and before prices became decent and speeds human – if you happened to be a techy, you kinda had to go to internet cafe or network for internet access, gaming, dose of computer time… and in the old days, it was not cheap – considering our teenage budgets.

Without us having the bleakest idea about it, those netcafes were actually our small hood-levels hackerspaces of the times.

After my previous post on how to scrap data off arabnet’s website and turn it into an interesting database, It’s time to share some basic analytic i did from that same database.

Those analytics are waiting to be turned into an infographic that can go viral. Please feel free to take that data and visualize it – i need some help in blogging in here ;p

You can download the data in a clean format using this link. There are only the info of 150 startup in here from arabnet’s database – so it may not be really representative of the actual startup scene in MENA but rather Arabnet’s outreach…which may or may not be a reflection of reality.

Finding talent and developers who can get a job done in just 12-hours is ArabNet’s mission during this digital summit. Investors will be keeping an eye on the Open Developer competition to identify the best engineering talent in the region.

This competition will take place during the Developer Days, part of the ArabNet Digital Summit 2012, from March 27th, at 8PM til 8AM the following day. Competitors are challenged to build a simple web application or a mobile app in just 12-hours!
The exciting part is that it is free and open to any developer, regardless of whether they are registered to attend the conference!

Since I am an arabnet official blogger and all – I was checking out something interesting to blog about and I ran into the startup database http://startupdb.arabnet.me and i thought it would be interesting to actually get some statistics about the start up scene and why not visualize it too.

It is really important data for business decisions and no one can fail to see its value.

This is why I scrapped it off the arabnet website using excel – no, i did not hack into their database and steal it – i scrapped it off – here is a wikipedia link to explain data scrapping and here is how you do it.

[in collaboration with @battikh000, a network engineer working as an ethical hacker]

After a 10 years of delays, 3G has been finally introduced to the Lebanese market.
Many employees are tech savy and smart phones have higher specs then most of our computers did a few years back and they are amazing social connectivity devices…

This kinda of easy and cheap connectivity may not be welcomed in the workplace. Companies sometime go to great lengths investing in ISA servers and IT personnel time to block access to some type of content like social networks or to stop employees from leaking data through the internet.

This is why one of the most frequent questions I am being asked recently is: how to block 3G?

I know of a beautiful untold love story, one you cannot watch in a movie, read off dusty book pages or even hear in poetry.

This story is too mushy to be published on a technical blog, this is why i am sharing it as a guest post on KnoozRoom.
Here is your link <3

It’s been one long day with endless meetings, trick questions and formalities. It is the day the Quality Control auditors perform their annual visit for a client’s factory and HQ.

This client is using one of my freshly developed solutions for Quality Management… so needless to say the software was put under “scrunity”.

Here is an audio recording from the first minute of the final wrap-up meeting: