1. Get more then 5 hours of sleep before a marathon especially if you have had a hectic week with 4 hours or so sleep per night
2. Stick to eating pasta before the marathon it helps
3. Do not eat after 9 even if your friend has a birthday dinner party. The stomach pains will hit somewhere around the 30th Km
4. If you are a barefoot runner, do not run with a vibram five finger. As much as I love this shoes (I run 10 Km in them every day), I got pain in my toes mainly because of the asphalt. For a marathon and barefoot running I would suggest the nike free (at least i tried those)

Tomorrow is Beirut Marathon and for those of you who would like feel free to check out the map below to see how I am doing.

I walked into the theater at the beginning of the day thinking that I was one of the first to walk in after all the ushers were saying that people should start going in. Boy was I wrong, the theater was packing up and I barely found a place in the first session (in later sessions I opted for a seat on the stairs for it felt more natural). 685 people were sitting there waiting for the event. The stage looked amazing, because in its simple decoration of boxes placed here and there it was an elegant testimonial to what was about to begin. Our host Sara was well rehearsed and so were all of our speakers. The talks followed one and all, and each invited a host of thoughts. But the talks alone were not the cause for success. The success came from the well timed breaks given that allowed people to mingle with each to bring forth discussions, to linger in conversation as one speaker Mahomoud Natout had so hoped. And to my surprise and happiness those discussions during the breaks were not about people selling their products or their companies, it was about knowing other individuals in as much as you can know someone in such a short span.

But the greatest testimonial for the event’s spirit and success came from the audience. During the sessions you would be hard pressed to hear side conversations taking place. People were listening and dare I say reflecting. More importantly, after lunch I came back to a theater that was still packed. You might not grasp the significance of this immediately but in Lebanon (or elsewhere) I have yet to see a little less then 700 people stay the whole day for conference.

Yes yesterday’s TEDxBeirut event was well worth the day and much more. It was worth it thanks to the hard work put by the TEDxBeirut team who volunteered to make such a great event and to the speakers who volunteered their stories. To both of you a great thank you for the wonderful even you did. As for me, I think speaker ‘Arne Dietrich’ put it best when he said that It was the most fun he had in a single day in Beirut.

But, don’t just take my rant for it you could still catch the event (although you will miss on the discussions) by visiting TEDxBeirut.

Such an ideal prison this is; the warden, the guard and the prisoner are all the same, our own minds. In its confinement it seems only certain thoughts and ideas exist and one becomes obsessed with them. One thought towers above all, the obsession with freedom and what a dangerous obsession it is. It seems weird to say that the obsession of freedom is delivered into existence by a prison, but it is not; for in the shadows lies understanding. You see, an obsession with something can only come into existence through the realization that one can not attain that thing. And so the obsession in freedom, its very existence, is dependent on the lack of freedom. And in there lies the worst of all realizations, our own obsession with freedom our driving force to break all prisons depends on our existence in a prison. You see we are like the bees stuck in a box with the light of freedom shown so ironically so intelligently at the closed end of a bottle. We are always attempting to move towards the light yet never able to reach it for we are fixated on it.

Maybe in the years to come we were lot go of our prejudices and our fixations, and explore our surroundings. Then we will find that by not obsessing over freedom we can get out of the bottle and become free. But I wonder how shocking it will be when those who make it out discover to their dismay that the bottle is really just inside a box. I hope, I wish that they would not forget the lessons they learned.

Today however it seems there are no heroes. Sure there are many that stand against injustice in their lives, hundreds that everyday take one step further against all the odds. But these are not heroes for their stories are either untold and forgotten or worse told in entirely. Today, the lives of our would be heroes are not shrouded with mystery and built on with dreams and hopes, No today their lives are shown completely naked to us so we see their success and their failure, their confidence and  doubt. Today would be heroes never grow to become more than just people, they never become milestones that the young hope to reach and surpass. Today our heroes no longer grow to be associated with the potential of a human being and are alas cast into only being associated with their own lives.

Today there are no heroes because we no longer forget the mistakes they did on the way. Today there are no heroes because we can no longer paint over their lives our own dreams and hopes. Today with all our media, we so easily see the faults of our would be heroes and tell ourselves it is okay not to reach our full potential since those great people did not.

Where did all the heroes go? I think they are still here but we no longer wish to see them for it is easier to sit and watch then to live to your potential.  But to those of you who have read this far I say, I believe you can be heroes so why not start moving towards your potential for I am sure somewhere out there a little boy and a little girl want to dream of reaching where you can go.

Let me start by some of the lessons learned from my first month as a micropreneur.

1. The most important is it can be LONELY. Yes you read that right, going the micropreneur way can be a lonely endeavor and more so if you are not mentally prepared for it. I have mentioned before that I am a member of the Micropreneur Academy and let me tell you it is important that you have a group of people who are willing to listen and talk to you. I am still thinking how to add a bit more human interaction into my daily routine but suffice to say it is important.
2. You should worry about expenses but not too much. My experience so far has been that you can pay the bills by consulting. Sure it will cut into your product time but not as much as your day job if you have decided to leave that like I did. And consultancy is also a disguised blessing if you are looking for some ideas, since you get exposed to all sorts of problems. Also a good friend pointed out that you get to meet some interesting and smart people when you consult.
3. The hardest part in building a new product is not the building part. Let me tell you this is a horrible one that I am still wrapping my head around. If you are a programmer, the biggest obstacle in your new idea that will help everyone is in letting people know it exists. Building your idea is easy in comparison. GO FIGURE.

So with the above done let me tell you a bit about my niche product. This idea has been banging on my head for some time and I have done a couple of half hearted attempts before but this time I am trying to take it all the way. The idea is to give businesses that are based on appointments a simple and easy web-service that would followup on their clients to remind them of the appointment. Also I wanted the tool to be able to inform the business in all sorts of ways like phone call or email as well as the website of the product itself. Cuevox is the implementation of that idea. Cuevox gives businesses an easy way to do followup but without all the hassle and best of all I plan to offer it to as many countries as I can. The truth is that Cuevox still requires some code in the background to bring it all the way through but I wanted to bring it to as many eyes as possible as soon as I can to hear your feedback on it. I believe the idea has market and little competition, although by biggest fear is that one very successful micropreneur (Patrick McKenzie) is working on the same idea. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds and if I can get enough traffic to turn this into a good product.

As always I shall keep you posted. Until next time have fun and be happy.

The first series is going to deal with cell phones and airplanes. Anyone who has flown a plane has heard the customary warning to keep cellphones off cause they may effect the behavior of the plane. Now I am no aviation engineer (although I am a telecommunications one) so I can not conclusively state one way or the other, but I am willing to accept the situation as a rule (as in you want to change the rules get your own plane ). My problem starts with the dozens of people who propagate the hypothesis: Any cellphone operating will cause a plane to malfunction. I am sure you have heard those especially from people you have shared flights with. So let us analyze.

I do not have any hard numbers about the number of daily commercial flights around the world but given that in the US alone is 30,000 (according to NATCA) I think it is fair to assume that daily around the world we would have 10 times that number. So let us say that there are 300,000 daily commercial flights around the world. Now assuming an average flight size of 50 passengers (my guess I am being very lax but okay) that makes a total of 1.5 million flight passengers every day. Now we are going to assume 65% of those have cellphones (4.6 billion out of the world population of 7 billion have cell phones according to Wikipedia). That means so far we have 975,000 people with cell phones that are flying each day. Some of these people do not listen to the rules, others are just forgetful and some just pack their cellphones in the baggage that they checked in and simply did not turn it off. For the case of our study I am going to be very lax with my assumption and say that only 0.1% of all those people have forgotten to turn off their cellphones for one reason or the other. That gives us 975 cellphones that are operating everyday on commercial flights. I will go one step further and say that of those only 1% happen to receive calls while within cellphone reception. The conclusion to all those assumptions would be that each day we would have to hear about at least 9 planes being in some trouble due to cell phones only. And the reality I have yet to hear one conclusive plane incident due to a cell phone .

So in conclusion let me say the following points:

1. In regards to cells and airplanes, the rules are to keep your phones off so keep your phones off. If you have a problem with that rule take it up with the airline or the government or start your own airline. But in no case should you start stories that defies logic in order to try and convince yourself that you are doing it because you want to.
2. The analysis above only tells us that the stories that we hear from our friendly passengers are just logic defying however it is not conclusive on what is the effect of cellphones on planes (they can possibly degrade radio quality). The only thing we can infer is that planes do not come crashing done on a daily basis because you forgot to turn off your cellphone.
3. When someone tells you a story and it just does not add to your sense of logic, question it and you too might find a case of the common sense .

Until next time keep questioning.

First off, let me start by saying that I have actively been a full time micropreneur for almost a month now. I had been working on several ideas for some time before July but few have taking any holding. But when July came, I decided it was time for me to try and make entrepreneurship work (and if need be supplement it with consulting). I am currently working on two products I have built Cuevox, which offers an appointment reminder for businesses, and SmsTheTeam, which allows you to send mass text messages to anyone and collect replies easily. So far I have had a few trial sign-ups but no sale so far and still poor traffic on both.

Second, let me tell you about the slight hassles of entrepreneurship. If you are like me living in a country where PayPal, Google Checkout and every other major payment processing system (and helper such as Chargify) do not offer their service, then you are in for some very heavy lifting. For one thing you need to get yourself a proper company standing (an offshore) in a country where those services are available or you are left reinventing the wheel (the hassle of recurring payments is large). That setup and getting the bank to work with you on the things you need is well hectic. If people would like I might write a post about that too later on.

Third and lastly, let me talk about the Micropreneur Academy and to a small extent StartupToDo. I am a member of both communities but have been spending alot more time in the Academy so I will focus on this post on it (but know that StartupToDo is well worth too). Few will get to see the original version of Cuevox,  but I will be the first to admit that if it was not for all the comments and discussions that I got from the Academy regarding my first attempt as well as my other product then the site could not have reached the stage it is in today. The best thing about the Academy is that you always have someone talking to you and answering you in the forums. If you ask me it is well worth its price (not to mention that they do offer a few things inside that make the Academy repay for itself at least through recovered expenses ).

So as a conclusion, I am not sure where this path will lead but I am excited to find out and cant wait to build some great stuff. And in case you are thinking of following in the micropreneur path I suggest you give the Academy (and StartupToDo) a try, I doubt you will regret it.

About a month ago I started working on a little product idea called SMSTheTeam which would leverage Google’s Contact, Document and Spreadsheet API all while running on Google’s AppEngine. The start was quick and easy with AppEngine’s SDK and the Google API Documentation. I was able to come up with a proof of concept in a couple of days and then things went haywire.

Now as a disclaimer I am not sure if this is an issue in just Google’s setup or in the python Google API library, but I suspect the former plays a large role since it seems that Google endorses the python library by using it in their examples. Let me start with a case point which is the simple authentication sequence. Now almost all the examples show the using of authentication for a single Google service when using a session token, but what about if you want to use two services. In one place the documentation states that they should be separated by a blank in another it states they should be a list. Trying both did not work even though the forum discussion supported the second.

The solution amazingly is that you do need to use a list but what is not mentioned is that after you upgrade your token you get a new token from Google and that is the token that you need to manage and keep. Now to be fair it is easy to deduce that is the logic behind the process but with a detailed documentation I should not be making assumptions should I? More importantly the documentation does not mention that you need to use the variable auto_set_current_token and set it to True for you to be able to use the token later on.

And the worst part some things are just not documented in some versions. Like for example the insertRow function in the Spreadsheets does not appear in v1.0 even though the python library does support it and the fact that the list given to the function should be all small letters is barely mentioned (which causes some frustration let me tell you)

I do not know if others have found the same disappointments in Google’s API documentation but it is a shame to see that the guys behind the API are doing so much work (they are in version 3) when so many things are left undocumented or requiring too much work to turn into proper robust code. I wonder how many mushup opportunities were lost to that. So in conclusion Google’s API…great, but their documentation…merely good.

As you might know lisp hosting is not abundant so must of the time you need your own server instance to run your lisp on. However instances are relatively expensive when compare to other hosting options so it might be useful if you could run multiple websites of the same server. And it turns out you can do exactly that with hunchentoot and you do not need multiple instances of your common lisp running (I use SBCL).

Your first option is to visit Cyrus Harmon website and get his hunchentoot vhost code and run it on top of your hunchentoot. The code is clean and understandable and last i checked Cyrus uploaded a new version on 12 June 2009.

Your second option is to use hunchentoot built in capabilities and separate your websites on different ports (you could use a webproxy in front but that is another post). Start by creating your hunchentoot instance in the following manner:

(hunchentoot:start (make-instance ‘hunchentoot:acceptor
:port port
:request-dispatcher dispatcher))

Now the important part is that we started by telling this particular instance that we need hunchentoot to listen to the designated port. The key thing you need to take care of however is the parameter request-dispatcher. It turns out creating a hunchentoot acceptor this way you can no longer use any of hunchentoot built in dispatcher functionality (Which is the price you have to pay). So how to deal with that is to make sure that the dispatcher is actually a function that return the appropriate html.

This function needs to take one argument which is the response object and then return the proper html based on the response. There are different ways to do this that could be fast. One suggestion which I implemented was to create a hash table with the url as the key and the handler function as the value and i simply do a funcall on the handler function. it is that simple .

Hope you enjoyed the above and stay tuned for some more information on lisp programming.