Last week, i sat through a demo of a certain document management system provided by a vendor. The system in itself is pretty good. Although if it was up to me, I would never choose a proprietary system for a vital project. Since you essentially would be putting yourself and your data at the mercy of the provider. What was interesting though was their licensing terms. Aside from the system itself, you have to buy “modules”.

A couple of months ago, we started working on a project, code named firemote, to help in the detection and prevention of forest fires in Lebanon. I didn’t say anything about it because i was waiting for it to be announced, and the announcement was finally done a few days ago. The press coverage(in english) is at The Daily Star - Politics - AUB team invents new tool to help battle forest fires

It just occurred to me today. Running your own business, you try to optimize the hell out of everything to make as much use of your time as possible. Employees on the other hand, wish to be as unproductive as possible. But i have to say, I still don’t understand how people think. Its one thing to have a lazy day, but to turn laziness into a habit is just plain wrong.

My NDA Policy ~ I have decided to starting signing them! : Texas Startup Blog discusses Non-Disclosure Agreements and how the author has decided to react to it. I think it is brilliant. Also of interest are the other linked articles such as To NDA or Not to NDA? That is the question. My stance on NDAs is that i only sign specific ones that actually relate to confidential information. And i only do that to make newer clients feel more at ease.

I finally got around to releasing the BombMaker Gnome applet that i blogged about. I’ll share with you a little secret, I’ve actually been using it for the past 6 months or so. I even learned to package debian packages just so that i can release it.(manually installing gnome applets is a bit too much) There were a couple of snags along the way, mainly in the packaging part and specifically in using autotools for that.