A word of caution for female tourists visiting Egypt: be careful of the many of the men working in tourist areas in Egypt.

Although the vast majority of Egyptians have a high sense of honor and good conduct, it seems that tourist areas seem to attract a relatively high concentration of people with lax morals, who would exploit tourists in many ways. It can manifest itself as persistent aggressive begging, peddling cheap goods, charging 10X the normal prices for services and goods, and what this article focuses on: exploiting female tourists.

According to a report by the National Intelligence Council, the USA's global dominance is waning over the next two decades. Other rising economic powers include China, India, Russia and Brazil.

Ever wondered why the weird date used for HTTP headers in Drupal? Specifically, did you ever check the Expires: header in Drupal?

You may have stumbled on it while inspecting header data using wget or FireFox tamper data. Or you were simply browsing Drupal's source code in bootstrap.inc, and saw this?

header("Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT");

Well, that magical date is today, and it is Dries' birthday. So he turns 30 years old today!

This is a poem by a contemporary Maltese poet, Ġakbu (James).

He posted the poem in a previous article on the oldest Maltese literary work, Il-Cantilena. I translated the Cantilena into English using only my knowledge of Arabic and trying to decipher the old orthography and the modern orthography of Maltese.This was a nice mental challenge, and an experiment in culture, history and of course, linguistics.

News from Jerusalem yesterday showed Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks exchanging kicks and punches, with many of them featuring bruises and bloodied faces.

Of course it is odd that these are religious figures fighting inside a holy site, but if one examines the news deeper, he will see that this is a frequent occurance.

Earlier in 2008, Armenian and Greek Orthodox fought like they did yesterday.

A hilarious video on The Matrix running Windows. Really funny, and a mention of Ubuntu too.

Via Matt Assay.

The Ottawa Citizen has an article (mirrored here) about the "culture of impunity" within Canada's security officials.

As reported by the Ottawa Citizen, Momin Khawaja was convicted of several charges and acquitted from the major one: aiding a terrorist ring in targeting London England.

The trial was under Canada's Anti-terror Law, quickly enacted after the 9/11 attacks in the USA.

I don't think that Khawaja is innocent, given all the evidence, included an ex-fiance from Dubai.

Also known as Il-Kantilena ...

In a previous article on Arab heritage in Malta, I touched upon how the Maltese language (Ilsan Malti) is definitely derived from Arabic, and more specifically, from the North African dialect of Arabic.

A visitor to the site raised a nice challenge which was very interesting to me: He started on the off note and having his comment titled "Maltest are not arab", and by saying: