Thanks to Corrin of Rain City Studios, I came to know of the Courtyard Boston South. The folk from Rain City Studios (including Bryght), along with Now Public, will be staying at that venue.

Moreover, Corrin arranged for a block of rooms at the special rate of $129 a night, and a shuttle service to the conference will be arranged too. This is really convenient so as to avoid learning about bus stops and other aspects of mega city public transportation.

I use the Linux dump program to do backups. I use a set of scripts making the process as unattended as can be. The scripts send me an email with the result so I am informed of the outcome.

Viewing today's email status message in Gmail had a hilarious surpise in it. Look at the ad on the right hand side.

Google thought that the email subject and text here has "Dump" in it, an display an ad about "She dumped me" ... "Get your girl back".

Over the span of a few days, three undersea cables were cut in different areas of the world. Two in the Mediterranean, and another in the Perisan Gulf.

The site of the first cut is 8 km away from Alexandria, and was cut on January 30 by a wayard ship anchor. The third cut is 56 km from Dubai. The cause of that latter cut was not confirmed.

These cuts have affected Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran and India.

All over news outlets over the last two days is the fact that Microsoft has bid $44.6 billion for Yahoo.

The implications of such an acquisition are far reaching.

In the last issue of Computer World Canada, there is an article about enterprise content management. Shane Schick editor recommends six strategies for IT managers at large corporations seeking to reduce the cost of managing content.

Mainstream media is finally covering money-mule scams disguised as a work at home offers.

Cyber crime comes in many forms, whether it is phishing, 419 Nigerian scams, fraudulent cheques or money order scams, and much more. In all cases, money changes hand, and it needs to be funnelled back to the scammers in a way that will hide its origins.

To this end, the scammers recruit often unsuspecting people who are a bit naive, unscrupulous and often greedy. The offer normally comes in the form of someone being an agent for a company, collecting payments and sending them.

Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, announced Maria, a replacement engine for MyISAM with many new features. 

The blog post by Monty has a detailed FAQ. Briefly, Maria aims for 2.0 to have many proper database features, such as:

• ACID
• Commit/Rollback
• Concurrent selects (via MVCC)
• Row locking
• Group commit

It also wants to be the default non-transactional as well as transactional engine of MySQL.

A recent paper titled Engineers of Jihad by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford University finds that militants often have university degrees, more frequently in engineering and medicine. The Atlantic picked this news up by saying that "the stereotype of the poverty-stricken terrorist has been dispelled by
studies showing that militancy and high levels of education go hand in

A friend invited me to NotchUp today. It is a professional networking site similar to LinkedIn but claims that companies would pay to interview you.

I noticed the string q=user/password revealing its pedigree as a Drupal site, and decided to signup up.

Palestinian political leader and activist George Habash died yesterday. The interesting part is that Habash was part of the 60s-70s Palestinian resistance movements that employed terror tactics trying to draw attention to the Palestinian cause.