The current US Administration has made it known to the rest of the world that its military adventures abroad are motivated by values such as "freedom" and "democracy".The irony is that only one in four of Americans can identify more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution (Freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petitioning the government). This is about the same as those who can name all the five members of the Simpsons family ... 

Here is a quick guide on what you need to develop modules for Drupal, with useful links to get you started. First, you need to know what is Drupal is, and what it can do. You then need to learn PHP, if you do not know it already. After which you have to setup a development environment. You need a computer of course.

I think that Drupal as a community is now at a crossroads.

Having been at the Drupal Conference in Vancouver from February 7th to  9th, I was overwhelmed by what was happening. There are too many people in attendance, and talking about all sorts of things. Two consulting companies had a whole contingent each in attendance. These are Trellon and CivicActions.

So Far So Good

So far, Drupal's core has been contributed to by volunteers, with just Dries Buytaert and Steven Wittens as committers of patches to core. There is no influence from large shops or corporations.

Language is a complex thing, and is one of the things that make humans human. You may have seen this in your inbox:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rest can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The CBC web site has background information on many topic. It is often concise and informative.

Here is an article on the various kinds of H2O below zero that we Canadians get here.

Resource 

• CBC: Forces of Nature: Snow. 

Some time ago, an anonymous visitor wrote a comment on an article I wrote. In response, I wrote a comment listing some contemorary and recent influential and rich non-Muslims in Muslim majority countries. This is now its own article. Here are some example from recent times:

• Boutros Ghali, Coptic Christian Prime Minister of Egypt.
• Boutros Boutros Ghali, his grandson, Coptic Christian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Secretary General of the United Nations.
• Youssef Boutros Ghali, Coptic Christian present Minister of Finance in Egypt.
• Kamal Stino, Coptic Christian Vice Prime Minister of Egypt.
• Onsi Sawiris, Coptic Christian, and the richest man in Egypt. His family has been rich for some time.
• Rami Lakah, another rich Egyptian Roman Catholic businessman.
  

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has a very telling article on the spyware and adware industries, and the botnets that are setup to serve them by shady individuals and operations.

The article has an interview of a 21 year old high school dropout who goes by the name of 0x80 who runs a botnet, and 180 Solutions, a company that distributes its pop ads by spyware/adware that is installed by the likes of 0x80.

Although these are bad uses of a botnet, akin to using it to send spam, they are not the worst. Other botnets are used for phishing, the practice of tricking users into giving the credentials for their bank, Paypal or eBay accounts, or demanding a payment lest a denial of service attack be launched on a site.

Here are some notes from the Drupal Conference held as part of the OSCMS Summit in Vancouver British Columbia from February 7 to 9, 2006.

It was a gruelling trip for me, leaving home at 5:30 am to catch a 7:30 am flight to Vancouver. I missed the morning sessions of the first day because of that. Coming back, I took the red eye at 11 pm, arriving 6:45 am Friday.

I am not one who cares for Valentine's Day, or any of the other consumerism driven celebration. However, I got a nice surprise a few days ago, that is worth writing on: Valentine for Geeks.Alexandra Samuel, Aaron Pettigrew and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal sent me a small present. It was a typical Valentine present with sweets in it, and a card.What is interesting, is the custom nature of the larger sweets, and what was written on them.

Oracle Corporation has been on a shopping spree.

In 18 months they are spending $18 billion, including many open source companies.

First, it was InnoBase, the company that makes the InnoDB for the MySQL database. Then rumor has it that SleepyCat will follow, which makes the Berkley Database Base. Following that is Zend, maker of the PHP accelerator, and the PHP development environment, Zend Studio. Finally, it is JBoss, a Java application server.

The first two worry me the most. Although the source code of both products is available, the proprietary license for each allows MySQL AB, the company that makes MySQL, to offer non-free versions with suitable licensing for clients who need it.