It has been long know that the world of police informants is filled with shady characters, and questionable motives. It is common practice to hold some trivial mishap against the informant to force them to act as one. In other cases, the informants are people with limited skills and/or motivation, or ex-criminals who find this line of work a way to earn income.

Two articles that I came across, one old and one new, point to a new trend of "caching in on the internet".

The first article is one year old, and it came to my attention via an acquaintance (an MBA!) who wanted to copycat this idea. He read about it in Forbes, went ahead and bought some 50+ domain names and wants me to do "internet real estate development" with him. The second article is from the New York Times today.

Obviously, I refused to do that work due to my aversion to content free sites that have only ads on them.

Reluctantly, I had to miss OSCMS 2007 because of a silly illness. So, I am slowly catching up with some presentations that I would have loved to attend ...(Yes, 2 months later, I know ...)So, one presentation is Moshe Weitzman's Drupal: a retrospective. An lo and behold in it is Steven Wittens' famous: "please, don’t hesitate to stick your head in a microwave oven, and grill until satisfied" ...

The name Alazraqui is quite unique, and is used by various people, including actor Carlos Alazraqui, who was born to Argentine parents. Other people in the USA, such as Ed Alazraqui and others in Argentina, such as Marcio Alazraqui.

Since 1894, several Arabic block printed charms were known by various researchers. Arabic Verses by two Arab poets, Abu Dulaf Al Khazraji أبو دلف الخزرجي, from the 10th century and Safeyudin al-Hilli صفي الدين الحلي from the 14th century suggest that that the term they used, tarsh, is for the print block technology.

The charms or amulets are similar to modern day hijabs حجاب written for superstitious gullible people by greedy quacks pretending to be holy men. 

A while ago, I came across Morten Wulff's Drupal-on-a-stick page. A few days ago, Matt Cheney posted instructions for getting Drupal on a keychain using Ubuntu. Of course, these require a PC to run.

Somehow, I stumbled on this old article on the Adsense module for Drupal. The reviewer was skeptical at first, and preferred adding the code directly in blocks. He was pleasantly surprised by the ease and configurability of the Adsense module. The Adsense module itself can be downloaded from Drupal.org.

What does a 2nd century Jewish jurisprudence text and a 13th Persian mystic poetry have in common? At first glance, not much, but there is more linguistic commonality than first meets the eye.

After trying the Garmin StreetPilot c330 Navigator GPS, I decided to try a unit that was a hybrid between the car directions GPS and the handheld outdoor/trail GPS.

While a car directions GPS gives turn by turn guidance to get you to your destination, a handheld would provide tracking, a compass, waypoints, ...etc.

Say what you want about Newfoundland. All the Newfie jokes aside, they are a wonderful bunch.

Here is a fisherman whose lobster traps were burned by a vandal. As news traveled from one bay to another cove, people chipped in traps, raw material and money to get him back on his feet.

No wonder he says he chokes up when talking about it.

Good for Newfoundland, Canada and restores some faith in humanity.