Here is an example of why marginalization of minorities is bad for the whole of society.The largest minority group in France are immigrants from North Africa, namely Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Coming initially from former colonies as cheap labor, they settled in low income run down housing complex in poor suburbs.While the French society puts pressure on immigrants, accepting nothing less than full assimilation (not mere integration), that society never accepts foreigners who have a different language, different religion, different skin color, and different customs.The result is a no-win situation that leaves many youth feeling alienated. They only have mediocre education if any, have no permanent jobs, and have no hope of keeping up. Many succumb to drugs, crime, or religious radicalism.

Britian's Prince Charles will be visiting the USA shortly. During this trip he will be holding talks with Bush and trying to reverse the anti-Islam/anti-Muslim rhetoric that is so rampant there.Well, I have to say that this is a noble cause: narrowing the gap between cultures and faiths, and trying to ease tensions. Those can only lead to a more tolerant and a better world.However, I am not sure if Charles' campaign will be met with any success. I am not holding my breath that it will, but I hope I am proven wrong.

I just released a new version of User Points which interfaces with Drupal's Ecommerce module.It allows many forms of interaction between those two modules, including:

• Users can purchase points for real money. If the site admin sets up a non-shippable product, users can add it to their cart and pay for it as they do for a real item. A configurable multiplier factor allows one unit of currency to give the user more than one user point. This can be useful when used with certain other modules, for example my job search module, where employers pay to post jobs on a per node basis, or job seekers pay for posting resumes on a per resume basis.
• Users can use their points as a method for purchasing. They accumulate points by posting to the site, moderating, commenting, ...etc. and they they can use their hard earned points for other things. For example, they can redeem their points for additional roles on the site where they can access more content, or they can use it to pay for recurring subscriptions.
• Users who purchase merchandise or services from the site, can gain "reward points" for their purchase, and they can use that for future purchases. This is in addition to the psychological factor that we all fall for that we got something extra when we bought  the main thing.

Of course, users cannot use points to purchase points.

Someone compiled a list of all the available Drupal themes, compared the features of each, and tested them for issues.This is definitely worth reading if you want to select a theme.

Another small module that allows the creation of a service product with variable pricing. Useful for people who engage with clients on projects where the cost varies from one engagement to the other. They can get customers to pay them using credit card or Paypal on the web site.It is based on the donation, another contributed module in the larger Ecommerce family of modules. Here is the CVS view for the service module. 

I released another new module today. This is a somewhat custom module for a certain web site, but it may be of use to others. It allows users with  the right  permission to post "topics" and gather answers from registered users by email. It can be modified to be all web resident if needed, e.g. ranking of answers, making them viewable on the web site, ...etc. More information on the topic module, along with a download link, can be found on the topic project page.

The Stock API module  has been released to the public. This module was developed by Matt Westgate for the wonderful BuyBlue web site.The idea is that this module will fetch the stock data over the internet only when needed, and caches the info in a database table, hence network lag does not slow down the user response, and the system does not get bogged down if too many page views with stock data in them. Since Matt is busy with  E-Commerce, and other stuff, he asked that I take over this module. Of course, this is a good idea, since I do not want code duplication with my original stock module.

Turkish artist  Ekin Caglar has a really touching flash movie, called The Other Side of The Coin. Worth watching and spreading to everyone you know. It is available in many languages, if you so wish. However, pictures are worth a thousand words ...

PHPonTrax is another Model-View-Controller architecture using PHP.  It used to be called PHP on Rails,  attempting to be the Ruby On  Rails version for PHP.It uses Active Record for Object/Relational Mapping (ORM), much like Hibernate for Java.