A few weeks back, a client was facing a severe problem: their database disk space consumption was steadily going up for no apparent reason. I was called in to help, and provided with the hosting control panel password as well as the Drupal admin password.

Investigation and Findings 

Upon investigation, I found out two things quickly:

• They were using an old Drupal version based on CivicSpace. It was a 4.4 or earlier version.
• The cache was growing very fast. For such a relatively small site, cache was 184 MB alone! Larger than the content of anything else on the side (including comments, node, and accesslog).

When I emptied the cache table, it started to grow again almost immediately.

As someone who is has been living away from Egypt for years, I forgot how arduous it is getting simple things done, such as renewing a driver license. I did not plan on getting it renewed during this vacation, but when I arrived and took a look at it, it was about to expire in a month. Luckily, it is valid for 10 years, and hence the need to go for renewal is less frequent than the 5 years of Ontario.I had forgotten the sheer amount of bureaucracy required when interacting with government agencies for any type of document to be issued. Here are the steps that are needed to get a driver license renewed. I don't even want to think of what would have happened if this one had expired and I needed a new one with a test and all.

On 21 July 2004 on PBS, there was a two hour program about Zheng He. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch in the service of the Ming Emperor of China. Zheng He commissioned, built and commanded a Chinese Imperial fleet that sailed through the Strait of Malacca, and into the Indian Ocean to Calicut, possibly East Africa, and other countries.

They also reviewed Gavin Menzies proposal that Zheng He sailed all the way to America, and even established colonies there, as told in his book, 1421: the Year China Discovered the World, and on his 1421.tv web site.

In the last year and a half, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi has captured a huge mind share of mainstream news media. In this article, I try to gather some info on him to put him in perspective.

A few days ago, Drupal.org server went down, including the forums, the mailing lists, and the CVS repository. Two days passed before a message appeared on the main page asking for 3,000$ in donations to buy a new server. It turns out that for years they were hosted on a shared server that did not keep up with the growth. Last month it did serve 3 million pages, and 100 Gb of bandwidth.When I saw this message it was a few hours old, and asking for money in Euros. About 700$ or so were raised. I donated 80 Euros (about 100$US). After 7 hours, it switched to dollars, and 1,897$ were donated by 56 people.

One favorite family myth on my father's side is that El Sakakra, the village where they are from, has a lot of people who are descendants of Omar ibn al-Khattab عمر بن الخطاب who was the second Caliph after the prophet.

Let us see what the references say on this topic ...

Al-Maqrizi's المقريزي in Al-Bayan wa Al-I'rab الببان و الاعراب quotes one nassabah (genealogy expert) saying:

I have a client who uses DreamHost for their Drupal powered web site. They are happy with their service overall, and intend to stay with them. The client is on Drupal 4.6. Although this article focuses on Drupal, much of it applies to about any PHP application you use.

One issue surfaced a short while ago, where randomly, where a string like ?PHPSESSID= would appear in the URLs while users are browsing, like http://example.com/node?PHPSESSID=7dd1d5d1471fa8be2fea8f163cce3257.

Every so often, a new term takes new dimensions larger than the actual meaning and content of that term.
One such term in recent years is "blogging" or writing regularly to a blog or weblog (wikipedia).

What is blogging?

To me, blogs are just the new terminology for "a home page" from the late 1990s. However, there are a few new enablers that facilitates the so-called blog revolution. Free blogging sites have emerged, allowing people to start a blog in a few minutes. They allow publishing from a WYSIWYG web interface or some client based software, thus not requiring any HTML knowledge. For those with a bit more knowledge, there are many software packages, most of them free, that can be used to create a blog. Among them are WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal. There are also blog search engines too, such as Technorati.

Much has been written about the blog revolution where every person with an internet connection is a media source, often touted to be a rival to main stream media.

Here is an example of how one person can make a difference using determination, time, and the internet.Cory Horner, of Kamloops, British Columbia is an unemployed 24 year old electrical engineer. He is also a computer wiz. He undertook the daunting task of summarizing and tabulating the data from the records of Parliament proceedings.The result is a web site that summarizes how each member of parliament (MP) voted on every single vote. Also, how many times they are absent on votes, how many words they spoke and how many bills they introduced. The results are on the How'd They Vote web site.

Yesterday, I had an interesting and moving encounter with street kids in Alexandria, Egypt.

Street Kids Around the World

This topic and many like it can cause over-sensitive Egyptians to be offended. I should make it clear that it is not my intention to offend anyone, but rather document a problem that exists. I should also mention that the problem exists in most countries on the world. Their problem and plight has been publicized for only a few countries though, Brazil being the most covered in international media, followed by Haiti. Even Canada has some street teens (not really kids though) that have been on TV documentaries a few times.

In Brazil, some members of the police force have been targeting street kids with extra judicial killings.

Street Kids in Alexandria, Egypt

Back to Alexandria: this is not the first time I have seen street kids. About a decade of more ago, I saw a bunch of really young ones (10 or less) sleeping at tram stations. They were smoking cigarette butts they collect of the streets, discarded by others. When I talked to one of them saying that he should not be smoking, he pointed to my daughter, who was just a few years old, and said : "She also smokes cigarettes!"