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:
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
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.
On servers, and to some extent desktops, it used to be a common geek sport to brag about uptime.
Now, on a Linux laptop, I am getting 5 weeks of uptime, as per the commands here:
# who -b
system boot 2007-12-21 15:22
# date
Sun Jan 27 01:26:17 EST 2008
While this is true, it is due to the fact that I put the laptop to hibernate every day, and do not reboot it that often.
Still looks cool though ...
Two recent modules by Jose Reyero seem to be a very promising development for Drupal.
They are Messaging and Notifications.
For example, the new hook_watchdog() can definitely benefit from these modules, using them as a mechanism for delivering critical alerts for example.
Another example, is using this as a message queing facility a la IBM MQS.
Various little bits of information ...
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