Google launched Street View last week. In a nutshell, it is real images taken by vans, superimposed on Google Maps. The data is available in some select cities, such as New York, Miami, and the like.The level of detail is amazing, seeing people jogging, walking, and more.However, this is raising some privacy concerns. The level of detail is just too close for comfort. A woman has said that her cat is visible behind the window. She asked Google to take the picture down.

The authorities in the United States arrested several people in connection with an alleged terror plot to destroy New York's city JFK airport by blowing up a jet fuel supply line.Among the four accused there are people who are unlikely to be terrorists.

The Canadian dollar keeps gaining against the US dollar. It is now at 94 cents, from the historic low of 61.70 in January 2007. A stronger Canadian dollar is good for Canadians when shopping across the border, be it online or in person, or when vacationing in the USA. However, it is not good for Canada's economy as a whole.

Today I got an interesting attempt of search engine comment spam.

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.