I think that Drupal as a community is now at a crossroads.

Having been at the Drupal Conference in Vancouver from February 7th to  9th, I was overwhelmed by what was happening. There are too many people in attendance, and talking about all sorts of things. Two consulting companies had a whole contingent each in attendance. These are Trellon and CivicActions.

So Far So Good

So far, Drupal's core has been contributed to by volunteers, with just Dries Buytaert and Steven Wittens as committers of patches to core. There is no influence from large shops or corporations.

Language is a complex thing, and is one of the things that make humans human. You may have seen this in your inbox:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rest can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The CBC web site has background information on many topic. It is often concise and informative.

Here is an article on the various kinds of H2O below zero that we Canadians get here.

Resource 

• CBC: Forces of Nature: Snow. 

Some time ago, an anonymous visitor wrote a comment on an article I wrote. In response, I wrote a comment listing some contemorary and recent influential and rich non-Muslims in Muslim majority countries. This is now its own article. Here are some example from recent times:

• Boutros Ghali, Coptic Christian Prime Minister of Egypt.
• Boutros Boutros Ghali, his grandson, Coptic Christian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Secretary General of the United Nations.
• Youssef Boutros Ghali, Coptic Christian present Minister of Finance in Egypt.
• Kamal Stino, Coptic Christian Vice Prime Minister of Egypt.
• Onsi Sawiris, Coptic Christian, and the richest man in Egypt. His family has been rich for some time.
• Rami Lakah, another rich Egyptian Roman Catholic businessman.
  

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has a very telling article on the spyware and adware industries, and the botnets that are setup to serve them by shady individuals and operations.

The article has an interview of a 21 year old high school dropout who goes by the name of 0x80 who runs a botnet, and 180 Solutions, a company that distributes its pop ads by spyware/adware that is installed by the likes of 0x80.

Although these are bad uses of a botnet, akin to using it to send spam, they are not the worst. Other botnets are used for phishing, the practice of tricking users into giving the credentials for their bank, Paypal or eBay accounts, or demanding a payment lest a denial of service attack be launched on a site.

Here are some notes from the Drupal Conference held as part of the OSCMS Summit in Vancouver British Columbia from February 7 to 9, 2006.

It was a gruelling trip for me, leaving home at 5:30 am to catch a 7:30 am flight to Vancouver. I missed the morning sessions of the first day because of that. Coming back, I took the red eye at 11 pm, arriving 6:45 am Friday.

I am not one who cares for Valentine's Day, or any of the other consumerism driven celebration. However, I got a nice surprise a few days ago, that is worth writing on: Valentine for Geeks.Alexandra Samuel, Aaron Pettigrew and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal sent me a small present. It was a typical Valentine present with sweets in it, and a card.What is interesting, is the custom nature of the larger sweets, and what was written on them.

Oracle Corporation has been on a shopping spree.

In 18 months they are spending $18 billion, including many open source companies.

First, it was InnoBase, the company that makes the InnoDB for the MySQL database. Then rumor has it that SleepyCat will follow, which makes the Berkley Database Base. Following that is Zend, maker of the PHP accelerator, and the PHP development environment, Zend Studio. Finally, it is JBoss, a Java application server.

The first two worry me the most. Although the source code of both products is available, the proprietary license for each allows MySQL AB, the company that makes MySQL, to offer non-free versions with suitable licensing for clients who need it.

In September 2005, The  Jyllands-Posten right wing conservative newspaper publish 12 cartoons, including some of Prophet Muhammad. These images are deeply offensive to Muslims, since most of them portrayed him as being the cause of terrorism or violence.

The Cartoons

While some of the images are fairly neutral, some are indeed very offensive. The most offensive images are:

• Showing him as the typical Hollywood evil Arab with menacing features, with his turban as a bomb about to explode.
• Showing him as a man who has a halo that is also two horns, associating Muhammad as a devil or as Satan.
• Showing him as a bushy browed, unruly beard and with two veiled woman (implying polygamy). This also has the stereotypical menacing evil Arab look, and holding a scimitar.
• Showing him at the gates of heaven telling incoming suicide bombers "Stop! Stop! We ran out of virgins".

These images are very offensive to a Muslim, since they mock a person held in high regard and central to the religion. They are more offensive since they directly associate contemporary terrorism and violence with the prophet himself, saying indirectly that  he is main cause of Muslims being uncivilized savages, barbarians, ...etc. rather than attributing terrorism to its real root causes.
 
The Jyllands-Posten newspaper insisted that it is a Danish tradition to lampoon religious figures, and that they would do that to any religion, despite recent revelations that they refused to publish cartoons of Jesus.

By now, everyone has read about the sinking of the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 in the Red Sea, 60 miles away from the port of Safaga.Reuters today had an article on the aftermath of events, and in it was this quote: 

The disaster follows a string of fatal road accidents in recent weeks, a theatre fire last year which killed 46 people and an airline crash in 2004.The ferry disaster has fuelled criticism that Egyptian safety regulations are haphazardly enforced and that not enough has been done to educate the public about the need for safety. "People have developed a culture of playing hide and seek with the authorities when it comes to safety," said Mohamed al-Sayed Said, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.