In an earlier article, I noted the diverse backgrounds of the local candidates for the federal elections.

Today, I will describe the process of the election here in Canada, as a personal experience, mainly for my non-Canadian readers.

The process started by filing the taxes for tax year 2004 in March 2005. One of the questions is whether one would want to be on the elector list. Canada Revenue Agency sends the name and address to Election Canada.

Here is a list of web application frameworks that are written in PHP.  Some of those were inspired by Ruby On Rails, or seek to imitate it. Others are frameworks with varying goals. All are PHP based.

• CakePHP has been covered before on this web site.
• And so is PHPOnTrax.

Here is another web application framework written in PHP.

WASP is a "powerful web application framework built on PHP5". It is object oriented, and strives to be suitable for enterprise class applications with less code.

What is interesting is that  WASP uses Drupal to power its site. 

Resources

•  ONLamp article on WASP.

One of the known shortcomings of the popular site Slashdot.org is the frequent duplicate stories.A recent story I posted on research on how visitors judge a web site in 50 milliseconds later made it to Slashdot.What is funny, and sad, is that the story was posted on the 16th, then on the 17th, and on the 20th.

Dr. George Saliba of Columbia University gave a lecture at Princeton on Islamic science. A few years back, I attended a lecture he gave at the University of Waterloo, and wrote about it. I got his permission to republish some of his articles as well. I later started digging some of what he discussed, and the result was many articles on my site about Leo Africanus, Joseph Barbatus, Elmacinus, Erpenius, Rhazes, Alhazen and Ibn Khaldun.

Robin Miller is an author and columnist on technology whose writings appears regularly on Slashdot and Newsforge.His blog runs Drupal at roblimo.com. Plain vanilla BlueMarine theme look.

Some sites like to run as an outsourced service. For example, a payment service, a support ticket system, or an event registration is not something every site wants to run. As a solution, they want to pay some other specialized site for this service.Let us say that Widgets Inc wants a support ticketing system, and contracts Support Corp to do this service over the web for its clients. Support Corp's site wants users who come from Widgets Inc's site to have the same branding and look and feel as Widgets Inc's site. At the same time, Support Corp has been contracted by other companies like ACME, Sprockets, ...etc. Each company wants Support Corp's web site to look like its own web site for its own clients.

Southern Ontario has been enjoying a nice few weeks with mild weather. Not only has the snow on the ground thawed like it sometimes does in mid January, but the mild weather has spanned the good part of three or four weeks. What is unusual is that the thaw started on the first day of winter (Dec 21), before which we got three snow storms in a row very early in the season. In Mississauga last Wednesday, there was no snow on the ground to be noticed at all. Toronto is enjoying record mild temperatures.

This is both good and bad news to web site developers and theme designers.Many of us have read the phrase: "First impressions are the most lasting" on fortune cookies in Chinese restaurants, or heard it elsewhere. While it seems unfair to judge a book by its cover in a second or two, research shows that humans mentally rate web site by their looks in less than half a second, and often less than that.

Update 2006-02-01: User Referral Module has been released for 4.6. Get it from Drupal.org.A client recently commissioned a user referral module whereby an existing user of a site can refer another user and get some sort of credit for it.The module is conceptually similar to the affiliate module, but instead of a "site-to-user" model, it is a "user-to-user" model.Users in designated roles have a referral link that others can click on to register to the site. Once the new user registers, a database link is recorded as to which user referred them.