Last month, there were clashes between Copts and Muslims in Alexandria, Egypt. It started when someone leaked a CD of a theatrical play performed inside a church said to be disdainful of Islam. Three were killed in the clashes. The government was quick to blame a conspiracy by "external entities", or the religious parties (Muslim Brotherhood), for the soon to be held parliamentary elections. The problem is that someone to blame is always sought, whether internal or external.

The World Summit on Information Society has started in Tunisia.Watching Tunisia's Satellite TV on Telstar5, coverage is almost exclusive on this event. No wonder since it is good publicity for the country and tourism. I did some consulting work for telecentre.org, who also have a dedicated web site for WSIS. The official beta launch for Telecentre will be at the summit on Thursday.

I have been use a Dell Optiplex GX270 at work for almost 2 years now. This has been a very stable machine, powered on 24x7.

Last week, the machine just shut itself off by itself. After powering it on, the colors on the monitor were off (no greens nor yellows). I notice that if you wiggle the monitor cable the colors will change, although the green/yellow will never reappear. The machine has an nVidia video card with DVI output, and a connector for DVI to VGA.

After calling Dell, they said they are going to send the video card and "cable". Overnight, the machine powered itself again. And then again every night afterwards. Then it would only stay powered to the login screen only, then power off.

Here is another scam example. It is not a classic 419 scam, but still an advance fee fraud scheme.It says that I won the lottery. Thing is, I never bought a ticket? How can I win.

From:  The director of the Prize Award Department Reference number: EG/38807886091/05 Batch number: 340/1608/RDL Att: The Owner of this Email Address Re: Award Notification Of Final Notice We are pleased to inform you of the release on the 10th of Nov 2005 of the result of the GRAPHICS FORTUNE LOTTO brits sweepstakes lottery International promotion UK programmes held on the 30th of October Your email address attached to the ticket number 033-1146993-750 with serial number 13-15-16-21-34-36, which consequently won the lottery in the 2nd category. You have therefore been awarded the lump sum of £1.5 million(One Million Five Hundred Thousand British Pounds Sterling) in cash credited to file number EG/38807886091/05.This is from the total cash prize off £150,000,000,00(One Hundred And Fifty Million British Pounds Sterling) which is being shared among ten international lucky winners in this categ ory! Your funds are deposited with a security company, which will be insured in your name once you contact us. Due to a mix up of some names and numbers, we strongly recommend that you keep this award a top secret from the public notice until your claims have been processed and the money remitted to your account.This is a part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwanted scams of this program by other participants. All participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from 25,000 email addresses from  all over the world as a part of our international promotional program, which we conduct twice annually. We hope that with a part of your prize, you will take part in our end of year high stake 3bn lottery. To avoid fraud and scams, and to begin your claim, please contact only your assigned agent, Mr James Ink; foreign service manager of GRAPHICS LOTTERY ORG via email on graphics-lottery@mail.com for processing and remittance of your money to a designated account of your choice. All prize money must be claimed not later than 14days from the date of this notice, as after this date, all funds will be returned to GRAPHICS-LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL as unclaimed. In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please quote your reference and batch number in every correspondence with us, or your agent. Furthermore, if you have changed your email address, do contact your agent, notifying him of the change. Congratulations once more for and on behalf of all members of my staff and thank you for being a part of our promotions program. Thanks Mr James Ink Tel: 0044 703 184 8477 International:+44 703 184 8477 Fax:0044-20-7900-3621 Email:graphics-lottery@mail.com Email:claims_agent@post.com For Further Assistant please call your international directory in your country (GRAPHICS FORTUNE LOTTO)

Here is a new module that allows a web site  admin to track external clicks, such as ad campaigns and links in a newsletters. The idea is to pass external sites a special link, and the module will keep track of when this link is clicked. It keeps daily, weekly and total statistics per node, as well in groups.Download the click module. 

This module is an Extended Tracker module for Drupal. It has all the functions of the core tracker module  (the module  that provides the "recent posts" menu in the navigation block), and adds a few features:

• Ability to restrict the listing to certain taxonomy terms.
• Ability to list node scores (as assigned by the nodevote module)
• Ability to sort on any column (title, author, score, number of comments, last post date, ...etc.)
• Ability to change the number of nodes per page displayed.

The taxonomy feature works well in some themes (e.g. CivicSpace) but not others (Bluemarine). See  the README file that comes with the package for more details.

If one takes a few steps back, and tries to take an objective and pragmatic look at Terrorism, free from the rhetoric of mass media and think tanks with an agenda, we find that its true magnitude is not as large as it feels.For example, consider the following:

• On September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, around 3,000 people were killed..
• On March 11, 2004 in Madrid, Spain, 191 people were killed.
• On July 7, 2005 in London UK, about 50 people were killed by two bombing attacks.

Compare the above with the casualties of USA and Britain's invasions of Afghanistan (5,000) and Iraq (up to 100,000), the above is statistically insignificant. The above figure pales in comparison with "normal" crimes such as gun fatalities in the USA (16,000 per year), or car accident fatalities. If we venture into fatalities caused by less sensational means, such as poverty, unhealthy situations, terrorism becomes more insignificant.