One technology that has been getting good reviews and lots of attention laterly is Ruby On  Rails (RoR). It is a Rapid Internet Application Development framework that is  easy to use and really fast to write applications in.

One of the drawbacks is that it requires the Ruby programmng language, which although powerful, is less widespread than other languages, and hence not available at most web hosts. 

Now there is CakePHP, which is supposed to be Ruby On Rails but for PHP, the most widely deployed web development language. CakePHP follows the Model-View-Controller architecture, and  provides basic  CRUD (Create, Read,  Update, Delete) operations. Of course, it is fully object oriented, just like RoR is.

I have a new niece: Laila Baheyeldin, daughter of Omar, the newest addition to the Baheyeldin Dynasty. She joins cousins Suhaila, Sarah and Salma, as well as older brother Ahmad in being the third generation of Baheyeldins.Welcome to the dynasty ... 

Sometime ago, I wrote about Interrupting Interruptions, or how technology affects daily life.Today, the New York Times has an article in Life Hackers, about the exact same topic. Here is the Slashdot discussion.

John Brown from Texas is drilling for oil in northern Israel based on him receiving divine inspiration that there is oil  in Israel, and  that he has to drill for it to help Israel. He says that "God sent me for one purpose: to help Israel with oil".Brown and other born gain Christians believe that the Bible spells out exactly where the oil is. The often wacko right-wing WorldNetDaily has an article with a map of where the oil is based on what Brown says are the verses that pin point the location. The verses are also listed in that article.

Most of the world does not know that many of the famous actors they see in Hollywood movies or TV productions are not Americans, but rather Canadians.Names such as Keanu Reeves (The Matrix), Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix), William Shatner (Star Trek), John Candy, Dan Akroyd, and even Leslie Nielsen (Naked Gun) and Lorne Greene (Battlestar Galactica, Bonanza), are all Canadians. There was even a mockumentary (Mock Documentary) in HBO in 1985 called  The Canadian Conspiracy poking fun at the fact that lots of Canadians are in the US, and are not overtly saying they are Canadians.

What do Sikhs, Jews, Catholics and Mennonites have in common? We all know they are monotheists, what else? All of them were deprived of certain rights or privileges in Western societies because of the Muslims!

Even though this sounds bizzare, it is true.

France and the Hijab Ban

In France, a ban on the religious headscarf in schools and public workers have been enacted for sometime. Although it was worded as  a ban on overt religious symbols, it was specifically targetting young Muslim women in school.

Many countries have some form of compulsory Army service for a certain period, including Netherlands, Israel, Turkey, Egypt and others. In Egypt, service in the army was compulsory for most of the 20th century. It is restricted to males 18 years to 35 years who do have another male brother, and is physically and mentally fit. Those who study can have a temporary reprieve until they finish their study, to a maximum of 24 or so. The duration of the service varies from 1 year (plus 3 months training) for university graduates, to 3 years for those with only elementary education. Before 1952, service could be avoided if one paid a large sum of money to the government. After 1952, and in the name of equality, this practice was abolished, and every eligible person had to serve. 

In a previous article, I described how one would use flexinode to display ads anywhere on the page, and not just blocks. This can be used to achieve things like restricting ads from showing on certain pages.

This can be achieved using Drupal 4.7 regions feature, which, like flexinode, allows multiple regions for blocks to be placed in. The default regions are left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer and content.

However, blocks are always displayed with their title, which is ugly anywhere apart from the sidebars. Although CSS can be used to hide the header, this is more of a hack than the proper way of doing things.

It is very interesting how we humans acquire language as babies. Just by listening and observing, we acquire language and meaning, build vocabulary and grammar.

It was interesting to see how Salma, my baby daughter, did this.

This is not a full fledged study, but rather a collection of observations. 

Example 1: English or Arabic?

Early on, just after she turned one year, Salma started saying syllables. What we noticed is that she understood both English and Arabic words (which is to be expected, her not knowing the difference). What was amazing is that when we presented her with two terms for the same thing, one Arabic and one English, she picked the easier one to pronounce, although she knew the meaning of both words being the same.

I have written elsewhere on how and why I convered to Drupal. I still can't remember exactly how I stumbled on it though.A few days back, I noticed that Drupal user page says that I have been a member for two years already ...