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 ...

As the author of the Drupal adsense module, I often get queries on how to display ads in unusual ways.

Normally ads can be done using one of two ways:

Block Ads

if the ads are in blocks, then you just add  PHP blocks with the call to the adsense_display() function call. Ads in blocks can be restricted to certain pages, for example, you do not want them to display in node/*/edit and node/add/* pages because the Javascript based WYSIWYG editor you use is messed up by Google's Adsense code.

One of Drupal's features is that it allows database prefixes, so people can host more than one site in a single database, or share the database with other application programs.

As a site grows, people find the need to separate those sites into their own databases, making the prefix unnecessary.

To do that, the following steps are needed:

Backup the existing database

In order to start this process, you have to perform a dump of the database. This is needed for two purposes, one is to have a backup of all your data, and the second is to be able to copy it to the other database, which may be on another host altogether.

Sometime back, I posted an article about a scam email that I got. Basically, it was from someone who offered to buy something from me. It turns out that they offer to send more money than the item is worth, provided you wire the difference back to them. The cashier cheque turns out to be forged, and you lose money in the deal. This time, it is from someone who wants to buy Land Rover Turbochargers in Uganda! I don't own nor sell Land Rover, nor any other 4x4 vehicle. However, my brother Omar has had successive Land Rovers and uses them for desert safaris in Egypt, for example, hare hunting or Rayyan Valley. As a matter of fact, he called me yesterday from Siwa where he was offroading with some friends.

I ran across two Canadian educational web site, closely related.CASCA Education has nice background articles on Astronomy, specially in Canadian history, as well as modern famous Canadian astronomers. SpaceNow focuses on Space and has articles ranging from the Space Elevator to Human Mars Exploration.

Oil has been the main source of fuel for machinery in the 20th century. We can argue that it is one of the pillars of contemporary human civilization, powering everything from cars, factories, airplanes, to war tanks, house heating and barbeques. In short, we take it for granted.

Years ago, I recall reading a Scientific American article, The End of Cheap Oil, in March 1998 by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere. In that article, the authors predicted a sharp rise in prices due to many factors, the most important of which is producing countries overestimating their reserves to get long term credit from banks. They predict that the shortage is not 50 years away, but rather as near as 10 years away (approx. 2010 or so).