Two presidential candidates in Egypt's upcoming elections have withdrawn from the race. Nawal el Saadawi withdrew her candidacy a few  days a go, though I doubt that she would get much votes, being on the fringe as far as most Egyptians are concerned. A few days later, Saad Eddin Ibrahim also withdrew from the elections, and also said he is boycotting the election, calling it a "farcical electoral process". He said that some people outside have been deceived by the recent cosmetic and token changes, and that the new election laws effectively prevents independant candidates from running.

Ali Abdullah Saleh has been president of Yemen for 27 years. On Sunday July 17, 2005, he announced that he will not seek re-election next year.

This move is unprecedented in the Arab world, where no head of state leaves office voluntarily, whether they are monarchs or so-called presidents.

Here is another Nigerian 419 Advance Fee Fraud Scam that uses a Christian theme.

Any rational person knows that a certain symptom has to be analyzed before its real cause can be diagnosed, and that a correct diagnosis is necessary before the symptom/problem can be treated or cured. Terrorism is no different. If one remembers the first few weeks after the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks, there was a lot of discussions in mainstream media about why they hate us and how America's foreign policy played a major role in that hatred. However, as you also may remember, the discussion quickly shifted into belligerent jingoism where Americans were made to believe that they are hated because of democracy and freedom, thus justifying the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq.

V for Vendetta is a graphic comic book by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. It explores how oppression causes liberation and resistance movement to develop, and often the latter commit atrocities and abhorrent acts in the name of good causes.The hero, the enigmatic masked V spearheads a ruthless resistance movement that uses terrorist tactics. He takes under his wing a young woman that he previously saved. She begins to question the tactics used. Tagline: "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." As I discuss in another article, the comic book shows that often moral ambiguity and rationalization of atrocities are more prevalent than most people want to think, and that there is a fine line between resistance and terrorism. 

By now the identities of the July 7, 2005 London suicide bombers are known from effects they left on the scene, and possibly DNA testing.

Britain seems to be in shock that they are British citizens and not foreigners. An article tries to probe how Britian's multiculturalism fits (or conflicts) with all this, and probes why there are angry young Muslims there. Partially the problem has to do with how some Muslims struggle to fit in within a Western society, how they may be alienated by racism they experience, as well as how angry they are at images of Muslim troubles worldwide, from Kashmir to Palestine to Bosnia.

Recently, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has an overall positive article urging others not to see Muslims as suspects after every terrorist attacks. He states:

"The West will do it in a rough, crude way -- by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent."

However, as usual with Friedman's articles, he has some valid points, mixed with some dubious claims or faulty conclusions. For example, he claims that Muslims do not denounce terrorism enough, and cleric are silent against it.

A few weeks back, a client was facing a severe problem: their database disk space consumption was steadily going up for no apparent reason. I was called in to help, and provided with the hosting control panel password as well as the Drupal admin password.

Investigation and Findings 

Upon investigation, I found out two things quickly:

• They were using an old Drupal version based on CivicSpace. It was a 4.4 or earlier version.
• The cache was growing very fast. For such a relatively small site, cache was 184 MB alone! Larger than the content of anything else on the side (including comments, node, and accesslog).

When I emptied the cache table, it started to grow again almost immediately.

As someone who is has been living away from Egypt for years, I forgot how arduous it is getting simple things done, such as renewing a driver license. I did not plan on getting it renewed during this vacation, but when I arrived and took a look at it, it was about to expire in a month. Luckily, it is valid for 10 years, and hence the need to go for renewal is less frequent than the 5 years of Ontario.I had forgotten the sheer amount of bureaucracy required when interacting with government agencies for any type of document to be issued. Here are the steps that are needed to get a driver license renewed. I don't even want to think of what would have happened if this one had expired and I needed a new one with a test and all.

On 21 July 2004 on PBS, there was a two hour program about Zheng He. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch in the service of the Ming Emperor of China. Zheng He commissioned, built and commanded a Chinese Imperial fleet that sailed through the Strait of Malacca, and into the Indian Ocean to Calicut, possibly East Africa, and other countries.

They also reviewed Gavin Menzies proposal that Zheng He sailed all the way to America, and even established colonies there, as told in his book, 1421: the Year China Discovered the World, and on his 1421.tv web site.