In the last year and a half, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi has captured a huge mind share of mainstream news media. In this article, I try to gather some info on him to put him in perspective.

A few days ago, Drupal.org server went down, including the forums, the mailing lists, and the CVS repository. Two days passed before a message appeared on the main page asking for 3,000$ in donations to buy a new server. It turns out that for years they were hosted on a shared server that did not keep up with the growth. Last month it did serve 3 million pages, and 100 Gb of bandwidth.When I saw this message it was a few hours old, and asking for money in Euros. About 700$ or so were raised. I donated 80 Euros (about 100$US). After 7 hours, it switched to dollars, and 1,897$ were donated by 56 people.

One favorite family myth on my father's side is that El Sakakra, the village where they are from, has a lot of people who are descendants of Omar ibn al-Khattab عمر بن الخطاب who was the second Caliph after the prophet.

Let us see what the references say on this topic ...

Al-Maqrizi's المقريزي in Al-Bayan wa Al-I'rab الببان و الاعراب quotes one nassabah (genealogy expert) saying:

I have a client who uses DreamHost for their Drupal powered web site. They are happy with their service overall, and intend to stay with them. The client is on Drupal 4.6. Although this article focuses on Drupal, much of it applies to about any PHP application you use.

One issue surfaced a short while ago, where randomly, where a string like ?PHPSESSID= would appear in the URLs while users are browsing, like http://example.com/node?PHPSESSID=7dd1d5d1471fa8be2fea8f163cce3257.

Every so often, a new term takes new dimensions larger than the actual meaning and content of that term.
One such term in recent years is "blogging" or writing regularly to a blog or weblog (wikipedia).

What is blogging?

To me, blogs are just the new terminology for "a home page" from the late 1990s. However, there are a few new enablers that facilitates the so-called blog revolution. Free blogging sites have emerged, allowing people to start a blog in a few minutes. They allow publishing from a WYSIWYG web interface or some client based software, thus not requiring any HTML knowledge. For those with a bit more knowledge, there are many software packages, most of them free, that can be used to create a blog. Among them are WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal. There are also blog search engines too, such as Technorati.

Much has been written about the blog revolution where every person with an internet connection is a media source, often touted to be a rival to main stream media.

Here is an example of how one person can make a difference using determination, time, and the internet.Cory Horner, of Kamloops, British Columbia is an unemployed 24 year old electrical engineer. He is also a computer wiz. He undertook the daunting task of summarizing and tabulating the data from the records of Parliament proceedings.The result is a web site that summarizes how each member of parliament (MP) voted on every single vote. Also, how many times they are absent on votes, how many words they spoke and how many bills they introduced. The results are on the How'd They Vote web site.

Yesterday, I had an interesting and moving encounter with street kids in Alexandria, Egypt.

Street Kids Around the World

This topic and many like it can cause over-sensitive Egyptians to be offended. I should make it clear that it is not my intention to offend anyone, but rather document a problem that exists. I should also mention that the problem exists in most countries on the world. Their problem and plight has been publicized for only a few countries though, Brazil being the most covered in international media, followed by Haiti. Even Canada has some street teens (not really kids though) that have been on TV documentaries a few times.

In Brazil, some members of the police force have been targeting street kids with extra judicial killings.

Street Kids in Alexandria, Egypt

Back to Alexandria: this is not the first time I have seen street kids. About a decade of more ago, I saw a bunch of really young ones (10 or less) sleeping at tram stations. They were smoking cigarette butts they collect of the streets, discarded by others. When I talked to one of them saying that he should not be smoking, he pointed to my daughter, who was just a few years old, and said : "She also smokes cigarettes!"

I've written a new Drupal module to allow users to vote on various types of node, as defined by the site admin.The votes are registered, and an overall average score is displayed, as well as the number of votes for that node. Sidebar blocks can be configured to show the top rated nodes, most voted for node, as well as most voting users.An extended version is available that allows voting for multiple criteria for each node, and not just one vote. More information on the Node Vote project page. 

This is a new Drupal module that I wrote recently for a client.

It allows the site admin to define the number of points a user gets upon taking certain actions, such as posting a page, commenting on a page, posting an image, ...etc.

See the full details on the User Points project page.

After upgrading from Mandrake Linux 10.0 to Mandriva Linux LE 2005 10.2, I found out that there is a serious issue with either Mandriva or with kernel 2.6.11.

This article describes the issues faced upon upgrade, adn how to work around them.