This spring has been quite unusual weatherwise in Southern Ontario. We had two instances of freak snow storms.

Too often, people do not receive the recognition they deserve for acts they did in a timely manner. In this article I wish to write a tribute to my mother, Elham Abou Youssef إلهام أبو يوسف, in order to thank her for what she did.My mother's saga started with my father's prolonged illness and battle with chronic liver disease. This illness caused him not to be able to work in the last few years of his life. When he finally died, he left me (six years old) and my brother (two years old) in the care of my mother.Although she was in her early thirties then, she never thought of remarrying, nor to send the boys to their paternal grandfather in the rural village of El Sakakra. Instead, she went back to work in order to provide for the two young boys.

As I wrote in another article, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Spamming are two different things, yet technologically very close.

I had my own brush with Search Engine spammers on two different occasions.

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a cottage industry with many companies claiming they can help your site acheive top rank, it still means different things for different people.

For some it means just how to make your site get better ranking in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. For others, it means how to do so by shortcuts, tricks, ethically questionable methods, and other less savoury means.

Basics of Search Engine Optimization

First, we should start by seeing what Google, the current leading search engine, has to say about the topic. They clearly state what is acceptable and what is not. They also have a facts and myths page.

Google Maps is another technological innovation by Google. Sites with maps have been around for a long time, including Yahoo Maps and MapQuest, and others.

The interface to Google Maps is very clean and simple, yet very functional. You double click to center, you slide the bar to zoom in or out, and you can drag the map.

You can search on an address or a business, and get driving directions.

Recently, Google added Satellite Images to the maps as well. They also expanded to UK and British Isles.

A new approach that is gaining in popularity among web developers is using XmlHttpRequest with Javascript.

This is not a new approach since XmlHttpRequest has been around for some time. What is new is that (a) it is being widely used by Google, and (b) a new name was coined for it recently.

Here is a presentation on Google's Core Technologies, by Google Engineer Jeff Dean. You can see at the University of Washington Computer Science web site, or at UWTV.

It covers various things such as:

• Hardware (Google Clusters), and Datacenters
• Google File System (GFS)
• MapReduce
• Word clustering
• Google News

It also has a brief overview of:

There is no doubt by now that Google is one of the top technology companies of this decade.This series cover some of the technologies that Google uses, new annoucements in this area, and how it is used in creative way, whether by Google or by others.

Jose Pardo Hidalgo, of Murcia, Spain writes to me by email:

Dear Sirs, Do you know if Iberia is coming of Ibrya=Hebrew,the Hebrew land of Spain and Portugal.Ivry is a Jewish surnames, Ivrya,may pe "Ladino", for femenine.. where Iberos semitic people, Assyrian tablets say even Celts were a tribe Lost of Israel, red.haired and blue eyes,losing his identity, not lost, only identity, Judah, benjamin, dan, etc... which is your opinion?.Thanks and peace,lover and friendships,Thank you.

I write back that this does not fit with the pattern of settlement of Iberia in pre-Roman times, before the Jewish diaspora, and I include a few links, such as:

Language similarities between apparently unrelated languages is quite a prevalent phenomenon, regardless of what the underlying reasons in each case are. Here is a link that clearly shows that totally unrelated languages can have the same words for the same concepts or objects.And how likely are chance resemblances between languages? Quite likely actually. according to this statistical study on the Zompist web site.