Bill Nuti, NCR's CEO, made $16.8M in total compensation in 2007, an increase of 141% over 2006 (which was $6.8M).

In 2007, NCR closed facilities in Scotland and Canada, outsourcing some manufacturing (Solectron/Flextronics in the USA) or moving it to low cost countries (Hungary, India). Moreover, the Customer Engineers had their pay and benefits slashed severely. In 2008, there is a hiring freeze in effect, as well as coop student hiring freeze. Many employees also got a zero % increase for 2008.

As expected, the record from 1932 snowfall (245.3 cm) was broken this winter (246 cm), and winter is not even over yet.

Even the amount of snow for one day was 32 cm on Saturday, topping the previous record in Jan 22, 1966 of 30.5 cm.

The total amount of snow from Friday/Saturday was 38 cm, but with wind and drift, it was waist deep or even chest deep in many places.

I arrived in Boston in the afternoon after a fairly easy trip.

On the way from Waterloo to Pearson International Airport, Highway 401 was being repaired for potholes and the van driver took alternative backroads. This was a very scenic route with parts of the Niagara Escarpment, farms with cattle outside, and roads less traveled.

An American exchange student from Maine stayed with Coptic Christian family in Alexandria, Egypt.

He weighed 155 pounds upon arrival, and returned only at 97 pounds.

He claims that he was not given enough portions to eat, and that the Christian Coptic mandate to fast 200 days a year (with no animal protein) made it happen.

His Egyptian host family denies the allegations. Shaker Hanna says that it is "a lie", with the boy's parents planning to recover some of the costs of his stay.

Canonical has launched another Drupal site: Ubuntu Brainstorm.

The site is meant as a digg-like tool for the community to suggest features for Ubuntu's Linux distribution, and vote on ideas others have submitted.

The site runs some custom modules (qapoll, qawebsite), on top of Drupal 5.

Most of the computers in our house run Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10. This is of course the KDE desktop version of the popular and capable Ubuntu distro.

Today, Kopete, the multiprotocol instant messaging client stopped working. It would not even launch. When I rebooted, KDE's login did not complete either.

It was stuck at "Initializing system services ..." for several seconds, then the login would display again.

Video driver

Initially, I thought that this problem had to do with the video card, after seeing this in the /var/log/kdm.log:

A client who over grew the capacity of their Dual Opteron server planned on moving their site to a 2X Quad Xeon machine.

One of the things we use on the server is Munin for resource utilization and statistics. It is a server side tool that can monitor CPU, Memory, network, Apache, MySQL and much more. It has a web based interface that generates graphs from RRD Tool files.

The quote says it all:

... an open-source (i.e. free) content management system that’s flexible and feature-packed. Over the last couple of years or so, it’s taken off as the go-to platform to run websites that require a lot of community and content management features. From personal blogs and brochure sites, to fully-featured social networking sites, portals, news sites, and e-commerce websites, Drupal has proven itself as the most robust platform currently available in the content management system market.

Yahoo has an article on how apostrophes and other non-English punctuation in people's names cause a lot of trouble, specially when computers are involved.

It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make
it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your
college exams.

The Site in a Day competition by Full Code Press, was held in August 2007. Team Australia chose Drupal, while the New Zealanders chose custom coding.

In the aftermath, SitePoint's blogs had an interesting discussion.