Mainstream media is finally covering money-mule scams disguised as a work at home offers.

Cyber crime comes in many forms, whether it is phishing, 419 Nigerian scams, fraudulent cheques or money order scams, and much more. In all cases, money changes hand, and it needs to be funnelled back to the scammers in a way that will hide its origins.

To this end, the scammers recruit often unsuspecting people who are a bit naive, unscrupulous and often greedy. The offer normally comes in the form of someone being an agent for a company, collecting payments and sending them.

Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, announced Maria, a replacement engine for MyISAM with many new features. 

The blog post by Monty has a detailed FAQ. Briefly, Maria aims for 2.0 to have many proper database features, such as:

• ACID
• Commit/Rollback
• Concurrent selects (via MVCC)
• Row locking
• Group commit

It also wants to be the default non-transactional as well as transactional engine of MySQL.

A recent paper titled Engineers of Jihad by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog of Oxford University finds that militants often have university degrees, more frequently in engineering and medicine. The Atlantic picked this news up by saying that "the stereotype of the poverty-stricken terrorist has been dispelled by
studies showing that militancy and high levels of education go hand in

A friend invited me to NotchUp today. It is a professional networking site similar to LinkedIn but claims that companies would pay to interview you.

I noticed the string q=user/password revealing its pedigree as a Drupal site, and decided to signup up.

Palestinian political leader and activist George Habash died yesterday. The interesting part is that Habash was part of the 60s-70s Palestinian resistance movements that employed terror tactics trying to draw attention to the Palestinian cause.

On servers, and to some extent desktops, it used to be a common geek sport to brag about uptime.

Now, on a Linux laptop, I am getting 5 weeks of uptime, as per the commands here: 

# who -b
system boot 2007-12-21 15:22
# date
Sun Jan 27 01:26:17 EST 2008

While this is true, it is due to the fact that I put the laptop to hibernate every day, and do not reboot it that often.

Still looks cool though ... 

Two recent modules by Jose Reyero seem to be a very promising development for Drupal.

They are Messaging and Notifications. 

For example, the new hook_watchdog() can definitely benefit from these modules, using them as a mechanism for delivering critical alerts for example.

Another example, is using this as a message queing facility a la IBM MQS. 

DrupalCon Boston 2008 is scheduled for March 3 to March 6, with job fair on the 3rd, and a code sprint on March 7.

I have proposed several sessions, they are:

For the last two years, I have been running a Xen based VPS which has Ubuntu server on it. Up to last week, it was running Feisty Fawn (7.04), and it was time to upgrade it to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), the latest Ubuntu version.

The upgrade had some complications, so I am documenting them here in case someone has the same problem.

Procedure for upgrade

On Debian and earlier versions of Ubuntu, the procedure for upgrading consisted of entering the commands:

Prior to European arrival to North Americam wild Turkey was quite common in Eastern North America. As settlement caused habitat loss, combined with hunting of the birds, wild Turkey became extinct in Southern Ontario by the early 1900s.