If you love Open Source, and happen to be close by, Ontario Linux Fest is being held on October 13, 2007.

Hurry up and register before Wednesday to pay a lower fee than at the door.

I will be presenting on Performance tuning and optimization for large web sites, using Drupal as a popular LAMP application. According to the schedule, this is on 15:30 in Hall C.

Several indicators of a strong economy are causing the rise Canadian dollar.

Fuel prices

Something strange has been happening to gasoline prices. For the first two weeks of September, it only fluctuated between 96 and 98 cents per litre, despite crude oil prices exceeding $80 per barrel and only a few dollars from the all time record of $84. Moreover, the price was identical in all stations around the city.

This last week, the price fell to as low as 92.5.

This is all good news, but why was gasoline 130 cents when Hurricane Katerina hit?

Classical 96.3 FM is a Toronto based radio station dedicated to classical music.

They recently switched to Drupal 5.2 after being on a proprietary platform for a long time.

The site looks good aesthetically. 

Hope those who did can present it at a future Toronto Drupal User Group meeting. 

Two recent corporate news items caught my attention: the trend of taking large corporations from public to private ownership.

The first is Chrysler, whose parent Daimler Chrysler is selling a majority stake in to to Cerberus for $7.4 billion. The second is BCE (Bell Canada's parent company) who will be a private company for a $51.7 billion deal.

I know that youth in Saudi Arabia do the usual crazy things like racing cars at high speed, ...etc.

However, I never thought that I would see such a video of a reckless act.

Sounds like fun, but extremely dangerous!

US President Bush's library burned down yesterday.

Both of his books were destroyed.

The real tragedy is he has not finish coloring them!

An oft-repeated cliche is how Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler in 1938 in the Munich conference. By doing so, Chamberlain caused Czecksolvakia to be swallowed by the Nazis, and World War II ensued.

Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times writes about how this repeated mantra in today's politics is the wrong lesson learned, and details several cases from recent history of how this is indeed not the case, and that it can cause more harm to "be tough".

Although Dilbert is a US cartoon strip, and this refers to "President", it applies so well for Dalton McGuinty.

After breaking many election promises by raising taxes, he justified that as "leadership".

Statistics Canada released a report on 2004 income of Canadians, and if you make $89,000, you are among the top 5% earners in Canada, numbering 1.2 million.

These are 75% male, mostly aged 45 to 64, and married.

Compared to the US, one would need to make $165,000 to be among the top 5% there.

What is surprising is that the top 0.01% made $2.8 million each, a third of which were in the effective tax rate of 40%. Some paid as little as 10% in taxes, and 100 of those top 0.01% paid no taxes at all, due to tax deductions such as business losses and gifts to the Crown