When studying history, we often look for literature, archeology, events, and the like. Seldom do we consider food and recipes to be a topic of history.

However, there are several sites that have recipes from olden days. Some of them have a nice collection of recipes from Islamic countries, most notably Iraq and Andalusia.

These recipes go back all the way to the 10th century, when Baghdad was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate, in the Golden Age of Islam in the East. The Andalusian recipes go further into the 15th century, just before the fall of Granada.

Last year Gabor Hojtsy posted on Drupal's development mailing list about Ohloh, a site that inspects and reports Open Source software projects.

Al-Qaeda's ideologue, and second in command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri has a video tape out where he spells out the short and long term goals of Al-Qaeda.

Short term: the West

As I always thought: the goals are local to the Middle East, and does not target the West as a primary goal. Rather, he sees that Western governments are interfering with what is an internal struggle that Al-Qaeda (and other militant groups) would have won on their own against the despotic regimes in the region.

The bulk of web hosts are still on PHP4, despite PHP5 being out for years. PHP5, and specially PHP5.2, offers a lot of features that make developing in PHP far better than being held back with PHP4's feature set.

So, a bunch of activists in the Drupal community started talking to other PHP based applications to say enough is enough, and push for more adoption of PHP 5.2 by web hosts and projects alike.

Go ahead and Digg the story, and click the banner below for more information.

Sumac is a a family of plants from the genus Rhus. In some Middle Eastern countries, the drupes of Sumac are crushed and dried to yield a reddish sour coarse powder. This is used to garnish salads and dips because of its color.

What is both funny and sad is when one Iraqi blogger back in November 2003 posted a
recipe for Sumac salad. One aggravated American emailed him to say:

Yet another resource shortage in the tech industry. Companies are having trouble filling tech jobs, and offer perks to try to attract talent. Builder.au has likened that to the dot com era culture.

This CBC article takes a Canadian view of the issue, with enrolment in tech courses being flat, while graduates have no trouble getting interviews and job offers.

At first glance, this page seems like yet another blog.

However, once you start reading the text, you will find that it is incoherent, and has a lot of links to terms often associated with spam in emails (e.g. Epson photo paper, Stress, Bloating).

Moreover, the links on the sidebar are all spammy, varying from cellulite removal, hair loss, to Omega watches.

Back in university in Alexandria, a long time ago, there were several Malaysian students on scholarships.

It seems that Egypt is still a touted destination for Malaysians looking for an overseas education.

This article from The Star, Malaysia seems like a propaganda piece by the cultural attache in the Egyptian embassy there, or Sami Omara, an "Egyptian education consultant".

The mummy of Hatshepsut, the most powerful female Pharoah of Egypt has been identified from her tooth.

chx is Karoly Negyesi, who brings us the new rewritten menu system in Drupal 6.

Everyone knows that chx cannot be distracted.

Maybe if we chip in and he gets his dream Toshiba R500 laptop, he will be distracted after all. This is because the screen is a tiny 12.1".

Last time I used that size was mid 1990s.