Recent media coverage of three terror attacks all point to the same repeating pattern: authorities getting notice that they will happen, but not doing something to stop them.First, you have George Tenet, the ex-CIA director, authoring a book where he says that the U.S.A. ignored clear warnings before the September 11 attacks.

NASA's Virtual Earth has many interesting images.One of them is a composite night time earth lights. Some interesting observations on this image:

• Look at the Nile as it traverses Egypt. See how dense the population is along its shores.
• The same density is on the southern coast of France, and east coast of Italy, but not to the same continuity on the West coast.

Since late November 2006, I had Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 running on my Toshiba Satellite A100-TA6. I wrote a full report on that here.

So, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Feisty 7.04, and so the adventure begins.

Intel High Definition Audio (HDA) Sound Problems

My laptop has an Intel HDA sound card.

Graham Fuller is an ex-CIA spy, and a Rand Corp. researcher who lived and worked in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen and Afghanistan. He now lives in Squamish north of Vancouver.He is the author of six books and many articles on Islam. His writing focused on Asian Islamic politics, religion and ethnicity. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and everything from The New York Times to the Christian Science Monitor.

A recent survey by WorldPublicOpinion.org in Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco and Indonesia found that a majority thinks that the USA's goal is to weaken and divide Islam.

The survey also contains responses on things like:

A while ago, I wrote about the lack of printed Drupal books, how it affects developers in countries with limited internet connectivity, and how I even entertained the idea of writing one myself.

I finally gave in and bought a GPS.

It is the Garmin StreetPilot c330. A family friend bought it and was happy with it. it was also on sale at Canadian Tire for C$329.

It comes with a quick start guide, but no manual. Not that it needs one for basic operations. The interface is very usable by anyone. Either select from categories, or enter an address, and it will take you there via voice prompts ("In 950 meters, turn left" then after a few seconds "turn left").

As I noted before, Ubuntu.com is now running Drupal.

Today, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been released, and the number of visitors to the site must have skyrocketed. 

Either the site went into throttle mode, and hence no blocks are visible, or Canonical have replaced the front page with a plain HTML page. The only thing on the main page is links to mirrors for download, and the logo (from the Drupal theme directory).

Jack Shaheen is a Christian Arab American professor of Lebanese descent.After observing how Arabs are portrayed in the media, and especially entertainment, he authored a book: Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood vilifies a people, which is also available as a documentary on DVD.You can see excerpts from it on

Lee Iacocca, a great American icon, has written a book called Where have all the leaders gone?In it, he describes the 9 C's which are qualities of leaders, Curiosity, Creativity, Communication, Character, Courage, Conviction, Charisma, Competence, Common Sense, and Crisis Leadership. For everyone he lambasts G.W Bush and Congress for shortcomings over the tenure of the current administration.