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.

The Red Cross describes civilian life in Iraq as "unbearable and unacceptable", and it is an "ever-worsening humanitarian crisis".From this CBC article.

A 15 year old teen, Cody Webb, spent 12 days in juvenile detention, because of a mixup caused by the earlier than usual change in day light savings time. Comments and discussion on Slashdot.

While viewing CVS messages on Drupal's web site, I noticed that my name is up there.This is the first time I noticed my name being on the list. I am not sure if this means "badge of honor" or "addiction and obsession".

A new GPL licensed transactional engine for MySQL is now available.

It is called PrimeBase XT (pbxt). It provides all the benefits of transactional engines such as InnoDB. This includes referential integrity (RI) and multiversion concurrency control (MVCC).

The benchmarks are good for this engine.

Traditionally web hosting was done on shared hosts.

Overview

Drupal has a module called watchdog that logs all messages to a database table. The module is currently mandatory, and hence writing to the table cannot be easily removed without hacking core. This can be a problem on sites with heavy traffic where the database is loaded with more logging unecessarily.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by someone who got scammed. He was conned out of $750 already, and I advised him not to send any more money.The fact that he got scammed made me realize that this scam works, and that is why we all get so many version of it. It also made me sad for the poor sap who got swindled out of his money.However, the following email made my day.