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.

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.