In many cultures, a small number of people pick bad names for their kids to keep them away from envy, evil eye, or demons.In Egypt, you can find some rural families calling their kids strange and offensive names, to prevent harm from coming to them. This is specially true for a family that has all its male children die in childhood, or something like that.Names such as El Shahhat الشحات (the begger), Shehata شحاتة (begging) are used. This practice is not exclusively Egyptian though.Malaysia recently introduced a set of rules to prevent such practices among its varied ethnicities:

Not all people who do wrong pay the price for their crimes.

Once recent example is Ta Mok of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, known as "The Butcher".

Ta Mok was directly responsible for the death of tens of thousands of people.

Upon his death, hundreds showed up to pay respect for a man who was responsible for many atrocities.

As the Drupal project and the community around it keep growing, interesting dynamics develop, and are interesting to watch ...

After the Vancouver DrupalCON in February 2006, there were new entrants in the fray, I wrote about the community being in crossroads.

Today, I am writing about further consolidation within the consulting arm of the community.

Just to make it clear, I am just writing observations and opinion, and I am not exposing any information that is not already public. I am not privy to any such information, so I cannot be divulging anything that I don't have in the first place.

Another shameful and un-Canadian racism incident in Canada.Jazz player Oscar Peterson is being racially taunted by a group of youth who drive by his house. Peterson was born in Montreal, and now lives in Mississauga.He is a companion of the Order of Canada, had his photo on a stamp. He is 81 years old.From his comments in the interview, it seems the slurs or taunts made threats to his family as well.

2bits was commissioned to write a watermark module for Drupal's image module.

The module basically overlays a predefined PNG over each image uploaded. Options exist to restrict the watermarking to certain images and not other (e.g. thumbnails are not watermarked, but full images are).

Several years ago, a Dutch friend told me that some Dutch have funny names.
It turns out that this is a story worth telling, possibly repeated in Algeria, with the French playing a part in both.

Steven Wittens announced that he is going to work for Bryght in Vancouver, British Columbia. Boris Mann of Bryght also blogged on this in more detail.

What do you do when a neighbor starts leeching your wireless connection?Option would normally be:

• Confront them and ask politely they not do that.
• Secure your wireless LAN and lock them out.
• Ask them to pay a share.

Well, these are not the only options.Someone found out that their neighbor does that, and they decided to turn their life upside down. Very creative and very funny ...(Via this Slashdot post, and followup story).

Java developers and enthusiasts often keep repeating how Java is scalable, and look down on how PHP is just 'scripting' that does not scale.Well, we know we have a few big sites running Drupal, which of course uses the LAMP stack. Sites like The Onion, NowPublic, OurMedia, SavannahNow and others I forgot about.But, outside of Drupal, there are really larger sites that use PHP and MySQL.Here are some of them:

• Yahoo uses PHP almost everywhere, and gets an enormous amount of traffic. Read Michael Radwin PHP at Yahoo talk.
• Flickr. Cal Henderson, the lead developer for Flickr has a workshop on scalability using PHP and MySQL. He also wrote a O'Reilly book, Building Scalable Web Site, the Flickr way, on that experience.
• Digg. A very large user contributed news site that gets 200 million page views per month. This article on Digg PHP's Scalabiliy and Performance goes into details on how Digg managed to scale.

There is also a somewhat dated article on the PHP scalability myth.

Francis Pitia is a refugee from Sudan, fleeing the civil war before peace was established there. He spent time in a refugee camp in Uganda.He came to Kitchener, Ontario.Last week, he was swarmed by bunch of white young men, and beaten to the ground. What makes this appalling is that Pitia is disabled since childhood, having one leg non-functional because of polio. He has to use a crutch to walk. Those who beat him took the crutch from him and beat him with it.He had to get stitches to his cut lip, his ribs hurt and his eyes were still blood shot.