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:
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:
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.
This is old news, but I never knew about it when it came out.
A US Soldier who was on duty in Guantanamo Bay was ordered to play the role of an inmate, complete with an orange jumpsuit over his military fatigues. This was for the purpose of training.
The other soliders, who thought he was a real inmate, were supposed to extract him from under a bed.
In the process they brutally assaulted him, causing brain damage that caused him to have seizures.
He could not even utter the safe word because his breathing was constrained.
One can only imagine what real prisoners had to go through.
Hindu extremists have rioted in Mumbai. The reason: a statue of the late wife of a political leader was found vandalized. The party is called Shiv Sena, and is (unsurprisingly) right-wing, and the statue belonged to Bal Thackeray, the party's leader.The riots torched at least one bus and forced several shops to close. The sad part is that a former speaker of the Parliament, Manohar Joshi of the Shiv Sena party, has declared this act as vandalism against Hindus and Hindusim.
If one compares how the USA reacted to terrorism, and how the UK did, there are very significant differences.The population did not panic. The media did not demonize an entire religion. And despite some mistakes, the government did not make sweeping arrests.The British people took this in stride.There were also effort to diagnose the root causes, and address them, rather than the end symptom being treated as solely a security problem.Some of these initiatives are outlined in this BBC article, including:
Various little bits of information ...
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