When looking for a flower, don't miss the bird ...

Not an old wisdom or proverb, but something I just made up ...

In exploration, nature, science and even business, one must be ready for pleasant surprises.

Countless times in history, a scientist would be looking for something in their experiments, only to stumble across something completely different. The same is true in in exploration (Columbus was seeking Asia),

Similar surprises can happen in software too.

Wolfgang Ziegler (fago) is one of Google Summer of Code students for 2006, whom I am co-mentoring with Owen Barton.

Two recent polls do not give a comforting picture.The first shows that 18% of Canadians are uneasy in the presence of Muslims, compared to 5% saying the same for Jews, and 31% for born-again Christians.The second says that one quarter of Canadians see Muslims negatively, compared to 10% only for Jews and Christians.

On Sunday, a man reportedly shot and killed one person at a Seattle Jewish center, and wounded six more, while reportedly shouting: "I am an American Muslim and I am angry at Israel".His name is Naveed Haq, and is of Pakistani ancestry.What is emerging though is that Naveed had converted to Christianity and underwent baptism in December 2005. Moreover he was rarely at the mosque, despite his father being a founder.

You know something is wrong with the world, when a homeless woman who owns a dog gets a visit from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), and given instructions on how to build a dog house.

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.