Here is a humorous bit on the idiosyncracies of the English language.

What many people do not realize, is that language and alphabets are two different things. A language is mainly a spoken thing, while an alphabet is a way of approximating this spoken voices on paper (or stone, or keyboard).

English is notorious in being non-phonetic, and hence there has always been calls to reform/simplify the way it is spelled.

For example, Yahoo had an article on efforts for pushing simplified spelling, and how they persist.

This idea is not new of course. In 1779, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new phonetic spelling system. You can see the full details on that system in this article. Noah Webster proposed the same in 1789.

Two new reports have been added to the adsense module, in addition to the detailed report of each click, IP address/host, date/time and page.They are the top pages, which shows pages generating the most clicks, and another report for the number of clicks per day.

The top pages report will have surprises for you I am sure.

And according to June statistics, the adsense module for 4.7 has been downloaded 1,441 times, ahead of feedback 4.7 with 1,082 times.

I often get email mistking my web site for others. One of those is the EGC where I used to go to school as a kid, and have a few pages on it. Here is another instance of mistaking my web site for the EGC web site. Names withheld of course. 

Dear Mrs. Enaam [Eldafraway, headmistress],               I wrote to you on the first of June06 , about sending mydaughter [...] all document specially her 'BirthdayCertificat', and I have forward £10-00 Egyptian £ to pay for thecosts  that you can kindly sent all the Documents by post 'RecordedDeleviery'. Please note that I also the same time wrote to 'Alsassr[El Nassr = EBS] College', to Mr. [...], and he is kindlly have sent back allthe Documents belonging to my two Son's [...] And [...]. Please I willwait to hear from you , and sorry if I have caused any problemes?!.Yours truly[...]

Nick Wilson of Performancing.com kindly emailed me to let me know that they have installed my userpoints module recently. Performancing produces tools for bloggers so they can publish from FireFox, and also metrics for blogs. The site runs Drupal. See user points in action on their site.

Last January, Forrester asked what does corporate blogging mean? Boris of  Bryght has answered the question on his blog.  Later, Forrester  has released their report on blogging platforms, for a hefty price tag: 

• The Forrester Wave: Blogging Platforms Q2 2006 $995 for 15  pages.
• Drupal's Blogging Platform Integrates Community and Publishing $795 for 6 pages.

The price seems outrageous, but this is how Corporate IT executives  gets info, instead of researching it themselves.

From the "yet another terrorism plot" department we have today the claim that another terror plot aimed against New York's mass transit system and tunnels.After the recent Miami terror arrests, I am more skeptical than ever about these frequent claims of "foiling a terror plot" that is in the "early stages".

Ruby as a "quick and easy interpreted scripting language for object oriented development" did not really pick up until the Ruby On Rails (RoR) platform started taking off.It was only a matter of time for full-fledged Content Management Systems  (CMS) based on Ruby on Rails to emerge.Here is a list of a few I found out, still the early stages.

• RadiantCMS, licensed under the MIT License. It seems at a very early stage though, but has a small library of "third party behaviors" (modules/plugins), and templating is via special markup (check the demo).
• RailsFrog is another RoR CMS in the early stages as well. They need programmers, and Drupal's Ber Kessels is on board there.

Sarah has improved her marks in Science significantly. She went  from 70s% all the way to 93%, earning an honours on her diploma.Well done Sarah!

After spending almost a month and a half in prison, Alaa has finally been released.

Resource

• My original post on Alaa's detention, dated May 14.
• Alaa's post in solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood (in Arabic it says: "A thousand greetings to the Muslim Brotherhood"). One has to really taste what others go through to sympathize with them.
• Washington Post article on Alaa's release.