In a poll of 1,000 Americans, it was revealed that only 4% correctly identified Canada as the largest foreign oil supplier.

Most Americans think that most of their oil comes from the Middle East countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran), and also naively blame their own gasoline consumption as "funding terrorism".

The latter never made sense to me, for many reasons. Now it is proven to be double false, since their largest supplier is Canada and not Middle Eastern countries.

I needed to update by development server, which is also a home network server, which has Samba, NFS, autofs, NIS as well as the usual LAMP stack, and CVS, subversion, and other tools.

The move was to be  synchronized with my moving from Mandriva to Ubuntu server as well.

Pentium 4 with ASUS P4S8X-MX

Initially, I bought a nice used Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, but it it was unstable and kept rebooting under load. Later, I found out that  the  CPU was defective  and  I am waiting for Intel to send me a replacement. The machine is also based on ASUS P4S8X-MX, which has no lm-sensors support, so CPU and motherboard temperatures and fan speed cannot be monitored on Linux.

We just released a new version of the Drupal Adsense module to the repository.

What is common between London, Toronto and Miami? If we are to trust various government agencies, the three had terror acts committed or planned by young youth who were born and raised.

The London case seem to be very plausible in that who the authorities claim to be the suicide bombers are indeed those who executed the operation. They are young British born Muslims.

Although I am a bit skeptical on the Toronto and the Miami cases, it is too early to reach a conclusion.

Seven black people have been arrested in a poor area in Miami, Florida yesterday. The plot allegedly invovled bombing the Sears tower in Chicago, as well as FBI offices in Miami and elsewhere. An FBI agent posing as an Al-Qaeda operative gave them money, supplies and weapons. You can read the full indictment.

Are they Muslims?

The accused are mostly of Haitian descent. Although reports initially said they are Muslims, it later became obvious that this is not the case. They are members of something called the "Seas of David". Most of the suspects have non-Muslim nicknames which are more Biblical, e.g. Levi, although others were said to have names like "Brother Sunni". The one called "Brother Levi" is also called Brother Levi-El", the -El suffix being a Moorish Science Temple mark from Noble Drew Ali.

The Calgary Sun had an article by Licia Corbella, where her premise is that Multiculturalism threatens Canada.

She quotes one Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar of  Mount Royal College in Calgary, whom she describes as a "devout Muslim" and "Pakistani-born". He says: "Multiculturalism has been bad for unity in Canada. It ghettoizes people, makes them believe, wrongly, that isolating themselves and not adapting to their new society is OK". Kanwar justified alleged mistreatment in prison because "for accused terrorists, this should be expected". Kanwar also advocates that covering one's face should be illegal.

The Canadian Press is reporting on a study by a Readers' Digest survey. In this study, 35 cities around the world have undercover reporters test the population at large for how polite or courteous they are.Toronto came out #3 with 70% of people taking a moment to do the courteous thing. Only New York (80%) and Zurich (77%) are ahead of Toronto.  Elsewhere in Canada, Montreal ranked as #21. The lowest three were Kuala Lumpur, Bucharest, and Mumbai coming out last.The undercover tester for Toronto said that Torontonians "are the only people in the world that will apologize when somebody else bumps into them".

Mainstream media and neo-cons in the USA continuously paint a rosy picture of post-Saddam Iraq, to retroactively justify the invasion.Despite that, a leaked memo from the US Embassy in Iraq shows a very different picture.Here is the memo itself, and the article in the Washington Post on it. BBC also has coverage. 

Update: this article is for Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06). If you are using later versions, or other Linux distributions, then visit the following links:

• Installing PHP APC on GNU/Linux Gusty Gibbon 7.10 and (Debian).
• Installing PHP APC on GNU/Linux CentOS 5.

APC is a op-code cache for PHP that eliminates the parsing and compiling of script(s) for every page hit. Unlike Zend, it is truly free, and seems to have a lot of commuity momentum behind it lately.

As with all optimizations, there is a trade off. APC can use more memory on your server than without it.

The instructions below assumes that you have full control of your server, whether a physical dedicated server or a virtual private server.

Although one can always compile from source, this is more time consuming than using Debian's excellent apt-get.

Here is how I did it on two machines, with one more to go.

Flock has their site running on Drupal, and it looks great.Here is the designer's blog with some more details.Remember that Chris Messina, often contributor to Drupal in the area of theming and usability, used to work at Flock. Read more on Chris' blog.Here is the Digg discussion on the design.