One of the popular dishes in Egypt, as well as all over the eastern Mediterranean is stuffed vine leaves.The recipe is not a simple one, but it is basically rice mixed with tomato paste, parsley, minced meat that is cooked first. Separately, the vine leaves are blanched in boiling water. The mix is then stuffed in the leaves which are rolled so that the rice does not fall off. It is served with a youghurt dip that has crushed garlic and  cucumbers.Maple trees are all too common in Southern Ontario. The leaves looked very similar to the vine leaves. Since maple syrup is made from the sap of the tree, one can assume that the leaves are safe to eat too.

The recent arrests in the Greater Toronto Area have netted 17 accused person. Five of them are youth.

The Accused

The accused are a very diverse bunch. Two of them, troubled youth of Somali descent, were already in prison for pleading guilty for having guns when crossing the border from the USA. One of them told his mother that "they are changing my story around". One is a widower over 40. A recent graduate of health sciences and the son of a medical doctor. A really "calm and religious" good basketball shooter.

Well, the weather here is often variable, as I occasionally write about it.Here is another example:On May 21, there was wet snow in Dundalk, an hour north of here. Some people had to scrape their windshields as if it is January.On May 22, on Victoria Day, it was +5C with really chilly wind as if it is October or November. I had to wear a winter coat on that  day.On May 29 and 30, it was +33C and extremely hot and humid.On May 31, severe thunderstorms caused flooding in parts of Waterloo (knee deep water), as well as lightening that struck several areas causing power outages and even a few fires.  

While visiting Egypt in summer of 2005, I realized that most people are still on dialup, and hence pay per minute for the connection. This is in contrast to North America where dialup, although slow, incurrs no per-minute charges (local calls are free).The same is true in other parts of the world where local calls are metered.This practice precludes reading references online. Talking to Drupal present and potential users in Egypt, South Africa and India, one question kept coming up: "is there a Drupal book I can buy and read?"So, when Ian Dickson posted in July 2005 on  Drupal, I tried contacted him, offering to collaborate on a Drupal book. I got no response though.

Here is yet another example that extremism and militancy can be in any culture or religion, as well as the commercialisation of religion is a common ever occuring theme.

There is a a Christian computer game called Left Behind: Eternal Forces based on the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and  Jerry Jenkins, portraying an end of times scenario.

In the games, Christians shoot Jews, Muslims, Catholics, gays  and other "infidels" while shouting "Praise the Lord!".

The web is full of buzz on Web 2.0.

Here is a quick guide on how to identify Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 at a glance.

Resources

• Wikipedia article on Web 2.0.
• O'Reilly article on What is Web 2.0.

One often needs photos for web sites, or other projects that require photos. Here are some free stock photo sites that have a wealth of subjects.

• Yotophoto. This site runs Drupal, an Open Source project I am involved in, and categorizes photos from other free stock photo sites. It uses tags.

Only on rare occasions do I write about my daughters. Today is one such rare case.Last time I wrote about Suhaila was several years ago. Ever since, she has progressed well in school. Yesterday she got a Recognition of Excellence in Junior Short Story for her high school. She attended a ceremony honoring all students from the Region of Waterloo.Today, we got a letter from school that she will be honoured to receive the Most Valuable Pupil (MVP) award for Spanish. The letter says :  

Yotophoto, a Drupal site for free stock photo site, recently upgraded to 4.7.Like many users, they say they were shocked of rewrites of major portions. This is something that regularly comes up on the Drupal development mailing list, and Dries wrote about recently as well.

Yotophoto is a free stock photo web site that I discovered by accident via this Digg article. It happens to run Drupal.They seem to have a customized gallery. For example, look the URL for fish: it says /images/fish/1/ (note the trailing slash). Like many sites, they happen to use my Adsense module (their revenue source it seems) and my feedback module (the very first Drupal module I wrote).