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.

Here is an example that sticks out: the richest man in Canada, the 9th richest in the world, was known for being shy, benevolent and the atypical rich guy.

Ken Thomson, 2nd Baron of Fleet, died on June 12 in his office in Toronto, age 82. His fortune is estimated at $19.6 billion (US). The son of a rich man, he was an art collector (donated most of it to the Art Gallery), a philanthropist, and an overall nice guy.

He was with the Galt Reporter (later Cambridge Reporter), owned by his father Roy Thomson as part fo the newspaper empier he build.

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!".