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).

Here is really cool web site: Wikimapia.

This is a fusion of Google Maps with the concept of a Wiki where anyone can add/edit information on a site (similar to Wikipedia).

Last week, I wrote about the supposed May 25 Atlantic ocean tsunami, which received a lot of views.

I got this by email today from a Yahoo Australia email address, and IP address confirms it is from Sydney NSW. Of course in Australia, it is already May 26:

From: John Smith <zzzzz>Date: May 25, 2006 8:03 PMSubject: SunamiTo: me25th May has come and gone. I don't remember any Mega sunami, you bunchof dumb c****. Try investing some of you energy in something realistic,instead of running around taling s*** all day. You are a the biggestbunch of f*** wits ive ever seen.

This is of course a response to the article I wrote titled: Pseudoscience: Mega Tsunami on May 25, 2006 in which I opposed this pseudoscience drivel.