It is official: Drupal has 14 Summer of Code projects for 2006.

This is amazing, since Drupal came out #8 in the list, ahead of other open source projects, such as Joomla, Gentoo, Gaim, Mozilla, Eclipse, GNU and Debian.

This also means that Google will be investing $70,000 in Drupal.

Last year, I co-mentored three students, and got a Summer of Code 2005 T-Shirt. Two of last year's students that I co-mentored (The Amazing Angela and Fabulous Fabiano) are mentors in their own right this year!

The Weather Network had some really freak weather news yesterday (May 21, 2006). In Dundalk, Ontario, about an hour north of Kitchener-Waterloo (see map), considerable amounts of wet snow fell, and some people even had to scrape it off the car's windshield like it is January, not late May.

Robert Douglass, a fellow Drupaller, writes about a presentation he gave to a German group. What caught my eyes is this part (emphasis is mine):

I was happy with the presentation, despite the fact that two of my examples didn't work right (why do things always break when you're showing them to others?)

Over a year ago, I requested a feature to allow override of links at will. The use case was simple: if you use image module to create product nodes in ecommerce, then you do not want the links that have full resolution, gallery link, ...etc.After two releases, and lots of patches by Ber Kessels, Karoly Negyesi and Stefan Nagtegaal, it was Ted Serbinski's final version  that Dries committed to HEAD (the future 4.8/5.0).See Ted's blog entry on this. 

Some time ago, a few days after the December 2004 South Asia Tsunami, I wrote about the mega tsunami in the Atlantic ocean. This is a disaster waiting to happen anytime. Others have predicted a definite date for a Tsunami of May 25, 2006, but caused by a comet and more interesting stuff. Today, I got a comment (which I unpublished) and an email from a "friend".  Here is the email, and then a discussion of it:

Alaa Abdel Fattah علاء  عبد الفتاح, a young Egyptian activist, free software advocate and blogger has been detained by the Egyptian authorities, after protesting the politically motivated trial of two judges who exposed that there was widespread fraud in the recent elections.

About Alaa and Manal

Alaa and his wife Manal run an Egyptian blog aggregator from their Drupal web site. They are known for activism on political and social issues, as well as free software.

I saw Alaa on Al Jazeera last summer, and he looked to me like an Egyptian Richard M. Stallman (the father of GNU and GPL), with his curly locks of hair.

Roland Tanglao of Bryght posted this one minute video of my Building Drupal Community Sites using his fancy N70 phone.

I can barely hear anything in that video though.

Some nice lady from Standards Interactive has taped the entire presentation and said she will email me when it is posted.

Resources

• Presentation: Building Drupal Community Web Sites.

Here is where you can download the Building Drupal Community Web Sites Presentation that I gave earlier today at Drupal Camp Toronto.

I got this in the mail today.  It is mostly in Arabic, and the translation in English follows:

السلام عليكمانا محمد ... - مدير الترفيه ومدير مراقبة الجودة بحديقة ... الترفيهيةلدى موافقة من STC بخط ADSL سرعة 256ارجو ان ترسلوا لى قائمة الأسعار وشروط الأشتراكشكرامحمد ...050039xxxx

This translates to:

SalamsI am Mohamed .... Entertainment and Quality Manager at ... resort.

Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows what the world is searching for.As an experiment, I used a Google Trends Drupal search, and got a graph showing a steady upward trend in searching for  Drupal from 2004 till now.What is intriguing is the spike in mid 2005. Was that around the time that the servers choked and we had the fundraising for the new servers (July)?The other intriguing tidbit is why Budapest and Hungary are the top city/region? Why is Indonesia and Czech Republic the top two after that? Vancouver seems obvious due to the conference there in February.