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.

The media is full of news about Google and Microsoft heading on a collision course. Although it started several months back,  things are heading for an technology arms race. Microsoft hates competition, and Google has been gaining ground and promoting rival products, such as Firefox and Opera. All this is normal in the business world.

2bits is sponsoring DrupalCamp Toronto, held on May 12, 2006.

Boris, Richard and Roland as well as James Walker (all from Bryght) will be attending the event.

I will be presenting a talk titled: Building Drupal Community Sites.

Regarding Druplicon, Drupal's mascot, I have the same feelings about his eyes. The official history details how its eyes are supposed to have the infinity sign in them.While walkah prays to the Druplicon, and Robert Douglass sings its praise, while others morphed into a more evil looking Druplicon, some do share my dislike. Someone proposed to politely replace it.

Reuters is reporting that a poll shows that BBC, Al Jazeera, and Fox News are the most trusted news sources in their respective regions. Here is the discussion on Digg. 

Well, the BBC does deserve this reputation, having been known for general neutral and well researched reporting, with the few odd expections.

Here is the text of the Monty Python sketch: Four Yorkshiremen.The Yorkshiremen seem to be well off, enjoying fine food and wine, and reminiscing about the hard times they had growing up. This quickly degrades into a one-upmanship match where each of them fabricates a more outlandish claim than what the others have said.Very funny. Go read it.