Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has a very telling article on the spyware and adware industries, and the botnets that are setup to serve them by shady individuals and operations.

The article has an interview of a 21 year old high school dropout who goes by the name of 0x80 who runs a botnet, and 180 Solutions, a company that distributes its pop ads by spyware/adware that is installed by the likes of 0x80.

Although these are bad uses of a botnet, akin to using it to send spam, they are not the worst. Other botnets are used for phishing, the practice of tricking users into giving the credentials for their bank, Paypal or eBay accounts, or demanding a payment lest a denial of service attack be launched on a site.

Here are some notes from the Drupal Conference held as part of the OSCMS Summit in Vancouver British Columbia from February 7 to 9, 2006.

It was a gruelling trip for me, leaving home at 5:30 am to catch a 7:30 am flight to Vancouver. I missed the morning sessions of the first day because of that. Coming back, I took the red eye at 11 pm, arriving 6:45 am Friday.

I am not one who cares for Valentine's Day, or any of the other consumerism driven celebration. However, I got a nice surprise a few days ago, that is worth writing on: Valentine for Geeks.Alexandra Samuel, Aaron Pettigrew and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal sent me a small present. It was a typical Valentine present with sweets in it, and a card.What is interesting, is the custom nature of the larger sweets, and what was written on them.

Oracle Corporation has been on a shopping spree.

In 18 months they are spending $18 billion, including many open source companies.

First, it was InnoBase, the company that makes the InnoDB for the MySQL database. Then rumor has it that SleepyCat will follow, which makes the Berkley Database Base. Following that is Zend, maker of the PHP accelerator, and the PHP development environment, Zend Studio. Finally, it is JBoss, a Java application server.

The first two worry me the most. Although the source code of both products is available, the proprietary license for each allows MySQL AB, the company that makes MySQL, to offer non-free versions with suitable licensing for clients who need it.

In September 2005, The  Jyllands-Posten right wing conservative newspaper publish 12 cartoons, including some of Prophet Muhammad. These images are deeply offensive to Muslims, since most of them portrayed him as being the cause of terrorism or violence.

The Cartoons

While some of the images are fairly neutral, some are indeed very offensive. The most offensive images are:

• Showing him as the typical Hollywood evil Arab with menacing features, with his turban as a bomb about to explode.
• Showing him as a man who has a halo that is also two horns, associating Muhammad as a devil or as Satan.
• Showing him as a bushy browed, unruly beard and with two veiled woman (implying polygamy). This also has the stereotypical menacing evil Arab look, and holding a scimitar.
• Showing him at the gates of heaven telling incoming suicide bombers "Stop! Stop! We ran out of virgins".

These images are very offensive to a Muslim, since they mock a person held in high regard and central to the religion. They are more offensive since they directly associate contemporary terrorism and violence with the prophet himself, saying indirectly that  he is main cause of Muslims being uncivilized savages, barbarians, ...etc. rather than attributing terrorism to its real root causes.
 
The Jyllands-Posten newspaper insisted that it is a Danish tradition to lampoon religious figures, and that they would do that to any religion, despite recent revelations that they refused to publish cartoons of Jesus.

By now, everyone has read about the sinking of the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 in the Red Sea, 60 miles away from the port of Safaga.Reuters today had an article on the aftermath of events, and in it was this quote: 

The disaster follows a string of fatal road accidents in recent weeks, a theatre fire last year which killed 46 people and an airline crash in 2004.The ferry disaster has fuelled criticism that Egyptian safety regulations are haphazardly enforced and that not enough has been done to educate the public about the need for safety. "People have developed a culture of playing hide and seek with the authorities when it comes to safety," said Mohamed al-Sayed Said, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

The address module in Drupal's E-Commerce suite does not allow users that are not registered (anonymous users) to complete the checkout and payment. Thiscan cause loss of business due to users not wanting to register. There has been bugs filed against this, such as: 37220 Anonymous purchases, with patches.Since not everyone is able to apply patches, I am attaching a pre-patched version of the address.module for 4.6, as a zip file. 

The Linkpoint API module is part of the contributed set of modules for Drupal's E-Commerce suite.It was originally written as a quick and dirty hack to the Authorize.net module. As time passed by, E-Commerce APIs changed, and the Linkpoint API module no longer worked.Recently, a client wanted to use that module, and it did not work. So, I modified it to work again, and behave properly. The nice thing is that test mode also works. Comes in handy for testing before going live.The changes are back in the repository, after checking with Gordon Heydon, E-Commerce maintainer. 

While doing a site with lots of custom node types for a client, I decided to isolate some features into a generic and reusable module, and the favorite nodes module was born. This is a relatively straight forward module. The admin chooses which node types to enable favorites for, and users with the correct permissions see a link saying "add to favorites" at the bottom of the node. When they click that link, the node is added to a list of their favorites.

Winter in Southern Ontario started out with three consecutive snow storms early in November. This is unusual, since real snow storms do not hit until December.After that initial "wave" of bad weather, things were also unusual, because from 21 December (official day of winter start) till end of January, the weather has been warm. All snow has melted twice this winter, and we never saw the days with -25C that we had over the last few years. The temperature locally did not drop to lower than -15C on just one day. Moreover, it was +8C a few days ago, and even Toronto had +10C.