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.

Due to some change of plans, things turned out for the better, and I will be travelling to Vancouver, British Columbia to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit (OSCMS-Summit), which is mainly a Drupal event, but with other CMS sessions peppered in. This will be my first time in Vancouver. I wish it was in some better season though, and I could take the whole family there. Anyone up for fishing? I know it is not a geek thing, but ...

Sami Khan's DrupalShowCase.com has been operating for a while, but only today did I notice that he has something to say about Baheyeldin.com.He says:

Khalid is a Drupal module developer and works in general on the Drupal content management system. He's brought Drupal many great modules including the AdSense module and the nodevote module.

My first name is Khalid. In Arabic, this is خالد. It was originally spelled Khaled with an "e", to  be more in line with the Egyptian pronounciation, but at some point I decided that Khalid with an "i" is closer to the classical version. The problem is that in English, this is taken to be a long "i", as in "-leed". It is more  like "lid".

Searching Google for the proper name Khalid returns this web site in the top 10. Of course, having a non Anglo-Saxon name helps a bit.Also, see this post, and comments, on Om Malik's web site about other geeks on Google. Or you can read more about what the name Khalid means.

Many systems in human societies are started for good reasons, for sound principles and for the benefit of society. As time passes by, that same system is often abused to become completely opposed to the principles it was designed to uphold.One such case is the U.S. Patent system. Initially designed to protect the small inventor from large corporations, it has grown into something that disregards the individual inventor, and favors the corporations. For example, individual inventors working for companies are made to sign agreements ceding all rights to the corporation, in exchange for a "bonus" of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The system is prohibitive for the individual because it takes a lot of money, time and effort to get the filing right, and takes a lot more time, money and effort to defend the patent in court because legal fees are expensive, and only a corporation has the resources for a protracted fight.