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.
A few minutes from where I live, there is an interesting phenomenon, believed to the be the first of its kind in North America: a single building is used for both Reform Jews and United Church of Canada.
Of course, both are on the moderate/liberal side within Judaism and Christianity, and it would not have been considered if they were more conservative.
Historically, this is not the first time in that two different religions shared a building, as I will detail in another article on the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
In an earlier article, I noted the diverse backgrounds of the local candidates for the federal elections.
Today, I will describe the process of the election here in Canada, as a personal experience, mainly for my non-Canadian readers.
The process started by filing the taxes for tax year 2004 in March 2005. One of the questions is whether one would want to be on the elector list. Canada Revenue Agency sends the name and address to Election Canada.
Here is another web application framework written in PHP.
WASP is a "powerful web application framework built on PHP5". It is object oriented, and strives to be suitable for enterprise class applications with less code.
What is interesting is that WASP uses Drupal to power its site.
One of the known shortcomings of the popular site Slashdot.org is the frequent duplicate stories.A recent story I posted on research on how visitors judge a web site in 50 milliseconds later made it to Slashdot.What is funny, and sad, is that the story was posted on the 16th, then on the 17th, and on the 20th.
Dr. George Saliba of Columbia University gave a lecture at Princeton on Islamic science. A few years back, I attended a lecture he gave at the University of Waterloo, and wrote about it. I got his permission to republish some of his articles as well. I later started digging some of what he discussed, and the result was many articles on my site about Leo Africanus, Joseph Barbatus, Elmacinus, Erpenius, Rhazes, Alhazen and Ibn Khaldun.
Robin Miller is an author and columnist on technology whose writings appears regularly on Slashdot and Newsforge.His blog runs Drupal at roblimo.com. Plain vanilla BlueMarine theme look.
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